Pleasanton Web Design

This website was design primarily as a sales tool that features shipping software video tutorials. The website is available in English and Spanish versions.

The Flash video features a custom player with full screen capability, as well as custom overlays that display calls to action when the video is paused, and when it completes.

This project was a website redesign for a non-profit organization that works children, parents and teachers to promote a character-building methodology. The key function of the website is to provide educational document downloads. The site also includes an events calendar, an online shop and photo galleries of the organizations numerous events.

This website was created for a non-profit organization dedicated to feeding the hungry. Key components of the website are a custom interactive map feature, the ability to publish news articles to multiple categories and the ability to accept donations.

This Website was created for a company offering a wide range of services including damage repair, home detailing, general contracting and much more. Key features of the website include project galleries, coupon downloads, and a mailing list manager that allows the company to send mass emails to their customers.

Almost a month ago Google removed the keyword referral data for searches made by logged in Google users.  At the time Matt Cutts estimated that the overall effect as a percentage of the overall keyword data would be in the single digits. WRONG! At least for me.

My initial test for the couple of days it had been running when I wrote the first article showed minimal effect, along the lines of Matt Cutts’ statement. However as my weekly reports came in, I found that “(not provided)” was always on top, and was an alarmingly high percentage of the total. So high, in fact, that the data was functionally useless to me. In fact, over the month since the keyword referral data has been removed, the total percentage that is “(not provided)” is 24%.

So, think fondly of the days when Google supplied you useful data that would help you improve your web site promotion efforts and better serve  your business, customers and partners. Google just poked you in the eye!

Hey, maybe NOW you’ll start using Adwords!

Google announced on Tuesday that it would be removing keyword query data from Google referrals for searches performed by users logged into their Google account. The reason given by Google was to protect user privacy. “ Protecting user privacy is important to us” states Amy Chang or the Google Analytics team, on the Google Analytics blog post announcing the change.

However, Google is NOT protecting the privacy of those logged in searchers who click on a Google Adwords paid ad. Their keyword data will still be transmitted to paid advertisers’ Google Analytics accounts. Aaron Wall wrote a great post on the hypocrisy of Google’s ham-handed PR.

The bottom line is that businesses will no longer be able to see all keywords that are bringing visitors to their website. The amount of data effected, I assume, will depend on what percentage of Google searches are done by logged in users, and I didn’t have a good feel for that number initially (according to Matt Cuts it will be in the single digits).

I took a look at the stats for this website (http://www.pleasantonwebdesignblog.com/) and saw a new search term named “(not provided).”

So for the three full days for which I have keyword data that is marked  (not provided), slightly less than 4% of my total keyword data was  effected.  Not a big deal to me. So while there is potential for Google Analytics to lose it’s value over this issue, I’m not seeing it right now.

Google Adwords Express is the stripped-down version of Google Adwords, the pay-per-click search engine advertising program that is Google’s bread and butter. Adwords Express launched last summer and has had mix reviews from advertisers.

The idea of Adwords Express is to give the non-techie business owner a way to spend money on local advertising with Google Adwords. Everything about the campaigns are automated, and the set-up is extremely fast, performed through your Google Places account dashboard. The problem? As with any activity, businesses not willing to put the time (do it yourself) or money (hiring a professional) into it will generally get little out of it. The standard Google Adwords certainly has a steep learning curve that gets steeper as time goes on, but without that learning period a small business advertiser will not understand online advertising enough to get much out of it.

The main benefit of Adwords Express touted by advertisers is that of increasing “local visibility.” So if you are not worried about getting clicks and converting them to sales, but rather just exposing your brand to the local searching public, maybe Adwords Express is a no-brainer. However, if you are looking to expand your audience beyond a 15 mile radius of your physical location, you can’t do that with Adwords Express.

Another major limitation, in my opinion, is the fact that you can only create a single ad per business category that you have listed in Google Places. So if what you want to advertise is not represented by a category in Google Places, you’re out of luck.

Does the “Express” mean that Adwords Express is less expensive than Adwords? In the competitive niche I did my research for, the answer was “No.” The cost per click (CPC) was within the same general range, but on the high end.

Based on my research, I don’t believe Adwords Express gives the small business owner the tools necessary to run and efficient campaign. This, coupled with the fact that the CPC costs are no lower than a standard Adwords campaign, makes it difficult for me to see how it would be possible to get a positive ROI when using this service.

What kind of social networking activity do you need to do to achieve top ranking on Google? To begin to answer that question I employed a tool called Shared Count http://sharedcount.com, which displays the number of social networking “shares,” “likes” or other positive signals pointing to any URL you enter into the box.

For instance, how much social networking activity would you need to rank number one for an ultra-competitive phrase like “social media marketing?” Here’s the data I got:

That’s a lot of activity! Keep in mind to that this is a quick and dirty test, and doesn’t take into account the more traditional signals of quality in search engine algorithms, like backlinks, linking domains, etc.

One think you may also notice is zero Stumbles. Either the StumbleUpon part of this tool is broken, or StumbleUpon is dead. I expect the former is probably the case.

For the next test I chose an article on a blog written and I’m assuming promoted by some guys who know what they are doing with regards to social media.

Again we see zero Stumbles and only one Digg. Does this mean Digg is dead? This might confirm your previous suspicions.

What conclusions can we draw from this quick and dirty test? People who know what they are doing with regards to social media are presumable promoting a lot of activity on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and to a lesser extent, Google Buzz. Maybe you should look into doing the same!

Today I’ve put together a particularly horrifying web design process. Please don’t actually follow these steps  (if you can help it).

1. Start the project by creating some visual mockups. Don’t worry about the content yet. You can just plug that in later when the website is completed.
2. Adjust the mockups based on each and every criticism made by the person responsible for the approval. This is especially important if the person requesting the changes has no design training.
3. Once the mockups are approved, build the website. Make sure to use dynamic drop-down  menus, or create the whole website in Flash.
4. Start writing the content. Someone in the company can steal text from competitors’ sites, or scribble some notes and hand them off to the designer to fix up. This is also the perfect time to brainstorm and come up with new sections, pages, features and functions to add to the website.
5. Find some pictures to put on the website. There must be some laying around somewhere, so dig them up. The designer will be able to clean them up in Photoshop if they aren’t that good. There are also may cheap stock photography websites out there that have some good pictures.
6. Plug the content into the website. Whoops! It doesn’t exactly fit. Rather than going back and redesigning the site from scratch, recode each of the pages to make it fit. If there are pages or sections you failed to include in the navigation just add the links somewhere and make them flash or blink to get the visitor’s attention.

The website is finished! It doesn’t look very good and isn’t user-friendly, but it’s a website!

Have any additional steps to add? Let me know.

Taking advantage of the current trends in social networking doesn’t have to be difficult or time consuming. You don’t need a social networking “guru” to get you set up. Here are the basic elements I recommend to get started.

1. Start a blog. This is the core of your social networking strategy. The overall goal should be to drive traffic and increase search engine authority of your website. The bottom line is that if you have value to add to the Internet, your website blog is your forum to do so.

After everything is set up, your blog will be the only thing you need to spend time on regularly. Everything else will be automatic.

2. Get Social. Create a Facebook profile, and create a Facebook Page for your business. Open a Twitter account. Create a LinkedIn personal profile and a Company profile.

3. Add your Twitter account to your LinkedIn profile. You’ll need to uncheck the box that says “Share only tweets that contain #in”. This is a way to specify that only certain Twitter posts are displayed in your LinkedIn profile. Since your posts will be automatically fed to Twitter from your blog, you won’t have this control.

4. Twitterfeed. Go to http://www.twitterfeed.com and open an account. You will need to enter the URL for your blog’s RSS feed. This will differ depending on your blogging software.

The next step is to set up Twitter feed to publish your blog posts automatically to Twitter, as well as your Facebook profile, or business Page. Once this is done, your blog posts will automatically show up on Twitter and Facebook, and through Twitter, on your LinkedIn profile. All  you have to do is write the post!