Blog Profile - New Business Website/Blog Gets it’s Start With iBusinessLogic

I received a call the other day from the son of a nearly lifelong (at least it seems like a long time) friend of mine.

My friends son, Keith Bloemendaal is the sales manager of a local fence building contractor company in Raleigh Durham, North Carolina.

Carolina Custom Fences builds high quality custom fences and they are proud of the fact that they have some of the best installers in the area.

Keith Bloemendaal called iBusinessLogic to ask our opinion of the current Carolina Custom Fences website (follow the link above).

As you can see, the current website is a bit bland and really does not engage the public. This is web 1.0 at its best and is about 6-8 years out of date for website design. The owner of the company, Scott, did the best job he could with the tools his web builder gave him, but the results just do not compare with the state of the art today.

Scott, the owner of the company has access to the website and can update it, but since this site does not have an easy to use content management system (CMS) the owner rarely makes any changes to the site. It is just too difficult to even change an employees name or add a photo, and he does not have the time to worry about these things. If it were a simple process, he might get more involved, but as it is... he would rather just stick with the basics.

In my conversation with Keith we discussed what they had done as a company to promote their current website.

• Web Address on Business Cards
• PPC advertising

What else? Well, nothing much really, The Pay Per Click expenditure is enough... They buy Google Adwords until the budget runs out each day, the hits these adwords bring only last a few hours per 24 hour period. This is why Google adwords may not be the best long term strategy for a small business. Content rich constantly updated websites perform better at the end of the day.

Most small businesses build a website in the following manner:

• They get a standard low cost package from one of the big providers (Yahoo, GoDaddy etc)
• Fill in basic information about the company, what they do, where they do it, add a couple of photos and a telephone number and wait for the calls to roll in...
• When the calls do not roll in, the next call is to the same provider who sold them a substandard website. They are advised to advertise... (Hint - who sells the advertising?)

My advise to Keith and his company was to not only start a blog but to actually base their entire website on WordPress as a CMS platform. Keith did not understand all of the advantages of WordPress as a content management system but he had heard of blogs before. I explained the built in advantages of blog platforms like WordPress.

• Built in SEO Optimization
• Tagging and Category Links
• Constantly updated content is king for organic web search engine results
• Easy to use interface - no HTML required for basic tasks like adding an article or image
  
• Thousands of available "Themes" Make your website look exactly as you like
• If the need arises to update the look - Lose no content information, just install a new theme
• Every page is generated with CSS so all of the pages are consistent
• Every CMS website ultimately includes unlimited pages
• Sidebar widgets - bring incredible functionality
• Easy to insert images, video, and links

During this conversation, Keith revealed Carolina Custom Fences largest fence contacting competitor in the Raleigh area consistently ranks number one in Google organic search, no matter what search terms are used. (Google Organic search = results on the left side of a Google search results page).

I pointed out that this same competitor has a blog attached to his website and he updates that blog consistently with keyword rich content related to the local market and his specialty - fences. The interesting thing is in those same search results, very few of the other competitors in town were ranking on the first page of the Google organic search results. We determined that there was a great deal of room available for Carolina Custom Fences to find a way onto that same first page or organic results.

Helps Small Business build web relationships.

Part of what we do at iBusinessLogic.com is help companies develop content management system websites and blogs with systems like WordPress and Joomla. Of course my first instinct was to recommend a blog platform for Carolina Custom Fences...

Keith Bloemendaal & Carolina Custom Fences were impressed with our ideas and they gave us the contract.

Then Keith followed my advise and got his blogging feet wet by signing up for a WordPress.com account for his own personal use...

Keith started his own WordPress.com blog and I think he did a great job! (Click the photo to go to the site)

After Keith set up his account with WordPress.com we helped him with some of the basics of setting up the blog.

Some guidance was helpful so he could pick a good theme and I made a nice header image for the new Fence Post Blog he created.

After that we helped him with the basics of widgets and sidebars. Keith jumped right in with the writing though and has put together some really good blog posts right out of the gate!

This blog is meant as a trial, a form of training, a dry run... When we get the real hosted version of the new website installed all of the data Keith entered here will be easily imported into the new hosted company website.

Keith says that this simple blog is already outperforming the existing Carolina Custom Fence website for traffic and it is showing up better in organic search than the old website ever has... And this blog is only a few days old. (With some keyword searches, Keith has found the Raleigh Fence Post blog appearing on the first page of results in Google - in organic search).

The hosted website will provide an opportunity to add many features not available on WordPress.com blogs. The new site will look more like a standard Web 2.0 website but it will have the same content rich features of any WordPress blog. We know that Carolina Custom Fence will find a lot of value in the new installation and they will be more involved with their own website because they will have control over the content and they will not need an IT professional or a webmaster to insert a photo or change an employee's name in the about section.

Stay tuned here to see the progress of Carolina Custom Fences new website/blog...

Or call us to get one of these marvelous content management websites for your company or organization!

Scott Pooler

iBusinessLogic.com

727-596-6900