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IMPORTANT UPDATE ON 10/12/2010

I received a newsletter from the Lombard Chamber of Commerce for an Online Marketing presentation by a fellow member, Jerry Peterson. If you are in the area, I highly recommend attending! I am not associated with Jerry. However, small business is the backbone of the economy. As Chamber members, it is important to support each other and there is plenty of business to go around. For details and registration, please visit the Lombard Chamber website.

I have not posted to my blog in some time. I figured my next post should focus on the town of Villa Park that gave me and ONFX a great start as a web designer. The Villa Park Chamber of Commerce was my first client when I started ONFX. Alesia Bailey, the executive director of the Villa Park Chamber, posted several of the Chamber’s goals on the website at that time. One of the goals was to revamp the website. I am not sure how long the chamber had that goal or how long that was listed on the website. I do recall that I saw and waited a few months while I built my own website. I figured that I should at least show that I qualify. Before I go any further, I should digress for a moment and clarify that I did have experience with web development at the time. However, I did it for fun and I had over 10 years experience working with the top financial firms in the world. I worked in downtown Chicago installing trading systems in every major location and exchange. I traveled to New York and London and other financial districts. Every job that I took was a different level of responsibility and skill set. So, building websites for for fun and now making some money at the same time was actually – cool! Back to my story… I waited a few months and then submitted my application to the Villa Park Chamber of Commerce. Alesia was excited to have a web designer join the chamber. I could not believe that nobody else took interest in this opportunity.

Thanks Alesia, for giving me the opportunity to build a website for the Villa Park Chamber of Commerce!

ONFX recently completed a website for Farhan & Associates, a law firm based in Chicago. The client provided me with a few web sites that she liked. Each of those websites belonged to a big Chicago law firm. Each had a clean professional look and predominately used blue colors. So, just like all my projects, I provided a a sample website that looked just as good as those big Chicago Law Firm Sites. The sample had the colors that my client wanted. However, my websites likely cost a lot less than the websites that the those big law firms likely spent on their websites.

Everyone out there is obviously interested in statistics to see how many web site hits and web site visitors the site is getting. So, I thought it would be a good idea to point out a few basics, 10 to be exact, that every website should implement for better search engine ranking. I expect that some of you already know these basics. If so, great! You are already on a great start. If not, then I urge you to put these into place. Keep in mind that this list will not be enough to get you on Google's first page, but this is a great start. The goal for this list is primarily to open your eyes to the world of SEO or "Search Engine Optimization".

Well, maybe "sucks" is too strong a word, but I once bought a book titled "Web Pages that Suck". The title alone caught my attention, so I figured I would give it a try and see what everybody else thinks :)  Anyway, that same book focused on websites that the author felt were ugly or had room for improvement... lots of improvement. I agreed with the author's take on the subject. It can be difficult to explain or illustrate good design or looks, but it was very easy to point out bad choices and decisions on a web page. Some of my clients call me after they accept the fact that the free website that they setup could use some improvement. In most cases, the website that they setup is not too bad. There are definitely some rookie mistakes, but overall it gets the job done. Ok, now that I said something nice, here comes the negative stuff.

After careful consideration, ONFX chose GraphicMail for email marketing. So, what is so great about GraphicMail? Everyone wants to know the number of visitors to their website, right? Well, GraphicMail not only provides newsletter statistics, but also provides a free gadget that integrates with Google Analytics. This gadgets tells me when someone visits my website as a result of the newsletter! If you are unfamiliar with Google Analytics, then please visit my article titled "How to setup Google Analytics". Google Analytics will provides detailed statistics for your website, such as the number of visitors, the keywords they used to find your website, the website that they came from, and much more! BTW, Google Analytics provides very nice graphs. Did I mention this is completely FREE? So, as I was saying, I have selected GraphicMail for my email marketing campaigns. I can now easily create a mailing list so that I can provide some useful online tips and special promotions to my readers.

If you read my article, "10 SEO Tips to Increase Web Site Hits", then you already know you should setup statistics for your website. Google Analytics offers FREE statistics for your website. Regardless, if you or your webmaster perform SEO on your website, it helps to understand how your visitors arrived at your website. Whether you have 10 hits a month or 1,000,000 hits a day, it will help you see how you can improve your website and continue to increase web site hits.