For both businesses and non-profits I build websites designed to be easy to use. For too long websites have unnecessarily depended on graphic designers and coders who have a level of expertise that is far more sophisticated than most clients need or can afford.
We no longer have to live in the era where posting content to a website depended on a classic webmaster bottleneck that required paying too much and waiting too long for the website to get updated.
Today we can use tools like Posterous, ScribeFireNext and WordPress mobile apps to make updating or posting to websites as easy as sending an email or text message. This in turn frees up funds for the webmaster to focus on optimizing the website for search engines, as well as improving overall functionality and efficiency / faster load times.
1) Lacey Ultimate Fitness Center has been a client since September of 2010. Traffic to this website has doubled every month in 2011 and though much works still needs to be done, this website has begun to fill an essential communication need that the client originally didn’t think was necessary.
Most websites in the fitness industry are static sites with very little interaction. This website however has numerous employees providing content. Also gym members comments on our Facebook page often end up as posts on our website. Lastly, my work for this gym includes a gym membership, which has turned me into someone who loves to work out and stay in shape.
~
2) Deschutes Estuary Restoration Team is a environmental group based in Olympia, WA. Our goal is to restore a man-made freshwater lake back in vital salmon habitat, which means restoring the food chain via a saltwater-based estuarine regime. During some heated times in this year’s Washington state legislative session the information on this website was accessed over 1000 times a day.
~
3) A website dedicated to robot technology, iasRobot over the course of 8 months earned 2 thousand unique visitors a day. The catch is that the website’s visitors are not real human beings, rather they’re robots. These robots are dedicated to posting comment spam. And a function in the comments allowed the robots to email each other everytime they posted a new comment. Once the website reached nearly 100,000 comments my Web host issued a warning that iasrobot.com was sending over 500 emails an hour. So as of the end of April 2011 the study has reached its conclusion.
This website has been a valuable way to better understand how comment spam effects search engine rank and how Google’s response via the Panda upgrade has limited all the spammers ability to increase their search engine rank. This research also helped me better understand vulnerabilities in spam filtering tools.
Screenshot of total comments before all comments were deleted
