JDB Works - Web Development Information Blog

Well almost, GoDaddy has announced that April 29th is from here forward to be Webmaster Day.

GoDaddy is doing their part by offering eCards to send to your under appreciated webmaster.

I’ve been trying to get my computer back up and running, Lost my hard drive and my backup. So it’s been a solid week of tying to get my data off my busted hard drive and looking through all my various backup disks. Just tons of fun.

So now that everything is back to normal I can start working on an update, so stay tuned.

Well it been a frick’en month since my last post. I have been busy though. I have been working on my cooking blog Chef Benwa and of course there is the 9 hours a day spent at my real job, Global Vision Eyewear. And the other 2 sites that I manage for Global Vision. Avis Safety Glasses Retailers web site and Avis Safety Glasses Industrial web site. Lets not forget my photography site, photography.jdbworks.com.

I have also been trying to generate some interests in my work through some of the ever popular social networking site such MySpace, Facebook, Squido and others.

So that is it for today, hopefully it won’t be a month till I return.

As the webmaster and IT manager for Global Vision Eyewear Inc I’m responsible for the dissemination of access information to our FTP site where the images for our product are kept. Our customers use them for print or the web.

One thing that really blows me away is the domain names some of these people come up with for there web sites. I thought the idea was to make them easy to remember and reasonably easy to type into the address bar. Because they are customers and I don’t want to piss any one off, especially my boss, I can’t use the exact domain names here, but some examples are:

- Complete business name including Inc. or LCC
- Trying to make it shorter by leaving out duplicate letters, ie dicksports.com for Dick’s Sports
- Really long business name, ie bigjimmysmotorcycleandrecreationalmotersportscenterlcc.com
- Using full words and abbreviation, ie berrandscodistributing
- Making up word, ie bigjerrysmotorcyclewerx.com

These people obviously don’t understand the common, basic principles of domain names. Keep It Simple, Stupid. (I never did figure out if the stupid on the end was meant for the person you where say it to, or keep simple and stupid. Oh well I digress.)

 When coming up with your domain name make it as simple as possible. It takes a little work and thought, but it is better to some work now than make your customers work later. Here are a few tips:

- Try to be as succinct as possible
- Keep it as short as possible , yet easy to remember and spell
- Don’t be cryptic, just because you know what you mean doesn’t mean anybody else does
- Leave out anything the is not necessary, it’s a domain name not a billboard
- Hyphenate to make it easier to rememberIf you can’t find what you need in .COM use .NET or .US
- I know your company has a great name, but sometimes less is more and when it comes to domain names KISS

 For more information type “good domain names” in Google.

Some advice; If you spend buckets of money on images for your web site, don’t send images with your press releases that you took your self.

Case in point, I receive a lot of email at my job as a Webmaster for Global Vision Eyewear, one is a newsletter from HotRod Links. They promote car and motorcycle websites. In their last email newsletter they were featuring a new bike that looked really hot, Treavertson’s V-Rex, so I clicked on the link and went to the page that had a press release about the company and the bike. It showed an image of the bike and the press release information. The image was obviously professionally done it was well lighted, showed movement and was very impressive.

By this time I was thoroughly impressed with this bike and the company. I continued read the rest of the article and at the bottom of the article were 4 more images that made me completely change my opinion of the bike and company. I’ll let these two do the talking.

These were obviously taken with somebody’s point and shot digital camera. It has a list of image don’ts: poor lighting, bad background, dirty tires, no depth, no contrast and even flash reflections in the window behind the bike.

Then I thought to myself “how bad is the web site?”, so I checked it out. It was great, nothing but high quality images. They also had tons of images from other publications that they could have used for the press release.

In my opinion It would have been better to have just left out the bottom four images.

It is a perfect example of less is more.

Links:

HotRod Links Article

Travertson V-Rex Web Site

POST SOMETHING STUPID! Oh, and try to make it interesting.

It’s been almost 3 week since my last posting. I guess it’s like the auto mechanic who drives the worst running car around. I need to get into the habit of posting something at least every other day. Maybe I’ll take some side trips into other topics.

I’ve been able to post to the Avis Safety Glasses blog pretty much every other day, but that’s easy when you at work for 9 hours a day

I had a big boost in traffic to my JDB Works web site after I “Stumbled” it. But then it dropped off to nothing. I think I may have tagged it wrong. It’s been so long now I can’t quite remember what the tags were. I’m going to “Stumble” it again but I will make sure to tag it correctly.

I have also put some content on my Resources page that I am trying to change on a regular basis. Things like videos, links to funny or really great sites. I’m trying to create a landing page to bring in visitor and hopefully generate some work.

Wish me luck.

Well I checked both the Avis Safety Glasses site and the JDB Works site and apparently they were indexed on the day they were created. That was on the 20th of October. They haven’t been indexed since.

I did get a surprise when I checked my Google lerts for Safety Glasses. The Avis Safety Blog was on the Google Blog Alerts.  Oh, make that 2 alerts on the Google Alerts for safety glasses on Google Alerts. On on one day and another alert on another day. Sweet!

I have also done some work with Web CEO. I relay my experiences on the  next Blog, I don’t want top blow my whole wad on this post.

This is the hardest part of Search Engine Optimization. The Waiting. Waiting for Google or any other Search Engine to find and index your site.

I read some where that Google crawls blogs faster and more often. I’m not sure if thats true its been at least a couple of days since I started the JDB Works Blog and the Avis Safety Blog.

I’ve done some reading on Blog promtion. It seems one of the best ways is Blog. So that’s what I’m going to do.

Here is another way create your own Technorati Profile this one is mine.Technorati Profile

Found Squidoo today so I thought I would sign on and create a couple of pages. I signed up with 2 accounts. One for Avis Safety Glasses and one for JDB Works.

Avis safety is a wholesaler of safety glasses selling mainly to hardware stores, auto-parts stores and other such retailers. JDB Works is my web development page. Creating the accounts was easy enough, it took maybe 10 minutes each. Adding content can take some time.

It is a free service that is ad driven. When you create your page there are two types of ads, some from Google and then some Squidoo offerings. They aren’t too obnoxious at all. They also highlight several other “Lenses”. “Lens” is their name for a page. They will also pay you or a charitable organization. You can also split the money any way you like. You make money by linking to Squidoo partner web sites or highlighting products from Amazon or eBay. It doesn’t matter if it’s your stuff or not. Read all about it at Squidoo

You can make as many pages, oops, “lenses” as you want. I started out with one for each account.

It took some time to edit, or fill, the pages with content. If you don’t add enough content they let you know with a warning that you won’t get indexed. If you add more content the warnings will stop. I added three extra text modules, highlighted some product from the Avis Safety website and some web development levels from the JDB Works website. I also added a company video to the Avis Safety Squidoo.

I’m curious to see how any of this will turn out. Don’t worry I’ll be sure to keep you up to date.

Oh by the way here is the links:

Avis Squidoo

JDB Works Squidoo

This Blog is for and about web development and design.

I will be relating my experiences with SEO and other type’s of web development challenges.

One of the reasons for this Blog is to see if Blogs really do help with search engine rankings. I started this Blog and another one of my web sites. The other site is here: www.avissafety.com.

I will chronicle the results of the Blogs and let you know if they help with the Search Engine ranking of the two test sites.