Find a Top Web Designer

Elliot Silver
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3

I am lucky to have found a great graphic designer who has helped me with a number of projects over the last year and a half. I initially found Mike after holding a logo design contest at 99Designs (formerly part of Sitepoint). I wrote a creative brief, added a cash award for the winner, and somewhere around 15-20 designers participated. It turned out to be much easier to find a designer than I initially thought it would be.

I would like to suggest another way to find a great web or graphic designer using 99Designs as well. Search through either current or past design contests, which can be found on the home page. Many of the top design contests have dozens of designers, all of whom submit one or multiple entries. You can search multiple public design contests to see which designers seem to have a style that you’d like for your project.

You can then look at the profiles of your favorite designers, and see what other contests they’ve entered and recently won. Additionally, many designers have their external portfolio website listed on their profile, allowing you to contact them outside of the 99Designs website. You can also send the designer a private message via 99Designs asking for a price quote for your project.

If you prefer to keep things more trackable and on site, you can set up your own design competition, and using what I suggest above, send private messages to the designers asking them to participate in your contest. 99Designs is a great site to find designers who will compete to complete your website design project.

Monitor Your Adsense Ads

Elliot Silver
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0

When developing a website, I really like to use Google’s Adsense. Not only can I customize the ad units to integrate into my website, but I can also use graphical banner advertising, which not only generates revenue, but it helps give the appearance that advertisers want to be advertising on a particular site. Technically, they may not know they are advertising on certain websites at the time, but they are able to block them if they don’t wish to advertise there any longer.

One drawback though is that certain advertisers, who may have opposite beliefs than your website, can still advertise on it. For example, on a religious website, a website that is owned by a group who has conflicting beliefs can still place advertisements depending on the keyword match they are choosing. These links can take visitors of your website to another site, potentially angering the visitors, especially because people don’t always realize how Adsense works.

A website owner is able to block certain urls from appearing, however, there may be hundreds of different website urls with the same message that want to advertise, so it can be a never ending battle. That said, it’s very important to monitor your websites to make sure objectionable advertising isn’t being displayed. While the ads don’t violate Google’s TOS, it could violtate your own site’s standards.

Wanted: Website Calendar Software

Elliot Silver
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7

I’ve been scouring Google for this, but have yet to come up with exactly what I need for Lowell.com, Burbank.com and Newburyport.com. I figure I will put out this request and hopefully hear from someone who knows of a calendar or who can build something for me inexpensively. I would prefer something “out of the box” though.

Calendar Needs:

1) Small calendar box, just as currently on the home page of the site.

2) When you click on the month or date, you are taken to a page on the site with search friendly (and unique)   URLs, such as http://www.burbank.com/calendar/2009/june or http://www.burbank.com/calendar/2009/may/30

3) All events for the day or month (whichever is clicked) will be listed on the page. So if you click on a specific day, you will arrive at a page with the individual daily events listed, with hyperlinks to take you to individual event listings.

4) Event listings will be indexed with search friendly urls, such as http://www.burbank.com/calendar/2009/summer-water-festival.php .   Meta description and keyword will be search friendly and stay indexed so people can find the event listing even if it already happened.

5) Web based calendar management system – not necessary for people to create their own log-ins unless that’s automatic, easy, or cheap to do.

Please post comments, suggestions, or price quote and I will be in touch.

My Mini Site Experience

Elliot Silver
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8

I have gained some first hand knowledge about mini site development, and I would like to share some of it in case it can be helpfu. Some of this knowledge has been gained from buying mini sites and putting those up, buying mini sites and adding content, and creating my own mini sites; while other information is somewhat obvious.

Domain names that I either own or sold, where I used mini sites include UniqueInk.com, BullRidingHelmet.com, Secaucus.com, FuelAssistance.com, WeddingEntertainment.com, Oenophiles.com, and DebtAssistanceClinic.com – all of which had/have different mini site set-ups.

I found that I had the most success when I purchased mini sites rather than having built them on my own. I was able to enhance the pre-fab sites by adding pages of content based on keyword research within the paramaters of the nice looking design. Not having to fuss with templates and pictures and the initial content saved me a few hours worth of time, and it gave me a great foundation to build out the sites even more.

I’ve discussed strategy to building out mini sites in previous posts, but basically I used the Google keyword tool (and others) to find out what people are looking for related to the topic, and I created pages based on this information.   The pages had limited but adequate information about the topic, and it included Adsense and/or links to the source of the topic. For example, on the page about an outlet mall, I linked to the outlet mall within the text. I also populated the pages with photos from iStockphoto.com, which are cheap and help enhance the appearance of a mini site.

The objective of a mini site is to make money from Adsense or advertising, but it’s also to provide a nice website that is liked/accepted by Google and by visitors. If a visitor leaves the site after 2 seconds, Google may give it a poor quality score, lowering its rankings on the SERPs. Ideally, traffic will grow on a mini site because of the Google rankings, so the lower CTR is hopefully offset by higher traffic. This is important to consider when building pages.

The only time I recommend that inexperienced developers (who have jobs and other family commitments) build their own sites is when they really want a mini site but the quality of the domain name is lacking, and they want to learn about development by practicing. It doesn’t usually make sense to pay $100-1,000 for a mini site on a domain name that isn’t worth that amount, but it has been a great learning experience for me.

Some might argue that UniqueInk.com is more of a brandable name that might not be worth building, however, due to it’s initial launch before I owned it, the site already received enough traffic to justify. Building out a mini site from scratch takes time, but it is a good leaning experience. I will do it again for sure, but I am lucky to be a full time domain investor, so it’s a nice break from my daily routine.

I urge people to only develop mini sites on domain names that are category defining (the exact keyword string) for a term/phrase that is well-searched – especially if it doesn’t already get type in traffic. The point of a mini site is to provide content for people looking for whatever the domain name would imply by getting listed in the search engines. A 3 word long-tail keyword might not get typed in frequently, but when someone types it in to Google, if there’s a site with good information, it will probably rank well and get traffic in that way.

If you build a mini site on a brandable domain name, chances are good that it will have trouble ranking for the exact term you want – especially if there’s any competition, so you will end up spending a lot of time and effort that probably won’t pay off in the end.

There are plenty of mini site options available, and testing is key. Just like you can’t expect to get rich with a newly registered domain name, the same can be said about mini sites. They may enhance the value of a domain name, but execution is key, and you can’t expect a mini site will be a magical solution.

Re-Designed “Mini Site”

Elliot Silver
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24

This morning I mentioned that I was re-designing a mini-site, and I wanted some feedback. I am still working out some errors that I couldn’t see before the site went live, but I would love to hear your thoughts on the new look of UniqueInk.com, a tattoo website.

I am a bit concerned about click throughs because of the layout, but I am more interested in growing the site’s traffic before worrying about making money from Adsense.

If anyone wants to post their tattoos or has any suggestions/ideas for the site, please let me know.   I used Mike’s design for this site with a bunch of customizations that I made.

Building Out A Mini Site

Elliot Silver
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4

I haven’t started re-designing UniqueInk.com yet, a site about unique tattoos and body art, but I am really excited about how it’s going to look when finished because I received the design template last night. I know the age old (and proven theory) is that design doesn’t matter when it comes to generating revenue, but I am going to put the theory to a test.

One of the nice things about working for myself is that if a fun project comes up, I can put other things on the back burner for a day. I have quite a bit of other development work to do, but it’s always fun to work on a fresh project. My interest in re-designing and re-launching the site will help me stay focused and hopefully complete the new site by the end of the day.

When you have a chance, please check out UniqueInk.com to see the “before site,” and when the re-design is finished, I would love your feedback on the look, layout, and design. I will also be happy to report how the site is doing in a few weeks.

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