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Several times when our sales reps go on a sales call, they’ve been heard a “no phrase” that they just can’t beat:

We just want a simple web site with no bells and whistles for cheap, really cheap.

Cheap Web Design starts with no bells and whistles. By focusing on only the aspects of a web site that are the most important to the success of a web site, you can save a ton of money!

Since the economy has turned south we’ve heard this numerous times.  The search engine data reflects this trend.  Google says people are searching for the phrase “Cheap Web Design” more than 100 times as much as “inexpensive web design” and over 1000 times as much as “quality web design”.  It’s pretty clear that for a lot of small business, price is the #1 concern when it comes to building their web presence.

There’s no way we’re getting out of the full service web design business, we just love it too much.  But the market is speaking pretty clearly.  We’ve always had quite reasonable prices and gave amazing service, but there’s a lot of small business owners out there with no web site at all or one of those really bad, “make your own web site for free” (which aren’t actually free, just cheap).  We knew we could give the small business community of America a better choice.  So after careful thought, we’ve come up with a new branch of services that offers high quality web sites for cheap! We call it, appropriately: Cheap Web Design

Learn more:

• How can we do web design so cheaply?
  • Basically, we focus on providing only the features of a web site that are the most important to the success of a web site.
  • The above page also tells you about the few things one gives up with a cheap web design package?
• A big part of why we can do web design so cheaply is our streamlined cheap web design process.
• We still use our 2 proof process to ensure high quality web sites . . .

Create a Post in WordPress Video

WordPress, a web application that supports not just reverse chronological order articles, hierarchical pages, a WYSIWYG content editor with a working image/file uploader and embedder and tons of other features, sounds a little intimidating at first.  But the beauty of WordPress is that it’s easy to use.

Yes WordPress is powerful, secure, has tons of plug-ins and a huge user community.  But it also has it’s basics down.  If you are a basic level user it just doesn’t get much easier than this to work.  Other Content Management Systems (CMS) like Drupal, PhpNuke, Joomla will have even the fastest of learners pulling their hair out within a manner of days.  Don’t worry, it’s not you, it’s them.  WordPress is so widely customizable that it can do just about any job that they can.  But without the heartache that the others cause.

XML Site maps are 5 years old and we are still amazed as people who are using their site maps effectively. As the lady in the video below also points out, often times a poor sitemap.xml is an indicator of a poor web site plan. ie, sometimes more content isn’t better.
She also touches on a great point, using other forms of XML, namely RSS feeds can be a link building machine for a web site. Others sites that are focused on providing users the latest from the blogging world, or even better are focused on providing the latest info from the specific niche you are in, will provide summaries and links to your articles and pages. This not only builds links but it also can generated a little targeted traffic occasionally.

This will be a two part series, next week will tell you about an instance where you may NOT want to have a “properly” implemented sitemap…

We’re proud to launch our in house made client info and proofing system. Behind a password protected front end we’ve created a custom section for each client with client news just for them, a summary of their account status, proofs of their latest web designs, if any are available and a simple feed back form for approval and feedback on these proofs.
Like we said it’s pass word protected so if you are awaiting a proof we’ll be contacting you soon (if we haven’t already) with your user name and password to the client info center,

Any of my SEO clients and many regular readers here know that researching what phrases people are actually searching for and how tough the competition is for those phrase is a very important part of any SEO campaign.  It usually the first step, in fact.

This video has some tips about how to gain a little more insight on how to get some keyphrase ideas.  More importantly, it has some off hand advice, which is actually great about integrating analytics and paid advertising into continuing campaigns.

Read the rest of this entry »

Stop Form Spam - but how?

Form spam, everyone hates it.  That’s when some automated software finds the contact form on your web site and uses to tell you about cheesy offers you’d rather not hear, like how they can get to to #1 on Google for anything you’d like for $9.99!  The most common approach has been to use an image based CAPTCHA script to make sure that a human is filling out the form.  The problem is, they really irritate users and now they make programs for spammers that can read the image the Captcha produces so now image based captcha just doesn’t really work any more.

What’s a web Designer to do then?  We have the answer.  We needed a custom script that was secure, easy for users and easy for web designers.  Years ago we developed one for a client, but it was a bit too custom for general release.  So we simplified it so that even an entry level web designer could customize it and implement it.    We made it more secure and kept easy for the one filling out the form to use.  We liked it so much we use it on our own contact page.   So far it has blocked 100% of the form spam and also blocked everyone who has tried to access the form handler page directly (robots, pranksters and hackers, o my!)

Download the source code, see how it works and get support on our Stop Form Spam page.