EMarketing 101: The Nuts and Bolts of Building Your Own Website

[somarco]

Re: EMarketing 101: The Nuts and Bolts of Building Your Own Websi

Gary built my first "professional" site. The methods he uses are behind the times and the code is sloppy.

I did OK with that site but mostly because of what I did, not Gary. Had I followed his advice on SEO I never would have come as far as I have.

 

[BTFuzz]

Re: EMarketing 101: The Nuts and Bolts of Building Your Own Websi

Gary built my first "professional" site. The methods he uses are behind the times and the code is sloppy.

I did OK with that site but mostly because of what I did, not Gary. Had I followed his advice on SEO I never would have come as far as I have.

Care to elaborate?

 

[Mark]

Re: EMarketing 101: The Nuts and Bolts of Building Your Own Websi

Gary built my first "professional" site. The methods he uses are behind the times and the code is sloppy.

I did OK with that site but mostly because of what I did, not Gary. Had I followed his advice on SEO I never would have come as far as I have.

You have a great website now. One to be very proud of.

 

[somarco]

Re: EMarketing 101: The Nuts and Bolts of Building Your Own Websi

Care to elaborate?

He built the site about 2 years ago and installed it on his server. I did not give him control of the site as what he built was minmal, about a dozen pages.

Over the next few weeks I added a lot of content and hired someone to help with SEO. I learned the title tags and meta description was all wrong but Gary's advice about using submit services was not going to prove effective.

I later wanted a dynamic FAQ page and hired someone else to build it when Gary said it was beyond his capability. The FAQ worked like a charm and drove a lot of traffic, along with my blogging.

I was told the site had a lot of coding errors and was directed to a validator that confirmed most of what I was told.

Then I hired someone else to build a new site based on CSS vs tables which Gary had used. The site looked good but was challenging to me when I wanted to update it. After several weeks of frustration (mostly with me) I decided to convert the site to a WP template.

The only thing I lost in the transition was the FAQ page which was not compatible with CSS or the WP format. Traffic dropped off a bit but quickly came back.

Interestingly enough, Gary still has a screen capture of the site he built on his page, and a link to my site even though it is 2 generations removed from what he did.

I was pleased with the way the site looked, but I should add that I designed the general layout, gave him all the content, and showed him a sample of the way I wanted the site to look.

It looked good and navigation worked fine until I started adding content and then it became inflexible.

There were coding errors I discovered when adding content that resulted in odd font colors that I had to manually override.

If you want a simple site he does a decent job, but if you want to update it on a regular basis it is either expensive to pay him (or someone else) or challenging to you unless you really understand coding.

While I did not see your site, I notice you are in the P&C business. He has a sister in the P&C business and perhaps he understands that business better than health insurance which may or may not explain your Google results.

One other thing.

Shortly after I hired someone to do the SEO work, we noticed that someone from Gary's IP had logged in to my site and sabotaged all the work that had been done over the prior 2 weeks. I immediately logged in and changed my password so there were only 2 of us who knew how to get in.

I had no more problems after that but it taught me a lesson to never trust anyone who is working on my site. Now when I need work, I create a dummy site that is a clone and let them work on that while keeping them out of my live site.

 

[Robert Fuller]

Re: EMarketing 101: The Nuts and Bolts of Building Your Own Websi

There are a lot of options in the design and construction of a web presence today and what I have found is I know "Life Insurance and Annuities" and I know nothing and don't want to know anything about building something like a Website-SEO-Ad words much less social media...fact is I get paid for selling so I out source tech issues-needs and wants..I have had great luck with free lancers thru companies like Guru.com or elance.com...all you have to do is post what you want and set back and watch the proposals come in-notice the vast differences in pricing.. interview and select the programmer or tech person/company to go with. Great thing is I run all projects via my AMX just in case there is an issue. I only pay 25% up-front to begin the project and then we agree on what ever the balance is based on time tables and mileposts being hit. Today more than ever with so many tech people looking for a job many have turned to free lancing. Last web platform..not a site but platform I had built for our national operation cost me less than $1,500..If I had went thru normal channels and companies for the same design and functions the average cost I was given in proposal format was on average between $70,000 and $100,000! That was not including the dedicated server I lease for $140/mo...so...the point is shop until you drop and think big...cause it's a big internet and you can get on it with a small investment.

 

[STIBROKER]

Re: EMarketing 101: The Nuts and Bolts of Building Your Own Websi

Dude.....REALLY.........

Shortly after I hired someone to do the SEO work, we noticed that someone from Gary's IP had logged in to my site and sabotaged all the work that had been done over the prior 2 weeks. I immediately logged in and changed my password so there were only 2 of us who knew how to get in.

I had no more problems after that but it taught me a lesson to never trust anyone who is working on my site. Now when I need work, I create a dummy site that is a clone and let them work on that while keeping them out of my live site.