Archive for the ‘Services’ Category

I am proud to be one of the organizers of a local networking group here in Lawrenceville, GA. We have events a couple of times each month. This past event we were lucky to have George Robbins there from Your 1 Minute. He creates videos for business owners to help promote themselves and their company. Here is one he did as a gift for our networking group. Thanks again George, it looks fantastic!

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Here are some great blogs to start reading from some Purple Star Consulting clients. You can simply subscribe to their RSS feed for notifications, or just visit them every so often.

Star Team Atlanta – Rodney Camren

Rodney is a Realtor in Lawrenceville, Georgia and the Greater Atlanta area. He also does relocation and is an extremely active member of the community. Look for Rodney to do even greater things in 2010!

Best Fit Pet Sit – Valerie Pegg

Best Fit Pet Sit is a pet sitting service. Along with being a fantastic dog walker (and one Purple Star trusts with our own pets), Valerie has also done amazing things with her site. Giving her the tools for success, she understands the importance of keywords, titles and headers. Proof? Type Pet Sitter in Gwinnett into  Google, she comes up number 1!

Georgia Trolley Services – Jerry Moore

Jerry owns two trollies. A trolley is a unique form of transportation for your special event. While most trolleys are modern in terms of amenities, their style speaks of yesteryear. His posts are unique and entertaining! His service is a great alternative for wedding transportation.

Baby Steps Online – Laura and Melissa

This blog is mentioned in the article about WordPress in our December newsletter. Laura is web savvy and worked on their main website, but just needed a bit of help with the coding of WordPress to add in the blog. Baby Steps provides classes and information about child birth and all things baby!

Sparkle – Meg Earhart

This is a brand new blog and can’t wait to see her articles once she gets started! Meg owns Sparkle! in downtown Lawrenceville. Go ahead and subscribe so you can start reading when she is ready to blog!

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Not all web designers or web design firms are created equal. Do you know what to look for? Depending on the level or complexity of the site you are looking for, most designers can put together the visual side of your site. If you want an online contact form, that’s pretty simple standard stuff, want an image gallery to display your work, that shouldn’t be too difficult either. However, what else are they offering you? How are they going to help you and your website succeed long after the work is completed and the check has been written?

Here are some questions to ask (in no particular order). If you want to be sure you aren’t just paying for a standard site and are getting a site that works for you, use these questions through your selection process and pay attention to their answers:

1. How will you help me promote my site? – Promoting your site is really up to you with regard to advertising and marketing, but a good web designer may submit your url to some of the major search engines as standard course. Simply submitting your site to Google, MSN and Yahoo can help speed up the process of the web crawlers finding your nice new site! Even better if they create a sitemap.xml file for you too! These can also be submitted to the search engines. Direct from the sitemaps.org website “In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.”
2. Do you create a favicon.ico file for my site? – This file is used to create a little icon to appear next to your website url in the address bar. For example, look at the top of this page at my website address and you can see a little purple star next to it. This is my favorites icon. When someone adds this page to their favorites folder, it will also show up there. It is not a necessity but nice to have your site stand out above all of the rest of the sites they have saved and visited.
3. How will people find my site once it’s finished? - A web designer has different sections of code they can be using to help promote and index your site within the search engines. Search Engine Optimization or SEO as it is more commonly referred to is something that should be done by default. If you meet with a designer that says they don’t do this, or doesn’t know what it is, move on and find someone that does! There are META TAG sections in the code which allow you to place keywords and a description, that if carefully chosen can go along way to moving you up to page number one of search results! This is what we all want, knowing that a potential client will tend not trawl through to the 2nd, 3rd of 4th page of results. First page is key. Another item that can be used is the title of the page. For example, when visiting my home page, the title (which is at the immediate top of the browser window and exists on every page of every single website) is Web Design, Marketing, Advertising and SEO in Lawrenceville, Dacula, Snellville and Gwinnett County – Purple Star Consulting. When searching on Google, if someone types in some of these key words, the title of a page is also looked at.
4. How will I know who is visiting my site? - It’s no good having a site but not having any idea how many people are looking at it. Without some kind of statistic or traffic tracking code on your site, you won’t have any idea. A web designer should add this code when working on your site, then give you all the log in information necessary to monitor and review the information. Google Analytics is one of the easiest to read and understand. For my clients, I have a document I send them once all of the code is in place so they can log in on their own and know exactly how to use the portal. With a simple Dashboard and easy to understand traffic patterns, display of links that were clicked on and key words that were used to find you, this is one of the best ( and free) products out there.
5. What if I need something changed, can I do it myself? - This is a tricky one. The simple answer is yes, any one can change things on their own site, but only if you have a certain level of knowledge. One of the reasons you probably are looking for a web designer is because you either don’t have the time, don’t have the knowledge or want it done right and professionally the first time right? If it’s simply just word changes here and there, if you have a web hosting package that includes a WYSIWYG editor (What You See Is What You Get), then you should be able to log in, open the page and then just change the text and save. If not, you would need to have Dreamweaver, Front Page, or simply use NotePad to make changes. That can be tricky and if you are not careful and/or confident in what you are doing, you could end up causing problems with your live site. So, if you ask this question, just be careful about their answer. The answer is yes, but if they are guiding you responsibly they should also give you the BUT at the end. Sometimes it’s better to work with your web designer over time and work out some kind of rate for changes you need over a months time frame.
6. How will I know if my site is working for me? - Hopefully the biggest sign is that you are making more money, getting more calls and in turn getting more clients! If you work with a large firm, the personal touch might not be there once the work is complete and you no longer need them, and perhaps they no longer need you either! At Purple Star Consulting, we want all of our clients to succeed. As part of that, every month or so after having worked with them, I will do some tests. Go out to Google and play the role of someone browsing the internet doing some research. By thinking like the average person, I come up with keywords, type them in and see where my client site comes up. Depending on the business, (and how much competition is out there) the site should start showing up in the listings. I will then send the findings on to the client, even if we are not currently doing business, wanting them to continue on in their success.
7. What can I do to continue the success of my website? - Great question! The web designer you work with cannot be held 100% responsible for the continued success of your site. Each day, more and more domains are added to the web, more companies are formed and there are more people clambering to get that top spot in the search listings. Once the initial work is complete, truly the best way to continue the success of your site is to keep it fresh and new. Think of it as a plant. If it’s in full bloom and healthy and beautiful, if you stop watering it, it’s going to shrivel up and die. Constantly updating your site means that the web crawlers will stop by and reindex your site if there is more information to see! Having a blog is the best way to update content. A blog also is an ideal way for you to make changes yourself even with very limited knowledge, and no coding needed! Your web designer should be able to suggest the best type of blog to add and integrate into your site.

So, take these questions with you, ask me these questions, or feel happy in the knowledge that you know your web designer did all of this for you already! If so, congratulations on having a great website!

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Back in May I posted about RSS feeds and what they are used for. (RSS – what’s it all about?). If you paid attention and started to use this information, hopefully you have started to subscribe to some blogs you are interested in. I use Microsoft Outlook 2007 to read blog feeds. I wanted to share a few with you that I think are worth subscribing too.

Jeffrey Gitomer’s Sales Blog
Jeffrey Gitomer is the author of The New York Times best sellers The Sales Bible, The Little Red Book of Selling, The Little Black Book of Connections, and The Little Gold Book of YES! Attitude. I first heard of Jeffrey at a Networking meeting when a new contact mentioned his Little Red Book of Selling. It was then mentioned again by my brother who actually had the book. After borrowing it from him, I subscribed to the blog. Not updated that regularly but when it is, it’s an insightful read.

Hidden Business Treasures
I stumbled across this blog through Twitter. Not sure who followed who first, but @michaelbenidt jointly updates the Hidden Business Treasures blog with Sheryl Kay. The blog provides thoughtful and provoking articles about the internet, searching online, and honing your searching skills. Unearthing some interesting views and challenging what we might typically take on face value, their investigative skills are first rate. Michael also understands what it means to build a relationship with his readers.

Seth Godins Blog
Seth Godin is author of ten books that have been bestsellers around the world and changed the way people think about marketing, change and work. Author of Permission Marketing : Turning Strangers Into Friends And Friends Into Customers, his blog is updated almost daily with thought provoking ideals that any business owner, no matter how big or how small can relate to. This might be my favorite blog!

All Geekness Great and Small
This is the blog of my younger, smarter and geekier brother, Daniel Rumney. I am constantly amazed at what he can write, create, code and design. His blog is more on the technical side and always gives me a blog post to really think about.

Better Business Blogging
I just recently came across this site and I love it! Designed to help and assist those savvy enough to realize what a blog can do for a small business (and large corporation!), each post offers ideas, and insight into how you can improve your blogging, work to get your site moved higher up the search engines, and promote your work. Great blog.

WordPress Garage
Along the lines of the Better Business Blogging site, this site focuses on WordPress Blogs. WordPress is the platform the Purple Star Consulting site is built on. It’s a great blog to learn more about great plugins, latest trends and how to get the best out of your own blog. Each post gives some great links that will really help you improve your site and optimize it fully.

Best Fit Pet Sit
Valerie Pegg is our pet sitter. She is also a friend, a client and a great writer. Each of her posts isn’t just information, it’s personal, descriptive and well written. Only blogging a few months, she already has a lot of followers and people listening to her advice and knowledge. One to check out if you are a pet lover!

NEW Lawrenceville
Finally, this is a site designed and developed to promote and enrich the City of Lawrenceville in Georgia. Blog posts include promotions from stores in the area, charity functions, family related events and information about your local government.

I hope you liked my suggested reading. Remember, an RSS feed is the easiest way to keep track of the updated blogs. We hope you subscribe to ours to keep track of all that Purple Star Consulting has to offer!

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You could have the most beautiful website on the Internet, but it would all be in vain if no-one can find you. Are you aware and educated about how people are actually making their way to your pages? Having a statistic tracking code embedded into your website pages can help you in accessing valuable data about how your visitors are getting to you. A free, and very good tracking tool is Google Analytics.

As with everything Google, it’s very easy to set up and use. Once the code is in place, you can track the number of visitors to your site, the source of the traffic (a direct hit, a visit coming in from a site linking to yours, or through a search engine), and then the keywords used to find you. Keywords are those typed into the search box on a search engine.

sample of keywords used to find Purple Star Consulting

To the left is a list of some recent keywords used by searchers on Google. The end result was that it helped them find and make their way onto the Purple Star Consulting website.

Some of these keywords make perfect sense. “purplestar”, “purple star consulting”, “purple star solutions” are all derivatives of the company name, therefore these keywords can be found all over the site. Others such as “web design in lawrenceville”, “atlanta marketing” and “dacula web design” are all set up in the code of my site as meta tags.

Then there are the more obscure such as “gaia human capital consultants” and “customerservice@marriott.com”. These are most likely connected to the Google AdWords account I set up. Paying a small fee that I can set a monthly limit on, I can create an ad that will show up to the right of any search listing on Google based on keywords that someone might type out. Sometimes there is an exact match, other times it might be a little random depending on the search criteria chosen.

The searches about e-mail signatures are the most interesting to me. Compare a site identical to your own in size, content and subject matter, and your search rankings might be fairly similar. Compare it with a site that has a blog, or frequent updates, and their numbers will probably come out higher. The more you update, the more web crawlers will search through and index your site. Web crawlers are looking for new content and updated pages. The searches on e-mail signatures returned my site in the results based on a blog post I did a few weeks ago. When it was posted, I didn’t think the post would result in one of the most frequently searched on items for my site, but it worked in my favor!

So, if you don’t already, consider contacting your web designer and have them set you up with a Google Analytics account and adding the necessary code to your pages. Once this is done, you can easily review the statistics yourself without any technical ability needed. Also, think about adding a blog to your site, or at the very least, adding new content to your current pages on a regular basis. You may be surprised by the end result!

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