It took a little longer than I thought. 3.5 hours for a simple website that is comprised of a home page and then a blog page with multiple blogs and SEO stuff. But once I got the system down it became a breeze! My next website I will probably be able to put up in less than an hour, including importing my blogs (simple cut and paste), and then putting custom SEO in.
I bought my custom URL, was able to set my SEO as I planned to do so, was able to put my blogs up in a simple fashion with the same SEO that I wanted, and put together the site the way I wanted to do so.
In fact, the site is now set up, with the photos I wanted, and even a simple 2 photo slide show (one blurry, I guess photography in 2005 does not hold up to the standards of 2016, but since it is of my kids viewers will probably assume the blurriness was on purpose to disguise them, and the current award winning photo of my hounds came our great. So it all works.
I have my own very expensively designed and implemented business site. It has over $20k worth of videos on it, depth of intellectual property through blogs that few law firms can put out, hundreds and hundreds of pages, and professionally managed by multiple prior vendors. History going back to last century. I am now down to using one marketer, and got rid of all the high price “talent”. She basically maintains the site and adds monthly marketing projects to it.
But you know what? It use to be that I dominated on the web. My competition could not keep up, and I had a family built website. That was cute, adorable, yet informative and kicked butt on the competition. Until 2009. Thereafter we switched, thinking we had to, to a more commercial vendor, and consultants. And all our competition did the same. Suddenly we were just another fish in the big lake of this very large metro area.
My goal is to cut through it all. With everyone saying the same thing, and spending tons of money to do so, I want to say something different, poignant, to the point, in a very simple and inexpensive manner and once again, as it use to be, cut through the chafe with quality and personality! If Google sincerely wants to provide the best search results (and I have studied it) I do believe this new strategy will work. Both as to how I technically am putting together the sites, and as to the quality of content on it. Hopefully the novel content, that you won’t find on other lawyer sites, will also attract instead of repel.
The one thing I would like to be able to do is to save this site as a template site that I can use for other domains as well. I plan on putting up at least a dozen such sites. All with the same strategy (no tricks, just the absence of employing tricks) and it will be nice if I can do so without having to reload the few photos I used, and the few setting I used (such as changing “catalogue” to “Blogs” as I have no physical product).
It is an inexpensive experiment. The same blogs are going on my main website. So there will be no waste of intellectual property. We shall see.
One detraction that I found (and I am sure it is just because I don’t know how to do it in the Shopify sea) is that when I put a link to my main website, it did not convert to a URL link and instead simply stayed as text.
I also do not have an email me button, or a text me button. I think those require more sophisticated plug ins. I don’t have time to learn how to install and utilize those at this time. So simplicity will continue to rule. The site looks great, it has my content, my SEO, and I believe that persons interested in it, because it looks good and has quality content you won’t so specifically find anywhere else, will take the time to manually call, text, or email me.
We shall see. I shall get to publishing it tomorrow. Work on adding a few more blogs, and then get going on my next site.
For those wanting to put up their own site, prepare ahead of time the digital photos or videos you want up, along with blog content. You can probably wing the rest. Also, it does help to study the basics of SEO as you can customize the SEO at multiple points on the site.
My blogs were prepped to go, and fortunately I had years of photos to choose from, and there were a lot of public domain photos I could also use that were just fine. I am not Nike, my images do not need to be perfect, just endearing and create the image of trustworthiness and passion.
That covers my experience tonight. Pretty much missed the entire football game, but well worthwhile.
Btw/ when I got started, I thought I might not be able to pull it off. It is not completely intuitive (at least for me) but through trial and error it started to make sense, and then become simple.
My first website!
Tinker