Wow…I’ve let the dust get about an inch thick on my blog, with the last post being over a year ago. Fear not! A fresh look and a website that I plan on updating on a more regular basis are on the way before the end of the year.
Thanks to flickr user emilykneeter for the photo.
Here’s a quick update to let everyone know that I have joined on to begin contributing to the local photoblog Greenville Daily Photo. The authors of the blog, Denton and Connie, have been regularly been posting photos since 2005 to document living in the downtown area. Now that work has them relocating to Charlotte, several other local photographers will be contributing to keep things running. I always enjoyed documenting campus life for The Tiger Newspaper when I was a student at Clemson and I have to say that I’m pretty excited to have an ongoing commitment to shooting this style of photography again.
My first shots will start rolling through in the next couple days, so head over to Greenville Daily Photo to check them out and be sure to bookmark the site or subscribe to the RSS feed so you can be sure to see the latest pictures of our awesome city!
With football season (finally) upon us, I thought I would share a project I recently worked on for RJ Rockers Brewery in Spartanburg. If you’re heading to Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte to catch a Carolina Panthers game this season, RJ Rockers is going to have stations set up at section 125 or 546 with Bell Ringer Ale and Son of a Peach for sale. I created the sign to the left for each station using the Panthers blue, large images of the bottles and a line of scrimmage background.
I’m starting off a series of posts about “web basics,” where I talk through a topic to help clear up some of the questions I routinely receive when working through a web design project. First up, I’m going to be talking about domain names – your home on the world wide web.
Domain names, also called your URL, are very similar to the address of your brick and mortar building – you give your web address out to your customers so they know where your business or organization can be located on the web. More specifically, your domain name is the address that you type in to be directed to a particular website.
Domains are usually reserved on a per-year basis from a service like GoDaddy* for between $7.50 (you can usually find coupons online to get this lower price) and $12 a year. There are also some select domains that the powers that be have deemed to be “premium” and can be very expensive to purchase – you’ll know pretty quickly if you run across one of those when searching for a domain.
Typically .com, .net and .org domains are the most commonly used and recognized, but there are many other extensions that can be used. Take this website for example, which is JimFerguson.me – I get a lot of funny looks when telling people my URL. But I like the .me extension for a portfolio website for an individual, because the website is specifically about that person and the services they offer. For me, it’s different, easy to remember and describes what the website is about. These alternate extensions can also be considered when the .com version of a domain has been taken. Some alternate extensions have certain requirements that must be met in order to purchase, such as .gov websites must be affiliated with the government or certain country-specific extensions require that you have an address in that country. Wikipedia has a complete list of available domain extensions.
From a search engine standpoint, I often get asked if owning an exact phrase match would help a company show up better in searches. In short, the answer is yes, they can – but for the time being. Recent studies have shown that this factor has started to slip in importance when search engines consider rankings. So if it came down to owning the domain for name of your brand or owning the exact phrase match of what you do, I would almost always recommend going with your brand name.
Another question that comes up is whether or not you should own several versions of a domain and redirect them to the primary URL. The answer here would be that it really depends. If you are concerned with protecting your brand name, then I would say go ahead and buy them up. Otherwise, don’t worry about it. Some companies go to a bit of an extreme here and also register variants and misspellings of their brand name. Registering a domain name and redirecting it to point to your primary URL does not help with searches though, so buying and redirecting the domain greenvillescwebdesignbyjimferguson.com or jimfergusonisthebomb.com wouldn’t help me out much.
So that’s a pretty good top-level overview on domain names. If you’ve got additional questions or comments on domains, leave them in the comments section and I’ll follow up. Or if you’d like some help in choosing a domain name, let me know and we’ll work through it together.
*I’m not endorsing GoDaddy here, they’re just one of the largest and most well-known domain registrars.
Your website lives and dies by the content found within its pages and posts – plain and simple. I can design and code up the best looking website for your company, but if the content is thin and doesn’t speak to your customers, then the website will fall flat (both in conversions and in the search engines). Quality content also plays a major role in your placement in search engines.
What exactly is quality content? Well, I would loosely define it as original information or graphics that, first – and most importantly, satisfies the needs of the visitor and secondly, interests them to the point where they want to share it with their peers. As it relates to the web, sharing usually means that someone links to your content either from their own website or from their social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc). It just so happens that search engines place a good bit of emphasis on these links (actually, in SEO circles they’re called backlinks). So how is this type of content developed? Well, there isn’t one clear and simple answer to that question, but the best strategy is to write relevant content with your visitors in mind. Here is one strategy that I like to use…
Not too long ago, an Apple store opened here in Greenville. I worked for an agency at the time and we, being the good Mac geeks that we were, kept our company blog updated with any of the chatter we were hearing. After months of speculation and rumors, Apple opened a store at the Haywood Mall. Over the course of several months leading up to the grand opening, and for some time afterwards, those blog posts got a ton of search traffic. Why, you ask? Well, the posts fell into three categories:
Brainstorming topics for your site that fall into at least one of those categories is a great starting point for writing quality content. You get bonus points if you can generate something that falls into more than one. The Apple store was opening soon, in Greenville, and a large percentage of creatives rely on Mac computers/software to perform our jobs. There’s your trifecta.
© 2013 Sandlapper Creative, Inc. All Rights Reserved | Simpsonville, SC 29681 | 864.881.8280
