Archive for: January, 2009

Finally indexed!

Jan 29 2009 Published by under Websmitten

Yay! Finally, after all these weeks, ImpactsAlaska.com is indexed! Apparently, it really does just take 6 to 8 weeks for Googlebot to come back around and re-index you. Posting at http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters was definitely the key to finding out what was going on. I actually got a real, live Google employee answering one of my posts. That really did lift the curtain on the wizard. It was good to clean up the site and make it more search engine friendly, but the biggest key was just removing the privacy setting on WordPress and waiting from December 8-ish all the way until January 29th.

There it is, finally listed in Google. Isn't it beautiful?

There it is, finally listed in Google. Isn't it beautiful?

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New Contest at Orbs of Happiness

Jan 27 2009 Published by under Websmitten

Another art show/contest has been launched from Orbs of Happiness. We designed a postcard-type flyer this time:

childlike-flyer Here’s what the front looks like. This was done in photoshop with a photo of my daughter Eliza playing with watercolors. We put more details on the back. More info at http://www.orbsofhappiness.org

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WordPress Templates

Jan 26 2009 Published by under Websmitten

Wow, more and more folks are creating wonderful WordPress Templates – that are easy to customize, too! We just re-did the look of St. Andrews Lutheran website and it only took 2 hours to get it looking like we wanted. It was already a WordPress site – all we had to do was upload the design we found, go into the Appearance features and set several options, and upload our own graphics. WordPress just keeps getting easier and easier.

Our old design was based on an earlier template I had found, too. But here’s the difference – I had to do all the customizations through the CSS and PHP files myself. That’s no problem for me, but whenever you mess with code, you have to maintain it. So, better, more customizable templates save my clients money.

standrews

Take a look at the updated site: www.standrewswichita.org. Our primary motivation for change was the previous menu was down the left hand side and had quickly grown out of control. It was difficult to find what you were looking for and difficult to keep updated. The new design has a drop down menu across the top. It looks cleaner and now it’s easy to see what’s there. Yay!

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Bounce Rate

Jan 01 2009 Published by under Websmitten

I’m still working on ImpactsAlaska.com to get that Google listing back. Found a great video from Google about how to interpret the ‘bounce rate’ of a site. Basically, the bounce rate is the rate at which people come to your site and leave immediately, for whatever reason. A typical site’s bounce rate ranges from 40%-60%. Here’s the google video – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppgfjo6IIf4.

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