Denver Web Design Blog - Katz Web Design

I’ve been working with the WordPress platform for a little while now, and I’ve been a regular blogger since January (though I had been promoting blogging for years earlier, and had my first blog in 2000 [yes, I'm a bit insecure about my blogging creds]).  I’ve created many sites with blogging capabilities, some of them based on Blogger.com integration, and others WordPress.

I’ve explained the benefits of blogging many times to my clients, made nagging phone calls reminding them to blog — all to little avail.  I even wrote an article about the importance of blogging to help explain myself. But still, the blogs remain silent.

What I tell my clients about the benefits of blogging

If my clients already know what a blog is, then I can dive into why it’s so important (other than people KNOW that it’s important).  I tell them the following:

Blogging is a great way to reach people who may not be searching for what you want them to be searching for. Let’s say you have a service for “healing touch,” but it’s not “therapeutic touch.”  With a normal website, you would not be able to rank well for the other key phrase. If you write an article on the differences between therapeutic touch and healing touch, you then will be able to rank for both phrases, even if your business only focuses on one service.

The more you write about what you know, the larger your online sphere of influence grows. By writing consistenly about topics important to you, you’re able to rank better in Google and other search engines, build a community of people who follow what you write, and become an authority on your topic.

There’s no other marketing medium like blogging where all you need to invest is your time, and you’ll get direct benefits. Fliers, radio, tv, newspaper, business chambers — they all take money.  Blogging is free to set up, and free to use.  You will get out of it what you put into it.

That’s the jist of what I tell people about blogging.  They generally get very excited, get a blog, and post a few times. One month later, cobwebs form on their admin login form.

Maybe try a professional blogging service?

One thing I’ve considered is writing the articles myself.  I’m no copywriting expert (I’m a Denver web designer), but I do know my clients’ business well.  If they don’t have the time or commitment to write their own articles, they should find someone to do it for them. There are many professional blog writing services out there, maybe I should start recommending them?

Does anyone have any experience using a professional blog writing service?

Load time matters

Imagine waiting 18 seconds for a page to load (on a high-speed connection) — not just the home page, but any inside page of a website.  Pretty frustrating, right?  Having bad load times makes a huge difference to your customers.  I helped a new client reduce page load time from 19 seconds to 3 seconds.

Keep reading →

I just finished meeting with a client who told me that she had met with multiple other designers, and that I was the only one who provided any ideas for marketing her website. It’s pretty unbelievable.

She has a new product that is not yet launched — very under wraps — and wants to spread the word once the product goes live. Other web designers only discussed her website. I talked about a web presence.

It’s hard for me to imagine doing what I do in Katz Web Design and NOT knowing about Squidoo or Flickr and finding ways to integrate a community of users into your website.  If people want exposure, they know they need a website.  But that’s not all.  They need to be properly situated online, and that means SEO.

My wife and I are now back from our 1 week vacation.  We stayed at home, and were able to:

• Paint!
  • The living room
  • My office
  • The kitchen
• Buy!
  • A corner TV stand
  • A SolaTube (which has made our living room 300% more pleasant)
  • A new desk for my office
  • Gallons of paint (see “Paint!” above )
• Plumb
  • Our secondary sewer line collapsed. Ouch.

So, as you can see, it was quite the vacation.  It’s good to be back doing web design!

Sometimes my thoughts have a yiddish accent…

And sometimes, I do something about my thoughts — like go on vacation until May 5th.

So, the Webs, I’ll be not online.  Hope the Internet’s there when I get back

I normally don’t work with ASP; I use PHP for my coding. Recently, I had to create a style.css.asp file, and I needed to find how to set a far-futures header in ASP. 

Here’s what I found in 5 minutes : Keep reading →

Today at the Westside Business Builders meeting, Todd Colchin of Colchin Automotive & Diesel gave Katz Web Design a testimonial:

Our website is just barely up — and we’ve not done anything with it yet — and yesterday, we got two new customers who came into our shop who found us by our website! They were both 18-25 years old.

Having a website is vital, especially if you want to appeal to younger customer base.

I am designing and creating a real estate website with WordPress, and I’m going to be writing a few articles that detail how it’s done.  This article will get you started — please leave feedback with any questions or topic requests for the next installment.

A little background — why use WordPress?

I’m working with a Denver company on a real estate website. Their goal is to showcase their listings in an easy-to-update CMS.

I’ve worked with Open-Realty, and — to say it bluntly — it’s a huge pain in the ass.  When you scratch the surface of OR, you begin to realize how cobbled together it is. Customizing the code to work as it should requires a steep learning curve.  The templates are relatively simple to work with, but the administration section is horrible.  The Open Realty user experience is just awful. 

WordPress is my CMS of choice currently, and it’s so easy to develop for that I recommend it to many of my clients.

Keep reading →

It was my first career day at a high school (since being in high school), and it was fine.  I remembered that high schoolers are just kids and nowhere near adults yet.

There were some kids that had already started designing their own websites, one knew Ruby on Rails, one was very interested in design.

I’m glad I represented KWD there; it’s important that high schoolers know that you can make it in web design — or any business — if you work hard enough. 

There’s a problem with technology: it’s not human.  Technology often can’t express when there are problems, especially when it doesn’t know problems exist. There’s a gap between the consumer and the product that can often only be bridged by a middle-man repair shop.

Creating products that communicate their problems effectively is one of the next major steps in user-friendliness.

Keep reading →

A man called yesterday wanting to have his Denver IT Services website optimized.  He had called multiple search engine optimization specialists in Denver, and each one had given him the same proposal: spend thousands of dollars per month, and take a long time.

Check out what the SEO companies said

He had been told the following by multiple companies:

In order to get your website ranked well, it will take 6 months to a year, and will cost $1,000.00 per month.

- Random Denver SEO companies

That means he will have paid $6,000 to $12,000 to have his site ranked well in search engines. I was taken aback; spending that much money each month on SEO is ridiculous for many reasons, but here are a few: Keep reading →

Note: the following will not work on all server configurations, which may be why you’re using SSI in the first place. Call your server administrator/tech support and see if the following techniques are supported.

Escape static HTML

If you want the power and flexibility of PHP but don’t want to (or can’t) shift away from HTML, you can actually tell your server to read all HTML files as PHP by making one simple change to a file called .htaccess.

Here’s how:

1. Create a file called .htaccess if you don’t have one already, and save it to your root folder
2. Add a new line to your .htaccess file with the text: AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .html
3. Save the file and upload it to your server.

Now, you’re able to use all of PHP’s goodness by adding one line of code!

Are you having the exposure blues?

Do you write articles that few people read? It may be because they aren’t finding your article! Writing on your blog is not enough when you’re starting out. It’s important to spread the word.

Doing a little legwork after you write an article makes a large difference in the traffic you will get.

When you write a blog post, what happens?

Depending on the blogging platform you use (WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, Movable Type to name a few), when you write a post, a few things happen:

Upon posting:

• Your sitemap will get updated
• Search engines and other websites will be notified of the update
• Your RSS feed will be updated
• Gremlins dance a jig around a cauldron of boiling yam juice and frog eyes

These processes will notify the search engines, but in order to increase your website’s exposure, there are a some websites you should submit your article to. After writing an article, take 5 more minutes and submit your site to bookmarking websites.

Keep reading →

We know who Barack Obama’s web designer is.  Let’s find out who Hillary’s web designer is!

I’ve looked through the CSS and there’s no trace of the designer. Anyone know?