Web development, design, and site optimization

For the past 2 months I have been working within the Custom Web Design industry, getting my first tastes of dealing directly with end customers in getting their custom designed online presence. Wow, what a roller coaster ride! But that is a post for another day.

There are many elements to getting a website online. Basically though you can break things down into 3 stages. This is what you can expect when working with my company and likely many others out there.

1. Comp/Mock-up stage: This is where we play with various ideas taken form the customer input and our own and come up with a Photoshop-made mock-up. Depending on the complexity, turn-around time on this is anywhere between 1 and 2 days.

2. Content gathering and site build: This is where we move ahead on an approved comp and build the website. We also look to the client to feed us as much content as possible. The site build takes anywhere from 5-7 business days. Getting content takes anywhere from hours to months :).

3. Site publish and ongoing maintenance: The website is published live with no less than 75% of the content. The site is then only requiring random maintenance on a monthly basis, content changes mostly. Clients can contact us pretty frequently on a monthly basis, any changes that are requested will be applied within 1 to 3 business days depending on complexity and how much is already on our plate.

My target for all my clients from start to finish is 30 to 45 days for the entire build cycle. That is from our first call to the site being online.

A non ecommerce website will costs you $785.00 up front and then $99.00 per month. Ecommerce cost you $985.00 up front and then $195.00 monthly. The monthly fee on both packages takes care of your website, hosting, domain name, privacy protection, and up to 10 email accounts.

Service is all about providing a convenience to someone. A good service will make both the client and the seller happy. A service doesn’t have to re-invent the wheel. In most cases it just needs to fulfill a need that the client has.

I choose to pay someone to cut my lawn, not because I can’t do it myself, but because I rather spend that time with my still less than 1 year old son. I am happy, the guy who takes my money is happy.

A common question I get as a blogger is about setting up a Wordpress blog. Again and again I answer it. Well this week it dawned on me that maybe I could and should make a few dollars off of this. I know how to setup Wordpress, others don’t and don’t want to even bother learning how to. So its a win-win situation.

If you are interested in getting setup with your own blog without all the hassle, visit:

SetupMyBlog.dropthemike.com

Here is a new Wordpress plugin that DropTheMike.com is testing out. Enjoy!

SEO Friendly Images is a Wordpress optimization plugin which automatically updates all images in your posts with proper ALT and TITLE attributes. If your images do not have ALT and TITLE already set, SEO Friendly Images will add them according the options you set. Additionally this makes the post W3C/xHTML valid as well.

ALT attribute is important part of search engine optimization. It describes your image to search engine and when a user searches for a certain image this is a key determining factor for a match.

TITLE attribute play lesser role but is important for visitors as this text will automatically appear in the tooltip when mouse is over the image.

Download

• Download: SEO Friendly Images

Installation & Usage

1. Upload the whole plugin folder to your /wp-content/plugins/ folder.
2. Go to the Plugins page and activate the plugin.
3. Use the Options page to modify ALT and TITLE options.
4. You are done, SEO Image does everything else

SEO Friendly Images options recognize two tags %title (post title) and %name (filename of the picture). By combining these two tags and additional words (photo, picture etc..) you can create relevant alt and title tags automatically for all images.

Here is a live example of the plugin (active on my blog). The image that has title and alt replaced with “%title” and “%name %title” respectively resulting in “SEO Friendly Image” for title and “example SEO Friendly Images” for alt.

You don’t have to be real technical these days to get started on creating a pretty elaborate Web project. I say web project because I am trying to be as broad as possible. I am talking about creating a blog, a website, a community portal, a classified listings page, an ecommerce site, etc., etc. You don’t have to do a thing these days to install some of the more popular Open Source web scripts that exist. All you have to do is login to your Web Hosting Control Panel, find and launch Fantastico, and click on the scripts you want it to automatically install for you.

Fantastico is a commercial script library that automates the installation of web applications to a website. Fantastico scripts are executed from the administration area of a website control panel such as cPanel. Fantastico’s web site claims that they are installed on ten thousand servers, with a million users worldwide, which would make it the leading product of its type.

No need for you to configure databases, just worry about setting the admin usernames and passwords. Easy stuff.

Now if your web hosting company does not provide you with Fantastico, shame on them. Most hosts these days make it a standard part of their offering. Netenberg.com, the company behind Fantastico, lists the following as official partners of theirs. Though there are many more providers who, though don’t have a direct partnership, do provide Fatastico.

For a complete listing of the web scripts Fantastico is currently offering click here.

As a professional blogger… on a budget, I am always looking at ways to improve DropTheMike.com. Over the next week or so you may see multiple new looks while visiting the blog as I try and test out new templates. I would love to fork out some cash for a custom design, but that is not happening any time soon. Besides there are always new and great templates being created. I am hoping to find one that not only fits with the DropTheMike.com blog but that is also not heavily in use by other bloggers.

If you have any theme suggestions, let me know. Also, feel free to give me your feedback on whatever the current theme you see that I am using.