How I Gave My Freelance Site a Tune-up
You’ve heard the saying about the cobbler having holes in his shoes, right? Business people are often the last to take their own advice. And I’m as guilty as they come.
Seven years ago, I dumped my dorky old Web site and created a new site from scratch. Since I like to do things the hard way sometimes, I did it all myself. I wanted to learn HTML and other Web stuff because I knew this would become more and more important in my line of work.
So I bought a book on HTML, sketched ideas for my site, created graphics, took photos and did a little Photoshop magic, and I cranked out a new site. It was light-years ahead of my previous site and began generating business right away. I found that it did its job so well, I no longer had to send out samples or answer a lot of questions when potential clients called me. They were pre-sold and ready to do business.
The site was successful. Too successful. Because I became complacent and ignored the site for years afterward. The result? My site took a nosedive in Google search rankings and traffic stagnated. It kept on working, for sure. I had links coming in from all over the place for several of my articles and pages, especially for an article on weird postal experiments which I reprinted with permission from another writer. So despite my lack of attention, people managed to find my site and call me with business.
But by ignoring my own site, I threw away loads of potential profits. Recently, I wised up and decided to take a hard look at my site and see what could be improved. Here are the results of my efforts.
Part 5: Tuning Up an Old Site to Make it a Better Business Generator
First, let’s take a look at my freelance Web site before my tune up. The easiest way to do that is to use the Wayback Machine.
If you clicked on the preceding link, you should have a new window open showing my Direct Creative site before the tune-up. Okay, now let’s look at my site after the tune up. If you clicked on that last link, you should have yet another new window showing my updated site. Doesn’t look much different does it?
This entire series has been about the business generating factors of a Web site, not pure design. So I wasn’t shooting for a new look. In fact, I continue to be pleased with the overall look of my site and always get positive comments about it, so I saw no reason to reinvent the site. I wanted to simply improve the site to make it get higher search rankings, make it easier to read, allow for easier editing and expansion, and add features that would increase its value as a business generator.
The first job was to recode the entire site. The old site was pure HTML. This means if I wanted to change the type style or the color of a headline, for example, I would have to make the change on every page individually. So I decided to use XHTML and CSS to make the code leaner and allow for faster editing when I need to change something. This also has the benefit of making pages faster loading and easier for search engines to crawl and index.
The second job was to learn a little about SEO, or search engine optimization, to “optimize” the site and make it friendly for both readers and search engine robots. I won’t go into all the fine details here, but this involved using proper file names and title tags as well as paying attention to key words and other best practices.
Third, and this is something you can see on the page, by using CSS to control the “look” of the pages, I was able to easily change the font and control the line height. Look at the before and after of my home page to see the difference. By applying a little best practice from typography, I was able to make the content easier on the eye.
Just doing these three things improved my site tremendously. The site would be more reader friendly as well as more search engine friendly. It would also be more webmaster friendly, making it easier for me to make changes, so there’s no excuse not to keep up with the site in the future.
But I made many more changes as well to improve the business generating qualities of the site. I started a newsletter and put the subscription form in a prominent place. This will help me generate leads and stay in contact with clients. I made the right column wider so I could post links and announcements more easily. I also added a store so people could buy books and magazines. This won’t be a huge cash generator, but it will add to the value of the site and give people a reason to return.
In the Learning Center, I have begun to add a variety of content. The long-term goal here is to provide a virtual library of how-to information, again to give people a reason to return. The mantra of good site construction is “build it and they will come.” Which means, provide a lot of high-quality content and people will flock to your site.
The changes I’ve made are mostly under the hood and around the edges, but they’ve already made a big difference. I’ve moved up in Google rankings to one of the top spots. My newsletter is taking off rapidly with new subscribers signing up every day. And I’ve found that working on the site is no longer a pain; it’s far easier with the new code. And my overall site ranking has risen dramatically, though I still have a long way to go.
From a business standpoint, my make-over has been a huge success.
Want to see what my site looked like years ago? You can use the Wayback Machine to travel back in time and see virtually any site from 1996 forward. You can see my site back in 1999 and how primitive it looked at that time. If the Archive went back further, you could look at a site I had with Compuserve that wasn’t even officially on the “net.” Many sites back then were offline and you had to access them by logging into private databanks to see them.
I hope this series has been instructive. If there’s one thing I want you to remember, it’s that your site is a business tool. Its purpose is to expose you to potential clients, generate leads, and pre-sell your expertise so that you can land more work and make more money.
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