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Archives for the May 2009

Google Analytics for tracking

Since we are on this whole kick to get Google to notice our site, and to hopefully get people to visit and buy things from us, we should probably have a way to see if those changes we've made make any difference. Lucky for use, Google provides a tool that provides us with more data than we could ever ask for and best of all, IT'S FREE! Google Analytics will tell use exactly what our visitors are doing on our website.

Getting analytics on your website is about as painless of a task as one could ask for. All you need to do is create a Google account, click sign up, enter your site details and put the code on your site. It really is that simple, but if you want a little help, I've provided some.

Posted: Friday, May 22, 2009

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Choosing Keywords

Probably one of the most important optimization steps for our website is the selection of keywords. If you don't have good keywords, then all that hard work that went into great site design goes for nothing. Inversely to that is the fact that choosing the right keywords will help your website be a great success. Keywords are a part of your website that must be changed and updated on a continual basis. They must also be maintained site wide, and vary to make sections of the site more relevant. This not only helps your visitors find more relevant data, but helps Google realize how relevant your data really is. Since we are concentrating on SEO on the cheap, this will help us gain a higher position within Google for search phrases that will generate free traffic.

Choosing the right keywords is extremely important, but just as important is making sure we don't fall victim to some of the most common mistakes made, when deciding on our target words. Some of the most common mistakes are as follows:

• Targeting only individual words
• Broad words
• Targeting STOP words
• Too many targeted words
• No variations on keywords
• Not using multiple keywords

Before I start putting keywords on my site, I have a brainstorming session and write down all the keywords and phrases that I think might be relevant to my site.

Posted: Thursday, May 21, 2009

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Hey Google Over Here

The website is built, and now that I'm back from vacation (watching copious amounts of sports), it's time to concentrate on getting it noticed. When I say noticed, I want to be recognized by Google, as that seems to be the "gold standard" for successful websites. In addition to establishing a good ranking within the search index, I want to concentrate on keeping my costs low and do as little as possible paid advertising.

With that said, over the next several posts we will be discussing Google, and how we can rise to the top of their index the cheapest and most ethical way possible. There are many free tools out there that can help you see your current position and those of your competition, and we are going to utilize them to their fullest.

In order to demonstrate this, we should probably find out how our website rates right now and then check the statistics in a few weeks, to see if any of the tweaks we are about to implement make any difference.

Posted: Tuesday, May 19, 2009

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10Beans Almost Ready

I've been spending some time on 10Beans.com this week and it's almost to the point where we could actually have shoppers. A few more updates to the templates and the creation of some static content, and we are in shape. I also think I need to add a shopping cart, which at this point will probably be paypal.

Luckily there are many considerations when it comes to shopping carts. For me on a simple site, it boiled down to Paypal or Google Checkeout. Both are pretty good, however the advantage to using Paypal, is that the shopper doesn't need a Google account in order to use it. Checkout still seems a bit limited, so I'm going to stick with the internet standard of Paypal.

Posted: Wednesday, May 06, 2009

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Some More Tools

As you can see from the site so far, things are moving along rather nicely. I've got my database all set up to start adding T-Shirts, and all that's left is to design the templates that display the data on the website. It really is that simple, it just takes a good plan and the ability to stay on track with the development.

Today however, I thought I would take a break from the building of the site and concentrate a little on some of the tools I'm using to make the T-Shirt site.

Posted: Tuesday, May 05, 2009

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Build T-Shirt Model

With the framework that I use to build sites ( django ), I start with my drawing, and then move to modeling my data. When I model my data, I usually get out my trusty blank piece of paper and start writing down the things that I think are needed for a particular piece of data. Since we are building a T-Shirt shop, I thought the best place to start would be with the T-Shirt data. That is essentially the bulk of the content for the site.

Here are the things that will be part of every T-Shirt.

Posted: Sunday, May 03, 2009

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I Start With A Drawing

Now that I'm off and running with the idea of a T-Shirt shop, I thought I would start the process off with a drawing I did to reference the various part of the site. I always like to start my design with a sketch so I have something to reference when I get into the building phase of my project. Usually I start with a drawing as you can see below, and then start a prototype with markup and sample data in the database.

Posted: Saturday, May 02, 2009

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