Barry’s Blog

There is a big push right now by some companies to get website owners to invest in Search Engine Optimization for their sites. The truth is that if you’re site is not optimized correctly, the chances of someone finding you on one of the search engines is slim to none. Type in any word or phrase and see how many returns you get. Chances are, if your not typing in the right phrase, you’ll get hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of returns.

This was the challenge posed to me by Chris Freeman. Chris is the owner of a small local business, Iron Man Detailing. He is trying to grow and asked me to make a website for him so that he could have an online presence. We decided to create a single page and optimize it so that people in the area would be able to locate him online. Based on his ideas, I wrote a couple paragraphs peppered with the keywords we agreed on. I also titled his page to target his services and the surrounding towns he would offer his services in.

Now, less than two weeks after posting his site online, IronManLKN.com is coming up on the first page. Since Chris offers Marine and Residential Detailing, and Gelcoat and Fiberglass Repair in and around Lake Norman and Lake Wylie, I was fairly certain that these phrases and keywords would have good results. I did not however expect to have such great results in only two weeks.

If someone tells you they can guarantee to get you on the first page, or even anywhere near the top of the first page on a search engine, they’re lying. Good SEO results are not always so easy, especially when the search engines are constantly changing their algorythms to keep the cheaters at bay. Most often, depending on your site, services, location, etc., it could takes months to even get anywhere near the first page. I’ve put a lot of time, research and practice into learning about SEO practices. And I am happy to say my last few sites have certainly benefited from it.

If you are a sports junky you might like to visit the newly redesigned and recently posted SportsmansDaily.com. Sportsman’s Daily is a satirical look at todays sports written as news articles. The site is the brainchild of my good friend Tom Alexander and Charles Epstein. SportsmansDaily.com covers all topics on all of the sports, including baseball, basketball, football, hockey, soccer, horse racing, boxing / martial arts, college sports, and more.

The first edition of SportsmansDaily.com launched about two years ago and quickly began seeing a large volume of visitors. However, earlier this year just before the superbowl the website was a huge swell of visitors after they published an article entitled Gisele Bundchen: “If the Pats Lose I’ll Run Naked Though Mid-Town Manhattan”. Within hours the site was overrun, nearly closing down the server. Although daily visitors don’t always spike with the same volume the site still enjoys a pretty impressive number of visitors.

So when Tom and Charles approached me to redesign the site I was stoked. Although I have designed a number of sites, this site would be getting noticed on a much larger basis than others.

The plan was to keep the site a static html site that Charles and Tom could maintain themselves with the least amount of hassle. The site had to also include a blog, a forum and a chat room application so that the Sportman’s Daily community could contribute and interact. We began the preliminary design in late June ‘08 and quickly came to a design template that would allow the visitor to quickly find the latest storys as well as archived version.

The newly revised SportsmansDaily.com was officially launched in early August with a brand new group of bizarre and though provoking sports storys. The guys are also regularly blogging about whatever comes across their mind along. Soon the chat room application will go on line, and in the coming months the second season of The Sportsman’s Daily Radio show will begin posting brand new spots.

Through the years I have had the displeasure to do work for client who, how can I say this, were not very honest. Like many other artists, I was often asked to do ’spec’ work. It is a pretty common request, especially when you are just starting to get your business up and running. At some point though you simply have to put a stop to it because, after all, the reason to have a business is to make money. Sure, there are always occasions, say for charity or a friend or a very special client, where a job might be done for free. But now these situations are the rarity rather than the norm. Read the rest of this entry »

As part of my job description with Omni Advertising, I am in charge of writing a blog for their main website, OmniAutomotiveAdvertising.com. It was my suggestion that we start the blog as a strategy to increase our presence on the internet, ramp up our google rankings and develop more incoming and outgoing links to the sites.

According to many of the guidelines, a blog is an integral tool to higher google rankings. Sites such as WebSiteGrader.com advise that the inclusion of a blog will increase your overall score. Prior to starting the Omni blog site, the main website had a very low score, somewhere around 20/100. After adding the blog, and following the other guidelines, the score rose to 53/100! Now, six months later, the site scores 72/100!

Of course, a blog is only a tool. A means to a end, the end being more visitors to your site. While many pages on a website are very rarely update, a blog can easily updated on a regular basis. If your blog is interesting and attracts attention you’ll see a increase in your sites traffic.

Keeping the blog up to date is the challenge. As you can tell from this blog, my last entry was in April. Finding something new to write about can be difficult if you’re not a prolific writer. Writing something that people will find interesting can also be a challenge. Since I write the Omni blog, I spend a lot of time finding suitable topics for that site and tend to neglect this blog.

So, if you want more visitors and higher search rankings, write a blog! It’s worth it.

Last night I attended the Adobe Charlotte Users Group meeting. Guest speaker, Christian N. Abad of Accessible Computing, Inc., gave an animated presentation on the topic of web site accessibility. Accessibility, in this case, refers to how accessible your website is to people with various handicaps or disabilities who use alternative methods to read the content on websites.

I found the timing of this meeting to be right on as I have been researching accessibility over the past month for some of my own projects. In my research I discovered that most ’sighted’ people, like myself, don’t often think about this subject. We take in multiple sources of information in a single glance.

But not everyone can rely on their eyes for information. This is certainly true of the blind, who often rely on screen readers to surf the net. These machines do exactly what you think. They read the web page, one word at a time. And they do it in a certain order. If a page is not designed for accessibility, finding the information you want could be frustrating to say the least.

Blindness is not the only disability targeted by accessibility. Accessibility addresses issues dealt with by people who are colorblind, or have trouble distinguishing contrasting colors, people with limited use of their hands, or suffer deafness or dyslexia, people with cognitive or neurological disabilities, or even age related disabilities.

In response to these issues, the WW3 came up with a list of accessibility guidelines. In 1998, Congress amended the Rehabilitation Act, Section 508, to require Federal agencies to make their websites accessible to people with disabilities. Simply said, any site receiving money from the federal government are now required to follow the Section 508 guidelines.

So why should your website follow these guidelines. Besides the fact that this would make your site accessible to handicapped people, these guidelines also make your site easier to navigate for everyone. If someone can find what they are looking for right away the odds are that they will continue to use your website and will use your services. The guidelines also help you when it comes to search engine optimization, which will help people find your site to begin with.

Throughout the meeting I found myself nodding in agreement to many of the guidlines Christian mentioned. Many of them seem to be based on common sense, like having navigation links at the top of a page. I was pleased to realize that I already implement many of these guidelines in my design.

Remember the old addage “You got to spend money to make money”? Well this is just as true today as it ever was. We all know that times are tough and people are holding on to their money a little more than before.

What this means to you, as a business owner, is that you have to do something a little more to get the customer to buy your product. Don’t rely on your old tactics for getting business. Is that ad you’ve been running in the local paper bringing in any new business? What about that yellow pages ad? How’s that working for you? Is it worth the cost of the ad itself? Have you tried anything new lately to boost your sales?

A recent article in the OmniAutomotiveAdvertising blog seems to drive home the point that you need to spend money to make money. Car dealers have taken a big hit over the past few years. Car sales are down for most major automakers. But do they stop advertising? No, they do not. Why? Because the more they push their images the more people are aware of their products.

Do they rely solely on one type of advertising. Heck no! Television, radio, newspaper ads, direct mail, internet banner ads, and websites are all used in a concerted tactic to get customers to buy their product.

I know. I can hear you saying, “Oh, but I’m just a small business. I can’t do all of that”. WRONG! There are steps every business, small and large, can do to increase sales. That newspaper ad not working. Try getting a better ad designed. Yellow pages not pulling them in? Maybe you should try online marketing. Radio or TV out of your budget range. How about opening a YouTube account or posting a pod cast.

Don’t have a website? Why not. Websites are not that expensive and if they are designed well and optimized for the search engines correctly they may be your best option. Let’s face it. Newspaper subscriptions are down. Fewer people are listening to mainstream radio anymore. More and more people are relying on the internet to get their information. I can’t remember the last time I looked in the yellow pages, opened the newspaper classified ads or even listened to a radio ad. And I am not a minority. If I need to find something I get on my computer and search for it.

Wake up people! If your business isn’t performing the way you want it to, do something about it. We can help you get that new improved newspaper ad. We can design a website for you. Contact me now and get more customers for your business!

I am very happy to announce the official formation of Dang! Good Graphics LLC. After a long period of procrastinating, researching how to incorporate, more procrastinating… I finally decided the time had come.

When I began researching how to incorporate I was a little intimidated by the sheer number of resources I found on the internet, most of which were difficult to interpret. I had all sorts of questions like, “Do I really need to incorporate?”, “What is the best way to incorporate?”, and “What type of corporation is best suited for my business?”  I Googled “North Carolina Incorporation” and quickly found tons of information from the state government. Did that help? A little. But I still had tons of questions. And how much was all of this going to cost.

Then a couple people told me to go to LegalZoom.com. I filled out a short form and in no time I had filled out all the paperwork I needed. And it cost me a heck of a lot less than if I had gone to an attorney. Even when I had more questions I just dialed up LegalZoom and they answered them for me. Of course, they can not answer legal questions, so I may wind up going to an attorney for the more difficult questions.

So Dang! Good Graphics is now open for business!

For those of you who have seen my portfolio you already know about my association with The Smart Alecks. This 22 minute animated cartoon was a collaborative effort led by my friend Tom Alexander. His idea for the story revolved around a rag tag group of misfits led by Jimmy Gibbs, a lovable, South Philly jazz musician and diehard baseball fan.

After almost six years of waiting it is now rumored that The Smart Alecks might be making a return. In fact, since the YouTube posting of a clip on January 31st, the clip has already been watched 63 times! Could the rumors be true?

When we began planning the project back in ‘01 we decided to use Flash as the animation tool. I was very comfortable with flash and felt that it would be the best choice for the job. This was long before other animation tools, such as Toon Boom came along. Never having done a character driven full length animation before proved to be a learning experience on my part. I pretty much had to learn how to do everything from speech patterns to walking cycles. It took over nine months to complete the animation, sitting at my computer after a full day of working at my “real job” and working late into the night.

Now, with the possibility of a new life for The Smart Alecks being bantered about, I find myself sitting by the phone, waiting for the call. Hello!! Tom!! I’m waiting!

One of the ways to increase your sites rankings is to, a) have a blog on your site and, b) get the blog listed in a blog directory like Technorati. If you are curious about how your site ranks with the billions of other websites on the WWW, check out WebsiteGrader. This site will perform an analysis of your site and offer suggestions how to improve your score. Topics include: On-Page SEO: meta tags, Headings, Images, Interior Page Analysis, and Readability Level; Off-Page SEO: Domain Info, Google PageRank, Google Indexed Pages, Last Google Crawl Date, Traffic Rank, and Inbound Links; Blog Analysis, Blog Ranking and more.

Technorati Profile

Should you design your site in Flash? This has been an area of controversy ever since the first flash based websites hit the internet back in the mid ’90s. When I first started using Flash 2 back in 1997 it was basically used as an animation tool. Sites like GaboCorp, (archived version here) and Eye4u, began using flash to build websites that used cool motion graphics to create seemingly seamless web experiences. While these sites were impressive they did have their detractors.

Almost from the moment flash sites started springing up there were people putting them down. Why? Well, they went against the convention at the time. People like Jakob Nielsen didn’t like flash because it “constitutes a usability disease”. To some extent that was true. Flash designers came up with new ways to present their vision. It didn’t always follow conventional thinking. Navigation was often difficult, to say the least, if it was there at all. As quickly as people had begun to praise flash the opposite happened. Long ’skip intros’ became a websites downfall.

You can still find websites with skip intros. The experimental sites are still there. A lot of ‘designers’ still use flash for their portfolio websites because of the ‘wow’ factor. But not all flash is bad. The current version of 2Advanced is a great example what fash can do today. Of course I still like version 2, and I am amazed at how far flash has advanced in the last ten years. And sites such as CityCenter.com have merged flash and video for a high gloss presentation.

Flash still has it’s place on the web but it still presents some obstacles. The main problem would be the inability of the search engines spiders to see inside of flash. If the spiders can’t see it they can’t index it which means the site won’t show up high on the search query. If you want visibility, your probably better off not using flash

If you really want to have some flash content, why not use it sparingly. A introductory animation on the home page can still make a great impact. Slide shows and product showcases can be presented using flash. Video presentation using flash can often be downloaded faster than QuickTime or WMV video. Just look at YouTube!

I am not against flash. Far from it. I am a flash fanatic. But flash is not always the best way to present your product on the web.