-> 21st December 2009 to the 1st January 2010 – CLOSED

-> 2nd January 2010 to the 5th February 2010 – LIMITED AVAILABILITY (I will be away overseas during this time however will be contactable and available for small projects).

Cheers and Happy Holidays.

Moving forward I plan to track the success of establishing the basics as noted below and will post new blog entries reporting my findings.  Stay tuned!

Review site and amend where required

• Review the site and make SEO related changes where necessary. What this will include:
• Ensuring that each page has a Search engine friendly URL (E.g. http://www.headstartrecruitment.com.au/about-us instead of http://www.headstartrecruitment.com.au/?=109)
• Ensuring that each page has a Search engine friendly Page Title
• Ensuring that each page has a Search engine friendly Meta-description
• Ensuring that each page has a Search engine friendly Meta-keywords
• Ensuring that each page has a Search engine friendly Links / Anchor Text / Title tags / Image Tags (if any)
• Review of internal links
• Add links to footer to main pages of your site
• Suggest design / usability changes that I believe would be beneficial

Implement the following tools / features

This involved implementing the following SEO tools / features to the site, including:

• Install Google Analytics and verify
• Create a Sitemap for your website (with all your links – for both visitors to your site and also search engine crawlers)
• Create an XML sitemap for your website (this is a file that the search engine crawlers can read easily and understand the content of your site – no one actually sees this file)
• Install the All in One SEO plugin
• Install the Google Analytics plugin
• Install the internal links plugin (allows you to easily create links to other pages within your site)
• Install the Twitter Tools plugin

And finally

• Submit site to the major search engines
• List your Business with Google Maps
• 301 Redirect the non-www to the www version of your website

Creation of robots.txt file.

Opening Keynote – Matt Webb

In one word – “Inspirational”.  Matt’s opening keynote kicked off Web Directions South 09  conference with a bang; an inspirational presentation about all the things that I love about design, technology and the web – that we are simply at the beginning of this journey of ubiquitous computing and interaction with technology.  Drawing links with the forward thought-thinkers of half a century ago, Matt’s passion and enthusiasm for the direction the web has taken us shone through and kept the audience engaged.  A great start to WDS09.

Sideshow – Sitecore CMS

Wandering through the various Sponsors stalls in the sideshow area of the conference, I came across Sitecore and their Web CMS product. A good 10 minutes of discussion with Greg at the stall, I have to say I walked away at first glance, very impressed with the CMS products feature set.  Highlights included:

• WYSIWYG type functionality when creating web pages; renders in completely W3C compliant code
• Enterprise level CMS; multi-site deployment and management off the shelf
• All the usual SEO control features
• All the usual social tools (forums, blogs, RSS etc.)
• Built in comprehensive web analytics suite
• Real-time website personalisation (and this is really cool – the CMS can track the behaviour of each user, build a profile and then adjust the site’s behaviour to improve the user experience and ultimately conversion).

The State of the Web as a Platform – Panel

An interesting debate / discussion (details here) about where the web is at, in relation to serving as a platform for business now and into the future.  Lots of debate over web standards vs. innovation and ultimately whether one particular technology standard will shine through in years to come – or whether the web as a platform will morph into something other than we know now.  Interesting stuff (if not a little too much talk about the iPhone!).

Closing Keynote – Cameron Adams

I have to admit to looking forward to this keynote since I read that Cameron was presenting at WDS09.  After a preview of Google’s Wave a few weeks ago at a client’s office, I was eager to listen to what Google’s Wave interaction designer had to say about the product and the process involved.  Cameron as expected delivered a solid presentation; and I, as many in the audience I am sure, felt pull towards getting our hands dirty with Google’s new toy!  A great end to overall a good day at WDS09.

99 Designs

If you have not checked out 99Designs yet, then I encourage you to do so. The generic concept of crowd-sourcing at its best in my opinion, whereby you can submit a design competition (I.e. brief) and then review design entries from a wide variety of designers. Fees are very reasonable ($150 for my pet related startup’s logo) and the quality high.  Highly recommended.

Elance

After listening to Mixergy’s interview with Matt Mickiewicz of Sitepoint and him mentioning outsourcing site  Elance in reference to copy writing, I had to check it out.  The site is slick, easy to use and the providers are of a great quality – well in my experience anyway.  I hired two professional writers to write articles for my pet related startup – $10 an article including the research and focus on SEO.  Outstanding value.

oDesk

Outsourcing site oDesk, is the service I used to locate and hire the development company currently building my pet related startup, Where Pets Are Found.  With a little extra effort when defining your requirements and possibly micro managing the project more than you normally would, the cost savings of outsourcing your project to a development team in a location such as India where fees are much lower can be huge.  Try $10-$15 an hour for an experienced developer.  Worth the extra up front effort in my book.

iStockphoto

I have been a member of iStockphoto for many years now and have always found the quality and selection of stock images and illustrations second to none.  And at prices starting at $1, it is hard to use anyone else.

Campaign Monitor

In one word – awesome site and service!  Campaign Monitor is an email marketing solution specifically targeted at designers.  It manages all of your subscriptions, provides beautiful email templates to use (tested in all of the major email clients), detailed reporting and you only pay for what you send.  And an Australian company to boot!

So, looking back on this rather painful experience the important thing to note is:

Regardless of whether you have registered your business name with your local State office and/or you have purchased the associated domain names, if you do not trade mark your name ANYONE can simply register the trade mark and effectively take your name and force you to give up your valuable domain names.

For more details in relation to trade marks check out the below links:

IP Australia

Trade Mark Online Search – IP Australia

Your thoughts?