Site copy can be a neglected aspect of the process. Sometimes, potential clients tell us that they do not want too much text on their site because they ‘hear that it’s bad for Google’ or simply because they don’t want ‘too much scrolling.’ Some clients want ‘lots of keyword meta-tags,’ or insist on only having pictures on their home page.

We also notice a phenomena, especially for a regional business, where the owner’s conception of  how their business should be presented on the web is only from the viewpoint of how they,  family, friends and associates will view it. A sort of “You already know me, come on by, so I can tell you more in person” view.

That’s a tough one when your business is in Massachusetts and a potential target contact is in Hawai’i!

This mindset can lead to a site that lacks focus, confuses the visitor and fails to answer the essential “who, what, why, and where” questions that the vast majority of visitors demand when they encounter an interior page of your site through a search.

On our business website projects we encourage clients to organize, re-purpose or produce as much text content about their business as possible .

We have in-house expert web copy writing services available for clients who might want their existing copy edited or if they prefer, we can provide all the copy for their site, researched and produced ‘from scratch.’

At my high school, Cambridge High & Latin School in Cambridge Mass., the study hall was a re-purposed former auditorium, with a series of office cubicles at one end. This room had a high ceiling which magnified all the sounds from the ’studying’ students and the people in the cubicles. So, it was impossible to study. This more or less defined education for me.

Every day, getting up early,  to trudge off to school was a terrible inconvenience to me. I had a lot of things going on back at home, in my room. There were tape recorders to disassemble, comic books to write & draw, songs to record, and books to read. And of course, waiting for the Internet to happen.

I admit it. I did not understand the education system I found myself in. I appreciate that I was taught how to read. But, after that, I think that the system lost focus when it came to what exactly they were preparing us for.

The powers that be were already moving all manufacturing overseas and offshore. Wars were to be managed with pinpoint precision gadgets of mass destruction and a professional armed force.

I believe that, with the Internet, self-motivated individuals are in a better position to self-educate, and learn far more than I ever learned in school. We can learn not only information, but global responses to that information, so that there’s a balanced presentation.

We’re not being presented with only media or political propoganda, but the underlying motives behind an event or item. There is an exciting new world of possibilities out there.

You can buy a plant that has been nurtured to a state of ideal development.

Here at Tom Stier Web Development & Graphic Design we like to present our clients with affordable options when they initially contact us.

We call the process “Organic Web Development.”

We have a page on this site where we detail the costs for some of the basic building blocks involved with the website creation process.

We handle all or some phases of each project. Sometimes our clients are Photoshop masters who present us with their layered files and say “Make this into a website!” Sometimes we create websites where all the content is created by us.

With our Organic Web Development method, you have the option of starting with a simple theme site that contains your valuable text content.

The same content can be presented with a more complex design theme “skin” at a later date as your business grows or your target audience changes.

The tech went through a checklist of items with the user, trying to solve the problem. After trying everything the tech could think of, there was still no joy – the machine would not ‘boot.’

So the tech advised the user to unplug the machine, pack it up, and send it back for service.

“Oh, was I supposed to plug it in?” responded the user.

At this point, the tech uttered his final words as an employee of this particular PC company: “Yes, but you might as well send it back, because you are too much of an idiot to have a computer.”

This is a funny story in tech support circles.

Although, perhaps the tech guy should have started at square one and asked if the machine was, in fact, plugged in.

We try to start at the best starting point for our clients.

Our small website development company always tries to remember how mysterious and foreboding all the coding and hosting jargon appeared even to us once upon a time.

Most users just want something that works!

We pride ourselves on communication with clients, breaking down complicated information into language they can understand.

So, the answer is no, you can’t be too much of an idiot to have a website. You can be brilliant!

All you have to do is call us today at 413-528-3195.

Times have changed, and since then millions more websites have been added to the world wide web.

One service that you may not be aware of but you receive automatically by being a client of Tom Stier Web Development is our website promotion services. All the sites we build are optimized from the start for search engine indexing.

Most users of Google Search enter keyphrases, since they know from experience that searches on single keywords can bring too many results that are not really relevant to what they are interested in.

So, if someone in Manhattan was looking to find a business or service in western Massachusetts, they would likely search on “(business or service) berkshires massachusetts” or perhaps would even narrow it down further “(business or service) great barrington massachusetts”

In a sense, this increased sophistication level of the average searcher can work for you. A more targeted search, with geographic area included, can return a much smaller set of results to choose from.

As time goes on, competition in certain keyphrases increases. Perhaps you find that your ranking in the organic search portion ( thats the part under Google’s Paid AdWords section) of the results has fallen below some newcomer.

Google uses a complex and ever-changing method to determine which web pages best match what it believes the searcher is looking for. They also factor in their own bottom line in services such as AdWords, which we’ll examine in a future post.

The best way for you to increase traffic to your site is to have text content directly on the site pages that contains the keyphrases your customers are searching on.

Knowing what are the best keyphrases (and realizing they change) requires knowledge of where to research and how to find out what can work best for you. It’s a time-consuming process, as is writing content that contains those key phrases, but that’s the way you’re going to get more traffic to your site.

Beyond this bedrock requirement, there are a number of techniques and strategies for increasing your business visibility on the web.