Marketing & SEO Discussion List - LED Digest

Suggestions on re-doing a website from scratch?

Ok, I give up. I've hosted my two websites at Homestead.com since I built it five years ago. Since then, my sites have grown, business has grown (e-commerce), and I've come to realize that I made some critical mistakes early on, and so it's probably time to start from scratch.

Mistake number one: my domain name is registered at GoDaddy, but the site is hosted at Homestead. Now, I have nothing against Homestead, but since the domain name is registered elsewhere, my sites look like they are part of homestead.com instead of independent, separate domain names. This causes various problems. I could move the domain name registration to Homestead and solve some of these problems, but the websites might be inoperable for up to two weeks, and, well, I am not willing to deal with two weeks of lost revenue.

Mistake number two: I built the sites using Homestead's SiteBuilder. Well, five years ago it was the best "free" site-builder I could find. So I went with it. But now with two sites and hundreds of pages in each site... I'm pretty sure that there are HTML editors / web design software packages that could make maintenance lots more automated than what I have now. Hey, even something that would identify all the bad links would be a big help! Plus the site is not quite portable the way it is.

Mistake number three: procrastination. I've stayed so long with what I have, knowing that the time will come to move on...

LED Digest readers, if I provide my "wish list" could you come up with some recommendations? I think I will need to buy a HTML editor... but which one?

- The websites aren't anything fancy. Basically, lots of images (products), lots of text descriptions. Lots of links from page to page.

- Right now, we have e-commerce through www.mals-e.com. For future growth, it would be super if we could have something that would interface with our order / accounting software. Maybe not to actually charge the credit cards, but just to cut down on data-entry? We're using Quickbooks at present, but we will probably outgrow that in 2008 (but that would be a whole new post).

- It sometimes happens that two people are working on the website at the same time.

- It would also be nice if we could interface with a catalog / database somehow. (I know nothing of how to do this, of course, but it would be nice!) One thing that I think my (fabric sales) website is better at than the competitions', is that we show a (large) picture of the fabric, and then several smaller ones of all the other fabrics that match. (This automatically answers the question "what matches that fabric?".) There might be nothing that matches, or there might be a dozen or more. So it wouldn't do to just show, say, four or six coordinating fabrics. I think this is called cross-selling or showing related products?  I'm not sure this could be fully automated because the number of related products can be so large, and we want to show them all.

- Site search would be nice!

- Site stats are a must. Otherwise, how will I know what I am doing *wrong*?

- We usually ship through the Post Office (sometimes FedEx) and would love to be able to automate the label creation process. Not sure that applies to this discussion, but this is a wish list, after all.

I know the basics of site design (thanks to reading LED): make navigation easy and intuitive, write good descriptions, tend to those meta-tags, figure out what your keywords are for a given page and make good use of them, provide nice sharp pictures, use alt-text over the images, link using appropriate text. But much beyond this, as to serious SEO jargon, I'm clueless.

Readers, please give your input as to what HTML editor / web design program you think would be best!

Gratefully...

Nancy Schettler

favoritefabrics.com

awelldressedkitchen.com

Hello Nancy,

Regarding your domain name, GoDaddy offers a free forwarding service for domains hosted by them that uses framing so you can hide that long Homestead URL. This of course, is only a temporary solution since it does little good for your search optimization efforts. For the long-term, get an inexpensive hosting plan (this digest is sponsored by a provider that can help in that area) that'll suit your needs.

If you don't already -- from a non-designer's stand-point, Microsoft FrontPage is an easy-to-use HTML editor that can handle most, if not all of your tasks. Personally, I like to code myself rather than letting FrontPage create the code for me -- it tends to add extra code that you don't really need weighing your site down. Know HTML, I suggest you learn quickly. Hold on, let me emphasize that. Learn Q-U-I-C-K-L-Y. Here's a great tutorial: www.davesite.com/webstation/html (there are tons of ads you'll need to ignore but hey, the tutorial is free!)

As far as SEO goes, I offer an affordable bare-bones solution for do-it-yourselfers that I'd be more than happy to tell you more about if you choose to go that route.

All the best!

Ivan Jimenez

smarterclicks.com

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Written by Rich Dudley
August 8, 2006

I would say to skip the HTML editor and go with a content managament system (CMS). A CMS uses a rich text editor for content, and can have functionality added via free or low cost modules.

One of the most popular is the free DotNetNuke. Hosts such as Discount ASP (discountasp.Net) or Server Intellect (serverintellect.Com) will install it for you when you set up a hosting plan. DNN has several books available through Amazon, including a "for dummies" out soon.

You can have DNN set up with a temporary URL, and migrate your content page by page. When you're done, update your nameservers and your new site will be live in about a day, no downtime.

Rich Dudley

rjdudley.com

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Written by R. Neilson
August 8, 2006

Nancy I feel for your predicament. I have been using Miva merchant thru my current ISP, but I do have total control over my domain name so I can easily move it where ever I want.

While Miva has almost all the features you want I have been having problems with my customers that use paypal. The current (Miva 4.22) version my ISP has available requires the customer to enter into paypal to pay and then go back to my website to complete checkout. Lately a number of my customers pay me but fail to go back to complete checkout and then I have there money but no record of what they were ordering or where to ship to only an e-mail. My ISP is checking into plug ins that are available to correct this problem and/or considering a completly new shopping cart program. After a month they still have not fixed the problem. The thought of having to redo my whole store scares me to death. I have invested hundreds if not thousands of hours over the years getting all the data and photos in my shopping cart program.

I have been looking at different shopping cart programs for over a year now. Most are in the $800-1000 price range for a good program. I have checked out the freebies and they just don't do what I want and would cause more problems then they would solve. I have considered buying Miva on my own and customize my website with the plugins I want but currently don't see this as working with my current ISP.

Good luck with you upgrades. I might suggest working with a shopping cart program you can work offline on and then upload on a set day and time so you don't have any downtime with your website. I am not the techie type to tell you how but I bet there are others on the list that can. I would love to know in case I have to go this route myself.

R. Neilson

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Written by Peta Scarbrough
August 9, 2006

Nancy;

A suggestion maybe would be to have a complete re-design of your site with a built in Content Management System in the backend. This will allow you to access the database and do your own updates of editing, deleting or adding an item all with a click of a button. Very easy and worth the extra cost for future no maintenance fees later.

Peta Scarbrough

websightdesign.com

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Written by Michael Linehan
August 10, 2006

Hi Nancy,

It looks like you have a pretty healthy business going at this point.  Maybe in the early days, you simply had to do it all yourself.  But I think the time has come to change that.  For the future, the list of tasks you outline is considerable, to say the least.  Yes, there are some things that are still best done by you, but with a greater volume of business, it becomes cost-effective to use a specialist for a lot of the implementation.  Do you do your own four-colour separations?  Your legal matters?  Your accounting?

I had one example a few years ago where the primary owner / president of a five-store retail business wanted to use me for a bit of consulting and training while he did most of the work himself. The project took six months instead of the two weeks it would have taken me.  One can only imagine the lost profit for a six-month period. AND, by his account of the time he spent each day, and valuing his time as the same as mine, it cost him about twenty times as much as he would have needed to pay me.  AND, to fix his numerous errors, he ended up paying me about the same fee anyway!  (All this gave me a very strong lesson for future contracts.)

So I'd like to suggest that you consider what is the best use of your time for the next weeks and months.  I think it is likely promoting your business, rather than learning how to do all of that considerable list.  If you are like the average business, you already have more than enough to do.  In theory, you might spend $x on a web designer and web marketer, but earn twenty times as much. Also, in addition to the simple time versus money efficiency, there is the fact that a good web marketer should be able to do things for you that you will simply not be able to do without maybe a couple of years of study.

Michael Linehan

Marketing Alchemy

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Written by Kathryn Martyn
August 11, 2006

You don't appear to have a domain name at all, which is why Homestead.com has you in a sub directory. If you had a domain name, it should simply point to their sub directory, but you'd use favoritefabrics.com or whatever your domain name is.

> I could move the domain name registratio... but the
> websites might be inoperable for up to two weeks...

Why on earth would it be two weeks downtime? It takes maybe 24 hours, sometimes a wee bit more for a DNS change to propogate over the net. Two weeks is ridiculous. If Homestead.com won't give you a proper site address, then yes, you'd be far better off moving your site. Maybe they have another level or service you could move to?

I use several domain registrars, joker.com, gandi.net and even viaverio.com which is where my sites reside. Verio doesn't care where I bought my domain, I don't see why Homestead.com would. You just point your domain's DNS to the correct IP address and voila! I have no idea why homestead would be different in this regard, so either you aren't really uing your personal web address, or they are just pretending you can't have it your way.

> I'm pretty sure that there are HTML editors / web
> design software packages that could make maintenance
> lots more automated than what I have now.

Probably, but it could be you'd be talking an entire redesign, and that's not necessarily easier. Are you always needing to change the existing pages, add more pages, or what? Maybe an CMS solution like Joomla would work? I'm just starting to play with that myself.

> Even something that would identify all the bad links would be
> a big help! Plus the site is not quite portable the way it is.

There are free programs for link checking. I use Xenu Link Sleuth (TM) to check my site's links. Here's the page to get that: http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html. I use Dreamweaver for an editor program; mostly because I've been using it forever.

Perhaps you could use some type of database solution, but not knowing much about that, I'd probably head over to rentacoder.com and post my specifications to get bids on the job.

> It sometimes happens that two people are
> working on the website at the same time.

Dreamweaver can handle that too.

You have so many separate issues in this post, you may just want to hire the work done and get busy doing what you do best. You're not likely going to be spending your time most wisely by trying a do-it-yourself approach unless you can devote the necessary time to trying software packages, learning them, and tinking until the cows come home. Believe me, I've tried.

I'll bet you'll get lots more ideas here though, so let's all see what ideas start to flow ...

Warmly,

Kathryn Martyn Smith, M.NLP
onemorebite-weightloss.com

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Written by James Miller
August 11, 2006

The first thing you should do is change your registrant to someone that passes the name through.  I use LowCostNames and this does that. One of my sites, MakeMostInternet.com, is registered in this way and points to a sub directory on my JamesMiller.com site. This would mean you still have the advantage of separate domain name and hosting, so you can choose a hosting company with all the features you want.

One other major point about a redesign is make sure all the page names of the old site do something on the new.  For instance if your main product page is products.html, it should also be that on the new site.  If not, it should be set to automatically redirect.

James Miller
Daisy Analysis