Concrete Forest

We decided to refresh our web site’s look.

Something a little simpler and cleaner.

The blog hasn’t been done yet, but that will come soon….

New web site for Industrial Environmental Contracting Inc at http://www.iec-nj.com. Since their inception in 1994 they’ve completed over 1,200 cleanup projects ranging in size from small heating oil tank removals to multi-million dollar industrial remediation projects.

This client was a referral we received from one of our fellow members (Safe Haven Computers) here in the ‘Clients Plus BNI‘ group. If you need some computer or network work taking care of we wholeheartedly recommend Safe Haven!

Great tips on building pages efficiently…. http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html

First phase of project was to rebuild their front-end ‘world-facing’ site.

We went live this week.
Second phase will be a password protected site for sharing information on their construction projects with their sub-contractors and customers.

This second phase will be written in PHP accessing MySQL for data relationships.

Its been a busy week.  We didn’t do the design side of this project either, but again worked with another firm to divide the project up. We did the entire HTML/CSS/PHP build however.

This is just phase 1 – there will likely be a phase2 with a lot more content.

http://www.sunfarmnetwork.com/

Our latest web site for TJC Custom Homes LLC of Raritan, NJ at http://www.tjchomes.com

This site features areas highlighting this builders designs, land development, commercial construction as well as their custom home construction.

Site uses lightbox to show before and after interior and exterior renovations also.

Building on what we did for mugstate.com we’ve built teeshirtstate.com.

Both sites use Zazzle stores and are customized subsets filtering the Zazzle RSS feed to populate the sites.

Additionally we’ve created an index to allow the visitor to drill down into the products by state, and in some cases by city.

One of the things we did to try to help with SEO was incorporate the drill-down product selection information into the title and the keywords of the page.

Found a great little photoshop tutorial for creating ‘postage stamps’ http://www.lunacore.com/photoshop/tutorials/tut014.htm

Here is my first attempt with a photo I took in the backyard.

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We launched mugstate.com last week.  This is a fairly simple front-end to a Zazzle store utilizing their RSS feed.  The site is focused on selling coffee mugs.  They don’t have a large selection yet, but are planning on adding more over time.

For the site we made a very simple template focussing on coffee and coffee beans with browns as the predominate color on the page.

One of the things I’ve been trying to do is improve search engine placement for my own sites through some search engine optimization (SEO).  I wanted to experiment on myself to see if I could get my own business more highly ranked in Google for a few web designer  / web developer search phrases.  One of the things I did was register a few domains that had portions of the search phrases I was targeting in them.  Then I built web pages at those domains featuring the same phrases while describing my services using the phrases as keywords and title tags. Then I built links from those domains to my main site (to try to inherit any value I might be creating).

And I did a couple of other little things that I’ve decided not to tell you about

On a weekly basis I run a series of batch reports to analyze where I am in Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google.

I managed to crack Microsoft fairly quickly and get some good results, I even had two of the top three with different domains on one search phrase for a while….. but success at Google eluded me (and I didn’t really care all that much about Yahoo – sorry Yahoo).

Today I checked my batch reports and found I actually was #1 on Google for the search phrase “Web Developer NJ”,  which I thought was a decent search phrase for me to score well with.

Maybe next week I’ll plummet to #100 for no apparent reason, but for now I’m celebrating my success.