I have been having a lot of fun writing on Twitter.  Twitter posts are called tweets.  At first, I found the 140 character limit kind of strange - what do I write?  Why would I write it?  What happens if you write something but then you can’t fully explain what you were talking about?

Twitter is so easy to use.  You can add links to your blog posts, links to websites, talk about anything. You can publicly respond to other people.  It is about relationship building.

I am only following a few people, and I currently have about 50 followers.  Follow me here:   http://www.twitter.com/ladwebdesign

Since I have been updating my site on a fairly regular basis, my Alexa ranking has been continually improving.  You may view your Alexa rank, or the Alexa rank of any website, by visiting alexa.com and downloading the toolbar.

As of today, October 5, 2008, my Alexa rank is 987,581.  Not great, but not too bad.

There are a number of ways of improving your Alexa ranking, or any search engine ranking for that matter.  Google really loves blog posts.  Blog posts that provide good content are highly rewarded in the search engines.

The search engines are always looking to thwart the people who try to scam (or beat) the system to get their website ranked higher.  I was doing some research for this article and there were suggestions from people to post in forums and blogs using the alexa.com link.  There were also other suggestions such as asking all of your friends and relatives to visit your site using their browser with Alexa toolbar.

I have a better suggestion.  Have good solid relevant content on your website.  Be active in forums and blogs and attach your website to your posts.  Get your traffic up through a combination of Google Adwords, relevant advertising in your niche, and blog posting.

At the end of the day, is an Alexa ranking of 20 all that important, or is it qualified traffic that you are looking for?

I have been designing websites for more than 10 years, and I have used the services of many different hosting companies.  I have hosted with some of the biggest names in the business - 1and1.com, AIT, Jumpline, and even Cobalt Raqs a few years ago.

One of the first clients I worked with had a small site on a shared server.  It just so happened that it was on the same server as Ticketmaster, and some big-name group’s tickets went on sale and the resulting spike in traffic crashed the server.  I complained to the hosting company about being unable to access my client’s website, and the technician told me what had happened, and that they were moving Ticketmaster to their own server.

Since that time, technology has rapidly improved.  Now there is technology that can spread the load over a number of servers, if one server gets too much traffic.  There is linking of different servers if your website needs grow beyond the constraints of one server.

I have thought about getting my own T1 line and just setting up my own hosting company - but then I realize that I would need to monitor the server 24/7, 365 days a year.  No thanks.  Not only that, but I live on the Space Coast of Florida, and we have certainly been hit with our fair share of tropical storms and hurricanes which could knock out power for days.

Currently, my hosting partner is Midphase.  They are based out of Chicago, and they have recently been acquired by an English hosting company.  However, their base of operations will still remain in Chicago.  While Chicago might have lots of wind and cold - there are no hurricanes.  As long as they have top-notch technical staff that keep the servers running 24/7, I am happy.

I chose Midphase for several reasons:

They have free individual (not shared) SSL certificates.  An SSL certificate is what makes any communication between your browser and the server much more secure and provides the https designation instead of the standard http address in the address bar.  Most SSL certificates cost at least $100 per year.

Most hosting companies have bandwidth limitations - meaning that if your website suddenly gets thousands of hits per second then they are going to charge you a great deal more per month because they have to allocate more available connections to your server, or your part of the server.  Midphase allows for unmetered bandwidth for one low price - although, I would like to see what their true limitations are.  I think they are just banking on the fact that most websites get only a few hundred visitors a day, not a few hundred visitors in a minute.

I was looking into setting up an account with Hostgator recently.  I transferred a few websites over there for a test run of their servers.  After the sites were set up, I logged in to the control panel and I found out that I am almost at the limit for the amount of disk space I am allowed.  If I am at my limit of disk space, well then I can’t expand.  Midphase allows for unlimited disk space.  Now I just need to cancel my Hostgator account.

I have been banging out the Joomla sites.  Not familiar with Joomla?  It’s a content management system - much like WordPress.  It is much more involved than a blog, though.  A Joomla installation can certainly have a blog.  Or a forum.  Or a community membership.  

I have certainly been dealing with the Joomla learning curve.  It’s a steep one.  I have stumbled many times.  The newest version of Joomla came out earlier this year, and there are about 4 templates for the new version ( WordPress templates abound on the internet - both free and paid).  Not only that, the templates themselves are a little bloated - meaning that page load times are affected.  A page loading slowly is not what a client wants to see.

I learned some new tricks with G-zip compression, caching, and smaller image sizes - although I still believe the Joomla core can be cleaned up.  It takes a long time to upload via FTP.  

So I guess you are wondering what sites I have been working on - to end the suspense, here they are:

http://www.brevardarchers.com

http://www.smilemore.com

The clients love the ability to make changes easily to any text on the site, without having to know any coding.  It is easy to upload pictures or text.

Here’s to more Joomla installs.

There are many ways to get free traffic on the web.  FREE means no money out of your pocket.  This post will focus on the social bookmarking ways of getting traffic to your site:

Twitter.com:  Twitter is an easy of getting your feet wet in the social bookmarking arena.  Go to twitter.com, sign up.  Add your website in the “about me” section of your profile.  All you need to do is to is to write short notes about what you are up to.  If this is about your business, we really don’t need to know what you had for breakfast ;).

Squidoo.com:  It’s a funny name, but google really seems to love Squidoo.  You can set up your own page - something like “Bestrealestatebrevard” and upload pics, vids, links back to your home page, and advertising.  It is very easy to set everything up the way you want it to look, and it is also easy to update.  Squidoo has a great user forum with ideas on how to increase the views of your Squidoo lens.

Hubpages:  Hubpages works a lot like Squidoo - you get your own free webspace to establish a link back to your web site.

These social networking sites allow you to introduce yourself to new markets.  There is more to social networking than Facebook and MySpace.

I received a call the other day from someone who had gotten my name out of the Cocoa Beach Chamber of Commerce directory.  They explained that they were putting together a basketball poster, and were looking for advertisers who would be interested in being on the poster.  

It was fairly inexpensive - $250 and they were promising that I would not be competing with any other company with a business similar to mine.  

I declined the offer.  The money and the lack of competition were indeed compelling - yet I made an educated guess as to where those basketball posters would be displayed.  I believe that most of the posters would be hung in a teenager’s bedroom.  I am interested in business to business advertising, not the teenage market.  If I sold I-phones - sure, put me on the poster.  Since I sell web design and hosting services, I need to be where my customers are.  

Effective targetted traffic is an important part of your advertising budget.  In future posts I will discussing several ways of getting free, as well as paid advertising that will greatly enhance the quality of visitors to your website.

Sure, I have maintained blogs on other sites before — I just haven’t maintained a blog on my own site, and I thought it was time to do so.  

This blog will be about any and all things web design related.  Are you looking to understand how to get better SEO (search engine optimization) results for your website?  Are you looking for easy ways to update your pages?  I will be discussing all of that here.  

LAD Web Design is on the Space Coast of Florida, in lovely Brevard County.  It’s growing, it’s changing, it’s hot.