Here's my site Canadian Woodworks - custom wooden rocking chairs

I use a mac, the program is called Sandvox uses templates but I did modify it to be wider then the original template.
I update my blog every couple days, especially when building a piece for a customer. I use a nikon and an Iphone to take pics and video.
I also have a youtube channel where I upload my videos too.

All gallery pics were taken in my photo booth that just uses a white sheet and a bunch of florescent lights, with my camera WB set to florescent the pictures turn out nice.

I'm constantly doing my own SEO and it shows I target custom wooden rocking chairs, when searched in canada i'm 4th on google, I don't know what I am where you all are? Have a search let me know!

I use google anayltics and web master tools.

 

Paul, all I can say is Wow! I'm not sure what I like most, your site or your chairs. Okay, I can say… it's the chairs, and all your other stuff too. If I weren't so busy right now (Dave's pressuring me) I could easily spend an hour or more browsing all your beautiful furniture. As for the website, it totally compliments your craft. It's clean, easy to navigate, loads super fast.. I think yours may well be one of the best sites I've seen in a while, and I don't mean just woodworkers sites.

So I tried searching Google for custom rocking chairs-no quotes, just the three keywords. I'm in Chicago and your site showed up #30. But considering it's a Canadian website, I'd say that's pretty impressive. Then I tried custom rocking chairs canada. You're came up in the #1 position.

I think anybody using a Mac who wants to build a website would be doing them self a big favor by following your lead. Anyway, I guess I could say a little more that wow. Thanks for sharing.

Mac users, here's a link to Sandvox that Paul referred to - http://www.karelia.com/sandvox/

 

Mine uses Shopify. I probably need to upgrade soon because I need a calendar for classes.

http://www.pugetsoundwoodworking.com/

The dashboard is easy, but the blog platform isn't so hot. I went with Wordpress for that and just linked it, but let it lapse recently and need to re-start it.

 

Hi Derrick, your site looks nice and it's easy to find my way around. I was looking at Shopify earlier today and they look pretty impressive on the surface. But then I saw the lowest price package is $29/month + 2% of sales, which seems kind of steep for a small shop, unless it's panning out of course.

 

Paul and Derrick, you guys both have clean and crisp sites. Good work. I did spend a few minutes on each site clicking around. I saw sycamore and pattern vices. Good stuff guys.

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Ted Waiting…......

 

 

I'm going to try and have a page up on one of our test sites tonight so you can see how we seo businesses to their local area. What you'll see on the test page is exactly what we do and we're having a lot of success with it especially with our small mom and pop store clients.

 

Try this site and see if it can help you get up a web site with no knowledge of web design. I understand when you pick out a template a video will pop up and explain how to edit a template to meet your needs.
I'm going to take a look at it later in the day. I've seen a few nice looking sites made from their templates.

http://www.wix.com/

 

OK, I'll be the ignoramus. What is SEO?

 

I would think that there are plenty of people here with the skills to get a website up. I don't see any reason that we couldn't get together to help out the less technically experienced and put together a website that we could all use. I could put some time in on it.

 

Rance,

Search engine optimization (SEO)

 

If you want a now free professional web site designer, Microsoft Sharepoint Designer 2007 you can download it here.
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=21581

It's the same as Microsoft Expression Web 1. We use the newest version Expression Web 4.
You can build web sites from scratch with the program or edit templates in it. We still use it for some sites that we maintain that need some of it's special features.

If you download it and have any questions getting started with it I'll try to answer your questions here or with a phone call in the US when time permits for me. You can probably find a lot of tutorials in Google.

 

A quick question about content now.

I've just sat down and started doing some of the images for my website. I'm tempted to post pictures of my two favourite jobs on the front page, but I don't want it to come across as only doing this type of (expensive) work.
Any thoughts?

http://lumberjocks.com/projects/55523

http://lumberjocks.com/projects/56330

Of course, I'd love to be just doing higher end work, but these jobs are really the exception rather than the rule, in this difficult economic climate.

 

You do beautiful work.
One of the big sellers for people visiting a woodworking site is to have a client gallery so people can see your completed work in the client's home.

It doesn't hurt to showcase some of your work on your front page and it helps to show several photos of product ranges that you do. It also helps to be able to click on a photo and it opens in a new page with a larger photo, the description and price if you want the price there.

Two things we don't do on our client's sites..clutter a page and have ads bouncing all over the place. Of the several 1000 clients my wife has in her business not one of them has clutter or ads anywhere on their sites. They load fast and easy to navigate throughout the site.

Have clean and fast navigation for every page and product you sale, not try to show everything on one or two pages. Let the front page be the one that captures the attention so they'll continue looking through your site.

 

I updated Wordpress and blew up my site. I am trying to recover now.

 

Dave, what the heck happened? Did you make a backup? Please tell me you did.

I see you got it working again.. I guess that's why they call you superdave!

 

Renners, I say put your best foot forward. If you look at other websites, especially successful ones, they don't put their mediocre stuff on the front page, they put their best and then make it look even better. That's what will get everybody's attention, including the high-end work, the low-end work, and everything in between. As they browse your site the in-betweens will be happy to see that your services are available to them too.

 

This is a very interesting blog. Lots of good input and smart folks posting here. Wish I had more time to read everything verbatim but we are slammed busy and time is limited.

Just wanted to answer original post. Our site is in signiture line and our SEO is www.footbridgemedia.com. I sure wish I could write html and be a master SEO fella, but I lack the time required. Leads provided by my web site, walk in traffic and referrals keep me running almost non stop.

I generate many leads from my web site. For example, we rank #1 for relevant search terms such as:

San Antonio custom cabinets
San Antonio kitchen cabinets

We rank #2, 3, 4, or 5 for many other relevant search terms such as:

Custom cabinets san Antonio
Kitchen cabinets san Antonio
Cabinet maker san Antonio
San Antonio cabinet maker
Cabinet builder san Antonio
San Antonio cabinet builder.

And many of those searches we rank #2 and #3.

Our site pays for itself and then some. I feel we may have grown much slower or not at all without the site leads we get. As an example, last week, I got a call from a lady who wanted crown molding hung throughout her small home. Because we talk about trim / molding options on our web site, we must rank good. She said she found me on a search through Yahoo. I sold her the job for 1,732.00. I bought the molding for 450.00 and since my thing is custom cabinets, and my already busy schedule, I called a trim carpetenter I know from past jobs, he charged me 1.00 per LF which was 437.00. We made little more then 800.00 for very little work. She was so happy, she told a friend. I sold the friend a comparable job this week and for very little effort we make around 1,500.00 this past two weeks. We tend to get a lot of this kind of thing. We sell everything from trim jobs, to small bathroom vanity job to large full kitchen jobs via our web site. By the way, we pay 150.00 per month which is a great deal considering our ROI on our web site.

I rank "how my web site works for me" higher then "what my web site looks like". My web site does look very good. It may appear cluttered to some based on some of the posts I read, but the undisputable fact is my web site makes us good money and pays for itself. My web site is probably my best employee. I just want to say "2 thumbs up" to Aaron with Footbridge as he has done a swell job for our small family owned cabinet shop.

One thing I am not sure about though. My internet provider gives me a IP address based out of Dallas area. So whenever I search for custom cabinets / builders without using San Antonio I tend to get Dallas based shops. Whenever I just google "Custom cabinets" I do rank very well on the first page even though cyber space thinks I am in Dallas.

I used to spend a lot of time doing my own page, but was never found in any organic searches and seemed to be wasting time behind a keyboard. Now, I don't have much time to spend at a keyboard since I am meeting with customers most of the time.

My biggest head ache these days seems to be managing labor and staying on schedule.

 

You can check mine out here. I made this with a WYSIWYG editor called Blue Voda. It's very easy to do and I actually believe I have a lot of what you're looking for on my site, and I made it with that program. The "catch" however is you have to use their servers to publish the website, but it's not very expensive and I found it to be the best deal anyways. I got a server with unlimited storage and a lot of extra perks for $100 a year.

 

Ted Wordpress had a small update. I went to my dashboard and told it to install. The update broke my dashboard. I since learned that Godaddy doesn't support you until they approve the update. So I started replacing files from my backup a few days ago.
My problem is I don't understand what files call what files. I didn't want to loose the data and comments between the crash and backup. So I got lucky. Six hours later.
For major updates using word press I suggest you turn off your plugins a have a solid backup, update and pray.
Its a large learning curve for me.
I need to learn basic web page file structure.

 

Dave, I'm not sure if GoDaddy has cPanel or if they use some other control panel, but what I do is at cPanel I first go to the file manager, select all the files, and click on the Compress icon. That makes a zip file containing all the files in their original structure. Then I to back to the front end of cPanel and make a backup of my database, which I download. Then I know whatever happens, if things go bad I just delete all the files and delete all the data in my database. Not the database itself, just the data inside it. Then I go to backup manager again and upload the data backup I made earlier (.sql file) and go back into file manager and extract the compressed file I made earlier (.zip file), and I'm back to where I started. I don't know if this is the correct procedure, but I've recovered some pretty complex websites this way. Not live sites - don't have any of those yet. But test sites just to see if I could do it.

 

I made my site on WEEBLY.com. it is completely free and the only cost was when I registered my domain name. Got a deal on that and paid only $12.00 for the domain name and registration for a year.. my site is strictly a show you what I can do or have done site.. there is no means of payment, there is a contact page and a gallery and a about and a why and a who page.. this is all I have done so far and seems to be okay to this point..
you can check it out at papaswoodworking.com
like I said this is real basic, but for my needs now it serves the purpose and was easy to set up..only took a couple days of adding this and that to get it working.. check out weebly if you want to try a free one first and then if you need or want to, you can look into a more expensive and more advanced web hosting./ have fun.. keep your tools sharp and play safe.. Papa

 

Ted I will have to look for the GUI at Godaddy.

 

Ted and Dave, I use bluehost for my wife's site using Wordpress and it uses cPanel (and makes a lot of the operations of managing a site pretty easy).

Paul Lemiski, good looking site (simple and clean) and awesome looking projects.

 

Thanks Doss