A blog is a website where entries are made like a journal and displayed in a reverse order.

Blogs are a type of social media because they have a new generation of tools that are able to bring companies, clients, visitors and potential customers into a dynamic, ongoing conversation.

Blogs can provide information or news on a particular subject, such as food, politics, or local news. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. Most blogs are primarily textual although some focus on photographs (photoblog), videos (vlog), or audio (podcasting), and are part of a wider network of social media.

The website you are currently looking at is a blog.

The reason I decided to go with a blog for this website;

1. Blogs are easy to update, the information on this site changes daily and the blog makes it easy for me to do that.

2. Blogs use a pinging feature that allows me to ping other sites and search engines each time the blog is updated.

3. Blogs allow visitors to become part of the website by giving them the opportunity to post and make comments on topic that the site owner starts.

If you take a minute and look in the top right hand corner of the header on this blog your notice some links that allow you to change the size of text and also move the navigation to were it feels most comfortable to you.

This post is to answer two questions that I get asked often on forums.

Do I sleep?
Do I have a life?

I wake up everyday around 5:30, take a shower and go to my little office at the house. I have an office in town but I’m rarely seen around there these days. My husband is the one that deals with the employees and sets up the jobs, I have people at the house that cook, clean and take care of my daughter.

On a normal day I start off by checking my emails, then I move into the forums and after that I start writing in my blogs. I have 7 blogs I try to post in at lest once a day and the same number of forums I try and post in everyday.

I spend an hour in the morning with my daughter before she goes to school and try to spend an hour with her in the afternoon when she gets out of school. When my husband gets home from our web design office in town my daughter, husband and myself will all go to the mall eat an ice cream talk a little and come back home. I normally go to bed around 11:00 and hardly ever watch any TV.

Roughly I spend around 12 hours a day online either reading, writing, posting in forums or posting in my blogs. A lot of people ask me do I sleep and the answer is yes, I try and sleep 6 hours every night. A lot of people say that I’m a workaholic and this is not true, I love what I do and do not consider it working. I spend my days playing online and at the end of the day I hope I’ve made enough money to pay the bills and take my daughter to the movies.

I enjoy learning and testing different methods of designing and marketing but do not consider what I do working. Some people enjoy watching TV and playing video games, I enjoy reading and learning. People want to say that I don’t have a life because I spend so much time online, this is untrue, because I spend so much time online it allows me to have the money needed to take my daughter to the movies, go out to eat with my husband, hire people to work for me, go out shopping with family and friends and take vacations when I want to.
It’s true, I spend a lot of time online but this allows me to have a life.

My blogs have not been getting the amount of traffic from the search engines that I would like so I decided to make a couple changes.

I started out doing searches online and found a lot of information but very little information that told me where to go and what to do. Because of this I decided to start a list of some of the things I’ve done and how I went about doing them. The blog I’m using is WordPress.

If you log into WordPress and click on options, then click on Permalinks you will be taken to a page that allows you to change the way your url’s are shown. It’s best to do this in the beginning stages of starting your blog because once you change the way your url’s are shown, you will loose all incoming links going to your current pages.

You have three chooses, the first is the default setting, the second shows the date and title name and the third is a custom setting. I used the third and placed /%postname%/, this shows the title of my post in all the url’s and nothing else. I’m not sure if this was the best way, if I duplicate a post title I’m not sure what will happen. The second option might have been the better option but I did not want the dates in my url.

Next problem I saw was with the title of my pages, I downloaded the blog and went to the wp-content folder, then to the themes folder and then picked the template I was using. From here I went to the header.php page and changed the title to only show the title of my post but later found a post by bj that had this code

So I changed it to this.

After this I downloaded a plugin called SH-Autolink, I’m still playing with this but it looks like a pretty neat tool. Lets say I want certain keywords to link to information about those keywords. I can tell the blog that every time it sees the keyword PageRank it needs to link to an article that explains PageRank.

I cheated a little and made it link to my website design site every time it sees the words website design but that does seem to be the most important site for someone looking for a website design company to me. (-:

I’m still playing but these are the changes I’ve made so far and I thought someone might be able to use this, so I posted it here.

Most business owners desire is to have the best looking custom designed website available, out doing the competitions and making customers smile when they see the site. Customers see websites as an extension of the company they are doing business with. Your website is seen by your customers the same way the customers would see you store in the real world.

What Makes A Good Custom Website Design?

We need to understand a couple things about what customers are looking for when they get to our website.

1. Information

2. To purchase a product

3. Entertainment

They are not there to look at how well we designed our custom website or to see what type of neat little tricks we’re able to do with flash or anything else. They have a need and want to know if our website is able to fill that need. A good custom designed website is designed with the customer in mind.

A custom designed website should have a header that is set up to show the customer that they are in the right place. The header should have a logo, tag line and some pictures that show what the site is about. If your selling baby strollers then you should have pictures of baby strollers in the header.

The site should be easy to navigate, nothing special or unusual, if you feel the need to write text to explain how to navigate your site then chances are the navigation is no good.

The text should be written with the customer in mind, it should have personality and spark a desire in your customer to make them want to learn more about your business. The website should be set up as a whole to guide the customer in the direction you want them to go.

I’m hoping this page of my site will guide you to making a purchase from us, if you would like a price on a custom designed website contact us today.

I spent a little time doing some website reviews over at WPW today and was surprised at our slow it has gotten. I remember when Brittany was there and by the time you looked at the site and got your review done it was already on the second page. Now it seems to be a bunch of made for AdSense sites and web designers wanting to show off their work. You can do the review and it might take a week to get it off the front page.

I guess it’s for the best, I need to start spending some time on my own forum. I have a good many members and I tend to ignore them. Maybe I can spend some time on my own forum and do some jumping around a little from forum to forum.

I can make a list of all the forums for the different topics over at ranked1 and start reviewing the forums.

I think thats a good idea.

I’ll start on it now.