Hey Lady Your Web Site's a Dinosaur

(In case you are wondering - I'm the dinosaur playing dead).

I am in love with a man named Jason Rosenberg. Not the kind of love that they write novels about but the love you feel when someone who is really smart and good at what he does helps you figure out what you need to do in business.

In this case, it's how to make my web site look like it's a 2010 instead of a 2008 creation. The online world has gone from the equivalent of the stone age to the iron age in 2.5 years. And my web site, which was designed then, is a pathetic example of what others should be doing.

Translation: If you do what I do and tell others how to market and communicate and your web site doesn't reflect all of your knowledge - why should they hire you?

To be clear, I know my site is way behind the times. A colleague put up an RSS feed to one of my blogs and links to Twitter and LinkedIn for me. He's not a designer and it doesn't look very good. But at least now it says I'm active in the social media world. SEO - Well that's another story.

Jason, who has a company called Neurofury, and helps people figure out what they need to do, offered me an hour's worth of advice from the goodness of his heart. That's why it is love. Between Jason and the designer who works with him, I am spending 1/6 of what a web site developer I work with told me she would charge to design and put up a site. And it's definitely not a case of you get what you pay for. The sites the developer designs may be SEO friendly, but they all look exactly the same.

Here's some of what Jason told me to do:

Use Word Press - It's a free web-based software that will support my site, blogs, Twitter Feed, etc. Even the Web Site for Dummies people can figure out how to use it. Which is the speed at which my brain works when it comes to technology.

SEO - I cannot compete with the big guys. Had already figured out that Google Ad Words is meaningless with the site I have now - my traffic doubled but off of a very small base. He is going to help with organic searching, which means that people who search and are looking for firms like mine, will have better chance of finding us. That's fine for now.

Copyright Old - When you go to my site it says Copyright 2008. Why don't I just up a banner headline that says she has not fixed this site in a long time? Instead, we'll just take it down for now.

Dynamic Site Map - Every site that wants to be found should have a map. Not that hard to do either.

Put up Your Press Releases - Many of them have big company names in them that will search well. It's great to have new content frequently. And I can use their brands to get more traffic to my site.

One Way Links are Fine - Everyone tells you the best links are when other sites link to yours. But you linking to other sites is good too. And that I can do easily.

Thank you Jason. There's more and we're getting started next month. Stay tuned for the new site announcement and what I learned redoing it.