Seeking Advice

[Ray Mighells]

Hi Y'all; I've been thinking about having a web-site made to include my woodcarving and laser engraving in one site. I have woodcarvings in Picture Trail but it isn't accessable like a web site unless you have the user name to get into the site. Question is, would there be any objections/conflicts in having both woodcarving and laser engraving in a single site but separate galleries or would it be better to have a separate site for each and each having a link to the other? I'm not all that crazy about spending a lot of money on two separate sites, but will need to do whatever gets the best results, or the most bang for the buck. You can take a look at my Picture Trail albums if you like: http://www.PictureTrail.com/razaxnstuff. Incidently, has anyone out there experienced Quartzsite, AZ between Dec and the end of Mar? Thanks for all responses, I have learned a lot from this forum.

[Tim Goldstein]

My experience is that I built different sites over the past 7 years for the various activities I was/am involved in. Eventually they became commercial activities then became interrelated. Now it has become a managment nightmare. I have 2 separate e-commerce sites so I have to process orders from 2 places. To make it worse, there would be synergy between the 2 sites in add on sales, but with them siloed that does not happen. I have informational sites that get lots of traffic, but don't expose the people to my commercial offerings.

Suggestion: Build it as a separate site with "departments" to cover your various activities. If you offer e-commerce do it all in a single site and do offer e-commerce. Spend the money and get a site that looks and works professional. It is the only view of your business most people will see.

[Joe Pelonio]

It's only $15/year for a domain name, you can have the same site with everything but 2 different website addresses, both pointing to the same one. Maybe just have two different first pages depending on which way they came in, showing that kind of work first, the other second and vice versa. The thing is you can use different keywords for each, and searches on the words that might be in the domain name will bring more people to it.

[Mike Null]

Ray:

I think, if I had your talent, I would look up a really good web designer and let him develop your strategy.

[Keith Outten]

Ray,

Since we started SawMill Creek I haven't had any time to spend on my web site and it now looks like an abandoned home. I guess I should just take it down.

All of my work now is commercial signs and I have found that a web site isn't a major factor anymore. When we owned Hampton Roads Online we designed web sites and provided web serving for lots of commercial customers. Many came to us for their first web site and we were an authorized agent and reseller of ShopSite E-Commerce Software. If you decide to invest in a web site have a professional design created, then find a reputable Internet Provider to host your site. Don't go the low price route, it rarely provides the best results.

I hope to be investing in a high quality brochure soon which will provide me with more exposure in my local area where 99% of my work is located. The last set of business cards I engraved I didn't even include my email address, I prefer customers to call me on the phone and schedule an appointment.

Maybe you don't need a web site...

.

[Mitchell Andrus]

Ray, Keith says it straight. If you need a standard site, spend some money. If you need a shopping cart site, spend a little more. BV is one of the best, I'm moving my current site there in about two months.

Ray,

Have a look at my cart site. (under my name, above) It cost about $2,500.00 to set up initially and another $1,000.00 to modify with a few add-ons. I then populated the product database, added info for credit cards, shipping, etc. Three weeks of hard work intially and continual tweaking to add stuff, update photos, etc.

But, I get compliments and retail sales have doubled over my old 'show and tell - call me on the phone" gallery site - no kidding, doubled overnight.

There are services available from almost all hosting companies. Many have templates you simply drop your graphics and text into. (easier said than done... but you get the idea)

Keep in mind when it comes to search engines, text on the home page is king.

Mitch

[Lee DeRaud]

Keep in mind when it comes to search engines, text on the home page is king.My understanding is that the search engine indexing bots can't tell (or don't care) whether that text is visible or not: they're just looking at the HTML stream coming from your server. So your home page can still be graphics-intensive to the human viewer.

[Dave Jones]

No. They can tell. And having text that matches or is cloe to the background color to make it invisible is an old webmaster trick that the major search engines not only know about but are programmed to penalize you for.

Search engines these days are quite smart and are designed to analyze pages for the content that a user will see, as well as a number of other things that are in the page (text in links and title text for images are all indexed even though they are not always seen).

Here is a page where Google mentions some of the reasons it will block pages from being in Google. One of which is creating text that the search engine sees but the user doesn't:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=40052

[Ed Maloney]

Do a Google on "Search Engine Optimization" and you will see how complicated things have gotten. Google also has a service that you pay for keywords that you want pointed to your website. In my opinion the Internet is being hijacked by being directed to sites that are filled with nothing but Adsense listings where the folks that run the site are paid per click. I'm sure you've noticed on some of your searches that seemingly good hits turn out to be nothing but listings of other sites. :mad:

[Mike Null]

Since I shifted to a professionally designed site last year my business has more than doubled.. Text does matter!!!

And I'm not even finished with it.

[Lee DeRaud]

I stand (sit?) corrected...my information is apparently outdated.

Assuming I read that correctly, it does appear that things like 'ALT' tags (seen by text browsers, but not normally visible to users) are indexed.

[Bruce Volden]

[QUOTE=Lee DeRaud]I stand (sit?) corrected...my information is apparently outdated.

OUTDATED??? What are you guys talking about? It is exactly this kind of stuff that keeps me out here on the prairie, bots, search engines..sheeesh! At one time I sorta kept up on computers and networking, even had some schooling under my belt~now...I envy the ostrich and sandy soils:D


Bruce

[Dave Jones]

Yes, alt tags and title tags are both indexed. The keywords metatag on the other hand has not been indexed by Google for several years. Yahoo does still index them though.

[Mike Null]

There really are some things you can't teach an old dog. I have selected this as one of them. I have a great young fellow who does my site and this is his exclusive domain. (no pun intended)

[Bob Yeager]

I can't tell you much about websites...other than this...You only get one chance to make a first impression...so it better be your best efforts.

Quartzsite AZ...I drove past it during the winter, didn't stop. I have heard several people talk about going there on their rock searching... The thing that I always remember when someone mentions "Quartzsite"...was the sea of RVs spread across the desert...there must have been 50,000 of them...stretching for MILES across the desert. Down the road about 15 miles was the nearest gas station...RVs lined up probably 10 deep for each pump. Are you planning a trip down there??

Bob

[Mitchell Andrus]

A famous example of white text on a white background was the word "sex" over 10,000 times on a website for used cars in Texas.

The notion of abuse comes to mind in many forms on this one.

Mitch

[Keith Outten]

Well it seems the search engines have developed counter measures to avoid the abuse that many will attempt in an effort to climb to the first page of search results.

Everyone must now learn more to get their sites registered properly.

Good web page design must take all of this into consideration plus be well designed, easy to navigate and pleasing to the eye. Even more issues that must be addressed if e-commerce is a factor.

Web Hosting companies have always had to deal with the spamming issues, their email servers are targeted and abused. Customers constantly complain about the spam they receive and demand that their Providers do something to eliminate the abuse. Assigning a technician to work mail servers full time makes the service more expensive to operate.

The problem of communicating with someone who doesn't speak english when trying to solve an email problem or make a change to your web site is now the norm. The 24,000 local Internet Providers that once dotted the land are now all gone. Aaron and I have a terrible time getting our bandwidth Provider to serve our account for SawMill Creek and we have a commercial connection. There is no off-hour support, if we have problems on the weekends we are out of luck until Monday morning.

Should your web site require special support programs like MySQL or FrontPage extensions you are out of luck upgrading your software until your Provider updates their software.

Everyone wants everything right now and they want it for $9.95 per month.

Not much has changed since I left the business :)

There must be at least ten thousand engravers on the Net now with prices heading for the basement as new operators drop their prices trying to compete with established businesses.

I need a really high quality color brochure and concentrate my marketing in my local area.

.

[Mitchell Andrus]

"I need a really high quality color brochure and concentrate my marketing in my local area."

Yea, I need just the opposite. I have zero local business so instead of a nice storefront and Yellow Pages ads, I need a good website, a few brick and mortar dealers and I know my Fed Ex guy on a first name basis.

Cool thing is.. my business is portable. I'm palnning on moving to the hills of TN in a few years. When you go there, ya gotta bring your job with you.

Mitch

[Ray Mighells]

Thank you all for your words of wisdom.. I'm printing out this thread for more study ( I hear what you're saying, but a lot of it is over my head for now. I also want to show it to a couple wannabe web-site builders. Mitchell, your site is great!!