If you haven’t already, I recommend reading our previous post how to name a website which illustrates the process of how to choose a domain name for a local business website. If you haven’t registered your domain name yet you can do that at the World’s Largest Registrar – GoDaddy.com

It is also important to note that the actual terms you use for your directories, sub-directories, and pages will be the filenames used in your website URLs. These filenames need to correlate with the search terms you want your site to achieve high rankings for in search engines.

Outline Template for a Standard Website

• Domain Name (Homepage)
  • Directory 1
    • Sub-Directory A
      • Page 1
      • Page 2
    • Sub-Directory B
    • Sub-Directory C
  • Directory 2
    • Sub-Directory A
      • Page 1
      • Page 2
    • Sub-Directory B
    • Sub-Directory C
  • Directory 3

In the above example of how to link your website you will see the domain name or homepage is at the top, this is the main page of your website. Below your domain name you will have multiple directories that represent your product/service categories or regions served, then inside these directories are more specific sub-directories, finally within your sub-directories are pages; each representing specific product/service & city pairings. Here is an example of how a URL will display for Page 1 inside Sub-Directory A which is within Directory 2:

• http://www.domainname.com/directory-2/sub-directory-a/page-1 – The words in the URL are very important to the way search engines rank your web pages.

How to Link a Website by Creating a Outline for ColoradoInstruments.com

When people are looking online to purchase a product or service locally they will enter “product in city” or “city service” into their favorite search engine to find it. As an example for this blog post we will look at how to link a website for a fictional local music store in northern Colorado serving the cities of Denver, Fort Collins, and Loveland. John Doe, the music store owner offers music lessons plus sells guitars, drums, and keyboards. John would like to rank high for organic searches such as “denver guitar lessons” or “colorado acoustic guitar” or “fort collins piano”, etc..

Lets pretend that John’s music store is a new business and needs to come up with a business name and domain name at the same time. Based on the principles described in our previous post how to name a website John has decided on coloradoinstruments.com (at the time of this post this domain name is available, btw). Also available is northerncoloradoinstruments.com, but John felt that name limits his territory, plus coloradoinstruments.com is shorter. A quick check in Google AdWords keyword tool shows that the term “Colorado Instruments” is searched 3,600/month. This gives him a head start over choosing a domain name like johndoemusic.com when it comes to organic search traffic for musical instruments in Colorado. Now it is time to create a website outline for the music store.

Outline Template for ColoradoInstruments.com

For this example of how to link a website it makes most sense for the categories to be city names, sub-categories to be instruments groups, and pages to be individual instrument types. We also added some standard web pages to the top level as you can see at the bottom of the outline.

• Colorado Instruments
  • Denver
    • Guitar
      • Electric
      • Acoustic
      • Bass
      • Lessons
    • Drum
      • Traditional
      • Digital
      • Lessons
    • Keyboard
      • Piano
      • Electronic
      • Lessons
  • Fort Collins
    • Guitar
      • Electric
      • Acoustic
      • Bass
      • Lessons
    • Drum
      • Traditional
      • Digital
      • Lessons
    • Keyboard
      • Piano
      • Electronic
      • Lessons
  • Loveland
    • Guitar
      • Electric
      • Acoustic
      • Bass
      • Lessons
    • Drum
      • Traditional
      • Digital
      • Lessons
    • Keyboard
      • Piano
      • Electronic
      • Lessons
• Mission Statement
• Testimonials
• Contact Information
• Directions

As far as SEO for local business websites is concerned the importance of using city, product, or service names for your directories can’t be overstated. By organizing the directories and pages in this way we have inherently helped the organic SEO for John Doe’s music store. Let’s take a look at how the URL’s for some of the pages on coloradoinstruments.com will read and how they relate to local searches:

• http://www.coloradoinstruments.com/denver/guitar/lessons – The term “denver guitar lessons” is searched approximately 1,000 times a month. By linking a website in this way John has “denver guitar lessons” in the URL for the page of his website that is specifically about Denver guitar lessons. This is exactly what search engines look for.
• http://www.coloradoinstruments.com/fort-collins/keyboard/electronic – If someone is searching for an “electronic keyboard in Fort Collins” search engines will direct them to this page.

Create your website outline by substituting your product/service and city name categories with the ones in the above template. Of course you can add extra categories, sub-categories, and pages if needed. The next step in the process of how to do a website is to learn how to link web pages.

This article includes three strategies you can use when choosing your domain name, plus lists three pros and cons of each strategy to consider before making your final choice…

STRATEGY 1 – Use Your Business Name: If you are a new business choosing a domain name may be easier to accomplish because you can choose your business name and domain name at the same time. If you are an existing business this may be more difficult to achieve because there are times when your specific business name is not available as a domain name.

Pros

• Easy for your customers to remember
• Keeps your online branding consistent with your physical store
• If a potential client sees an advertisement with your business name they can easily Google your name and be directed to your website

Cons

• Your business name may not be available as a domain name
• Your business name may not contain important search terms relating to your trade or products
• Your business name may be long

STRATEGY 2 – Use Your Name: Using your name for your business name is definitely a personal choice that makes more sense for some businesses over others. For example, being a sole proprietor I use my name for my website URL. Even though I am still in the same industry, over the last 10 years or so the services I offer have evolved and my customer base has changed with it. But because my website URL is not tied to any specific product or service it will always be relevant to my business.

Pros

• Easy for customers to remember
• Personalizes your business
• Very flexible as your business evolves over time

Cons

• You may want to keep your name and your business name separate
• If you decide to sell your business using your name may make it more difficult
• Not search engine friendly

STRATEGY 3 – Use Your Service/Product and Region You Serve: When people use a search engine to find products/services locally they will generally type in the product/service plus the nearest city they feel they can get the product/service at. This is the number one way people look for local businesses like photographers, florists, stylists, salons, etc.. By having a domain such as citynameproduct.com you have helped your position in search results improve greatly because the domain name is the most important factor for a site’s ranking in search engine results. It can be difficult to get the most searched terms as domains though because many people already know of this strategy. Plus if your domain name is losangelesflowers.com and you also have a store in San Francisco you can see how that doesn’t help local traffic in your San Francisco location.

Pros

• Search engine friendly
• Obvious what you do
• Obvious where you are

Cons

• Not a unique name
• You may offer multiple services or products
• You may service more than one area

Additional guidelines to consider when choosing how to name a website for your local business:

• Keep the name as short as possible: A short domain name is not always an option because 99.9% of single word domains are already taken so we are forced to choose longer names. But as a general rule, the shorter the better because it is easier to remember.
• Choose a.com:.com names are the most widely recognized names on the internet. If you are forced to choose a.net or.biz most likely the.com version of your name is already taken. Your customers WILL type in the.com version of your domain name when they are looking for your website. This will confuse your customers, or even worse, send them to your direct competitor’s website.
• Be hesitant about using hyphens (-) in your domain name: Names with a hyphen in them carry less weight than a name without. For example: losangeles-flowers.com is viewed as a less important name than losangelesflowers.com as far as search engines are concerned. Plus verbally telling someone your domain name when you have to say “los angeles (hyphen) flowers (dot) com” can be confusing.

As you can see, choosing how to name a website for your local business requires a lot of planning and thought. I highly recommend considering each of these three strategies when choosing your domain name. Researching available domain names using each of these three strategies will ensure that the choice you make will be relevant for your business now and in the future. An excellent resource for researching and purchasing domain names is the World’s Largest Registrar – GoDaddy.com

Brochure for Colorado Luxury Homebuilder Brannen Design and Construction

This is an example of a simple brochure postcard for Colorado Luxury Homebuilder Brannen Design and Construction. Because they only wanted to purchase a small quantity of brochures at a time we chose to go with HP Indigo press printing which is a digital printing solution with unmatched offset quality.

The reason I choose to go with HP Indigo is because the quality is excellent (better than any other digital printing technology imo), customers are able to choose from the same papers as traditional press printing (most digital printers have a very limited selection). Finally the price is very competitive and the turnaround times are about 1/2 that of traditional offset printing.

Rentfrow Design wins Residential Design + Build 2011 Design Excellence Awards. Cover photo by Warren Diggles.

We have been working with Jon Rentfrow for years photographing his Colorado Luxury Home designs. His home designs have won numerous residential awards and this month The Avalon is featured on the cover of Cygnus Publishing’s Residential Design + Build magazine. The Avalon was awarded Cygnus Publishing’s 2011 Design Excellence Award for the Spec/Model category. This speculation home was designed at the request of the developer for a high end development in west Loveland nestled in a valley bordering Devil’s Backbone park. You can see the article on page 42 of the magazine.

The Alpine Visitor Center is located at the intersection of Trail Ridge Road and Fall River Road at an elevation of 11,796 feet.

As a photographer in Colorado I really enjoy getting a chance to photograph well known Colorado places. Alpine Visitor Center at the top of Trail Ridge Road is definitely a landmark of Rocky Mountain National Park. Steve Lane, a local Colorado architect hired me to photograph this newly finished interior remodel. Steve is the founder and principal architect of Basis Architecture, Colorado Architecture Firm located in Estes Park.

One of the difficulties for this project was that we only had a short amount of time to set-up before the center opened for the day. As soon as the doors opened the visitors flood in, so there were a lot of tourists in the visitor center during the shoot. I really don’t mind this because I actually like having people in the pictures when photographing buildings. People could definitely see us working and the people that didn’t mind being in the pictures milled around the areas I was photographing. The staff of the visitor center were also explaining to the crowd that we were there to take pictures of the facility. This allowed them to avoid being in the pictures if they were sensitive to that.

Being a large area most of the shots needed two separate strobe packs with 3 or 4 lights on each for proper illumination. For the most part the strobes were used with no light modifiers and the light was feathered away from the direction we were shooting. This helps get a more even illumination and a softer quality to the light. Because of the people timing was a bit tricky to keep the architectural details the primary focus. That is where using a digital camera is ideal because we can take a lot of images and adjust to the shoot as we go making sure we get just the right amount of people in the pictures.

Generally when creating a Joomla business website I have started with the templates that come with a standard Joomla installation. Recently Michaela Johnson, owner of NCNC, Neurotherapy Center of Northern Colorado hired me to help her develop a website for her business.

Joomlashack Reserva Template

Michaele had already worked with a couple other local designers who were unable to create a website she was happy with. While working with these designers she had purchased the Reserva template from Joomlashack so she wanted to use this as her starting point. This was actually the first experience I had working with a third party Joomla template.

Upon looking through the source files and determining how to make changes to the template I found that this is a very basic template that doesn’t have a whole lot of bells and whistles. Actually this is a good thing in my opinion because it is not bloated with a bunch of things that will never get used, features that will slow the website down. The instructions that come with the template are very useful, informative, and easy to understand. Uploading the template files into the Joomla framework all went without a hitch. The Joomlashack website includes all the information needed to help develop professional websites from their templates. For less than $50 the Reserva website template from Joomlashack is an excellent value.

If you are interested in comparing the template to the final product so you can see the changes we made click these links:
NCNC Customized Website vs. Joomlashack Reserva Template

Website Highlights:

→ The gallery on the neurotherapycolorado.com home page is a customized version of Dione Sexy Slider, this is an excellent JQuery module by DioneSoft that allows you to add up to 10 images with text, includes 9 different transitions, and with css you can customize all aspects of the layout through the source files. Because this module is based on JQuery and not Flash it is search engine friendly. I highly recommend adding this type of functionality to any Joomla! website.

→ Another feature we added is custom css styles to the tinymce text editor in the administrator side of the website.

The main purpose of creating a Joomla CMS website for Miracles of Health is to give them the tools they need to add new content without having to call the web designer, me. Joomla comes with a WYSIWYG editor that is designed just for this. Sounds easy, but in practice it took some trial and error to get things to fit their needs and work smoothly for the customer.

The first thing we tried was pasting text from Microsoft Word, which led to all kinds of formatting issues. Then the customer tried starting from scratch inside the TinyMCE text box and formatting the text as they typed, this also led to a mess inside the ‘toggle editor’ html window. After cleaning up the first couple of weeks of trial and error I started to think that the only way the customer is going to have control over the appearance of the articles is to learn some basic html. For someone that designs websites that sounds easy but for someone that doesn’t it sounds like a monumental task, which defeats the purpose of having a WYSIWYG editor.

Ok, I guess we have to come up with a better solution.. then it hit me, we should be able to add styles to the TinyMCE drop down menu. This will lead to unlimited CSS possibilities, but the initial goal is for the blog / article posts to use the same color styles as the rest of the website without making a mess of things by pasting word text, using the color picker, or using h1 h2 etc text formats inside the TinyMCE editor. I want confident end users not ones that feel defeated because they have to call me frequently to clean up their coding mess.

By adding CSS styles to the Tinymce Style drop down menu the end user of the site can specify exact web text colors and styling. This will be crucial for the site owner to maintain branding consistency in their articles over time. Seems simple enough..

After my initial google search I found a number of blog / forum postings on the subject but no solutions to my complete issue. These are the steps I found:

• Create a new CSS file that includes your new styles for the TinyMCE editor to link to
• Put the new CSS file inside your /templates/custom/css/ folder
• The new file must be named editor.css (not sure this is critical, maybe on some servers)
• TinyMCE drop down menu only displays classes not id’s
• By adding a style to a text selection TinyMCE wraps it with a ‘span class’

Input your file path to this box then TinyMCE will use this file for the Text Editor window. This input box is found in the plugins parameters for TinyMCE Editor.

By following these instructions I was able to get the new CSS styles to work inside the text editor window but once the changes were saved the styles did not translate to the live website.. But if I clicked to edit the text again the styles still show up in the editor.. hmmm…

After some frustration, the solution turned out to be rather simple, not only do you have to add the css styles to your newly added TinyMCE ‘Custom CSS Classes’ but you also have to add these same styles to one of the other ‘live’ CSS style sheets your website page links to.

These are the colors that Miracles of Health uses, so in order to make them accessible to the TinyMCE editor we added them to both the TinyMCE Text Editor stylesheet and to a live stylesheet:

.recipe-author { color:#135cae; font-style:italic; }
.blue { color: #135cae; }
.orange { color: #f36c30; }
.fuscia { color: #b7238f; }
.green { color: #76c048; }
.red { color: #ed1c24; }
.lightblue { color: #e1eef6; }
.dimgray { color: #333333; }

In synopsis, the CSS file path entered in the TinyMCE ‘Custom CSS Classes’ input box only affects the Text Editor display. In order to transfer these changes to the live website the same css styles need to be added to one of your ‘live’ css stylesheets as well.

Check out their website World’s Best Colon Cleanse, they have been doing a wonderful job of adding recipes and blog posts, so proud of them!.

Colorado State University’s College of Business Dedicates Rockwell Hall-West, Holds Open House and Hosts Retired Gen. Colin Powell April 30. Colin Powell’s talk reaches out to the northern Colorado attendees with a message emphasizing leadership and local community… This image is available as a rights managed stock photo download through our online store.

» Download images – rights managed Pictures of Colin Powell.

Astragalus Root Slices, Cloves, Thyme, Garlic, Sage, Yellow Powder 599, Peppermint, Hibiscus, cinnamon sticks, Psyllium, Pumpkin Seeds, Cayanne Pepper, Alfalfa, Root, Ginger photographed in studio white background. This image is available as a royalty free stock photo download through Getty Images.

» Download images – rights managed and royalty free Pictures of Health.