My boss has “authorized” me to research doing a company website and I thouht I would come to the source and ask the folks here if you have web sites for your companies. Any good examples for me to look at? How did you do it?(software)How do you get on the search engines? How much does it cost? Maybe that’s the most important question.
I been reading you guys for a while now so I thouht this would be a good question for me to make my first post.
Thanx
Flip
Replies
Start here
http://forums.taunton.com/n/mb/message.asp?webtag=tp-breaktime&msg=20212.1
Excellence is its own reward!
"The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are." --Marcus Aurelius
Piffin, good response. I could give you many more having been in the business on both sides of the fence but I think those former posts paint a picture of a thousand words.. (give or take a few thousand).
FlipL- if you'll follow this link over to the Housingzone website I think you
may learn a lot and see what you should be striving for with your web design
project.
HousingZone.com
2002 Web Awards
They rate Builder sites for:
and Remodeler sites for:
On the other hand what they don't make any mention or provide rating for is
the B2B uses of a website. While I originally created our company website as
a marketing tool (which I think is highly overrated unless you support it with
a lot of other marketing) the majority of content on our site now is not there
for public viewing. It's to share project information with our employees and
trade contracting partners as part of what's called and "intranet"
(internal employees) and "extranet" (external trade contractors).
What kind of contracting company are you a part of? What was your boss looking
at getting out of a website?
View Image
“Systemize the Routine; Humanize the Exceptionâ€-
from Customer Culture: How FedEx and Other Great
Companies Put the Customer First Every Day
by Michael D. Basch
I'm not sure how helpful they'll be, but here are two sites that I have found interesting.
http://www.cluetrain.com/#manifesto
Notes toward a philosophy of doing business on the web in a way that will not alienate the customers most likely to do business on the web.
http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/
Learn how to design good web pages by looking at examples of bad ones.
Thanks piffen I had read that thread when I first discovered this site months ago but looking for it the other day I couldn't find it so that’s why I made my post. I’m hoping to get still more feedback and ideas. I’ve also got to get a handle on the cost too and so far I haven’t really found anything that really helps me out in that respect. Can anyone fill me in on what it costs to make a web site? Thanks for the links to Mr Hayes and Uncle Dunc. I stole the webpagesthatsuck book from my sister this past summer so I’d seen that site and that’s what helped get me interested in this. Thnaks
Flip it's Jerry or Jerrald not Mr Hayes. Please, I hate it when I get called Mr. Hayes here. How come that never happens to Piffen or so many of the others here. Ya never hear piffen refered to as Mr Piffen. Uncle Dunc, well I guess Uncle is okay there but please, it's Jerry or Jerrald.
Flip you still haven't told us what kind of contractor operation you working in? Builder,remodeler, specialty trade contractor?
View Image
“Systemize the Routine; Humanize the Exceptionâ€-
from Customer Culture: How FedEx and Other Great
Companies Put the Customer First Every Day
by Michael D. Basch
Works for me if you know <b> how to attract traffic</b> if you're ready for it. I didn't know jack about building websites, let alone posting pics...you can ask Calvin? at that other place that I still can't get in for some reason. I've personally done two sites and working on a third, actually number three and four. One is for myself and the other for a fellow colleague in the business.
Building them is basically the easy part, directing them to the right people is another. Search engines are the real mystery and there are really only two that many profesional webmasters focus on. Take google for instance...as it's the top dawg all around by a long shot. They constantly change how they rank websites. You can have all the right stuff and rank in the top five sites when the right search words are used. Then boom, one month goes by and they've changed the rules.
I've studied the way alot of sites are constructed and can get a good idea how much traffic they get just by looking at a few items in the html <b>and it ain't keywords anymore!</b> Actually only one search engine uses keywords nowadays, but they hardly count anymore.
For some that may have sites professionally built you really have no idea what that guy may have done. Actually I dragged it out of a few webmasters on a message board not long ago when I started my own sites. They recommended I hire a pro. Then I replied.."why should I? I can see some sites are built with no regards for attracting traffic.." The response was LOL "....well, you don't want to hire those people." Basically many <b>do not want to maintain them</b> because the big money has already been made and they want to move on.
In any event do your homework if contemplating a business site.
Ken Fisher
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