webgarden.ca

Phillip Sachinidis, owner of Crescent Moving and Storage contacted Webgarden in May to design a website that would represent his locally owned and run moving company. The Crescent Moving Site has 4 comprehensive multi-part forms which give his staff the ability to generate moving quotes online .The Crescent Moving site is built using WordPress, giving administrative staff the ability to edit and make changes to the site from anywhere, at any time.

Webgarden was pleased to unveil and go live with the Crescent Moving website during the 3rd week of June, one week sooner than the estimate completion time of 6 weeks.

Sunny Phulka of Maple Leaf Nurseries contacted Webgarden 4 weeks ago, hoping to have a website created for his company. Sunny was looking for a simple design that wouldn’t take away from his product photographs as well as provide visitors with company history, contact information and driving directions. We created a simple site that highlights the photos of Maple Leaf’s gorgeous facility and nursery stock, we made sure the navigation was easy to use and that the contact information is on every page. You can view the Mapleleaf Nursery Website Here.

Screen Shot of Maple Leaf Nursery

As many of you know, on December 30th 2009 my life completely changed (for the better) – I gave birth to boy/girl twins. My daughter Annika Marie was born at 3lbs 9oz and my son Aaron John was 5lbs 14oz. After a short stay in the hospital we all came home in the middle of January and I have been changing diapers and making bottles ever since! Now that I have children, I have taken on the role of “mom-entrepreneur” or “mompreneur”. My babies give me great joy and purpose… however my first child has been Webgarden. I have raised my business from a very small seed, into the thriving company that it is today and I don’t intend to give it up! Although my hours have changed, and my workload has been adjusted, I am still taking on new clients as well as maintaining old favorites. If you are in need of a website, or if you are just wondering how I am doing, feel free to drop me a line or stop by our new location at the 2010 Can West Hort Show. I am looking forward to hearing from you!

Aaron and Annika in Webgarden Uniforms

Search Engine Optimization, (SEO) is the process of getting your site “noticed” online and has plagued the web community for years as a very in-depth topic. If you search on the internet for SEO you will see multiple companies offering to optimize your website for a monthly or flat fee.
For those of us you looking for a quick and cheap way to improve your site rankings, here are 4 tips to get you started properly optimizing your website and help you improve your website placement in Google and most other search engines.

1)Make sure your website content relevant and original: This means that if you create a website about your Abbotsford Garden Center – make sure your content is ABOUT your Abbotsford Garden Center – don’t start writing pages about the real estate market in Abbotsford!
I know it can be tempting to copy and paste information from another person’s website- but YOU MUST make sure your website content is ORIGINAL – Google knows if you have copied and pasted from another site and will not give your site much weight or importance.

2)Add meta tags and keywords: This is a debate amongst many website designers – some say that Google no longer recognizes website keywords as being relevant to your site because of all the black hat SEO that is going on. (Black Hat SEO is the term used for illegitimate website marketing) However, until Google tells us that it specifically does not recognize meta tags and keywords – I suggest you still add 10-20 keywords to your site’s index page. (Please note these keywords must be relevant to your website’s content – if you have a website about your garden center you should not be using the keyword “Hot Girls” if you do this, you could be banned from Google – and it is nearly impossible to get back in!)

3)Use Text: Some developers will use images for the entire site – even though the images may have text within them, Google’s crawlers do not recognize text within images. This is a big problem with older sites and flash based sites! Make sure you design your site using css or tables with real text based content, otherwise your site will rank poorly – or NOT AT ALL!

4)Add a Sitemap: A site map is very easy to add to your site – there are many free sitemap builders available on the web. The one that I use is:

http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

Although this list will give you a good starting point to optimize your website, it is not exhaustive. If you would like to know more ways to improve your site’s rankings please feel free to contact us.

Here are eight sure-fire methods to make sure that your readers leave your site and never come back. Follow these tips to create a site that people will never want to visit. Alternatively, learn what not to do, so that you can create a Web site that people love and stick with for a long time.

1. Use impossible navigation on your site
If your readers have to be you to understand how to get around your site, chances are they won’t. Navigation is one of the most crucial parts of your site, and if you’re not constantly re-visiting it to make it better and more intuitive for your readers, then you are losing them to some other site that is easier to find things in.

2. Put up more ads than content
While you might feel that the ads serve a purpose, if there are more ads than actual content, your readers will notice and not stick around. And what good are ads if no one is there to read them?

3. Do not maintain your site
A site with outdated information or errors seems like a site that no one cares about. So why should your readers? Even if you can’t update your site with new information daily, you should strive to update it weekly or perhaps rotate what is displayed daily, without adding new content.

4. Require too much information
Requiring information in order to gain access to the site doesn’t convince people to give it to you, instead, they leave and don’t return.

5. Crash your customers’ browsers
Nothing makes a customer want to avoid your site like a spectacular crash. This is often caused by poorly written JavaScript or Java.
JavaScript, Java, ASP and CGI

6. Don’t optimize your images
Large Images slow down your page loading, and un-optimized images mean that your page can load in minutes instead of seconds. This gives your readers plenty of time to head to Google and find a faster site.

7. Embed too many tables
The more tables you nest, the slower your page will load. Modern browsers will now display the site as best they can before all the tables load, but the layout you’ve spent hours developing will take minutes to completely render. And that’s time your readers will spend elsewhere.

8. Pay no attention to your readers
If your readers contact you or indicate through stats that they are interested in a specific topic, you should avoid that topic completely. This will insure that your readers will not find what they want and so won’t come back.

Many of our customers come to us AFTER they have tried to set up their own website. Often these customers are overwhelmed and frustrated – why? Because the web is not print. When you create a word document or a power point presentation, all of your graphical elements and text are easily created and always display exactly how you want.

This is not the case on the web.

When you build your Web page and test it in your favorite browser, it may look exactly how you want it to look. But when you test it in a different browser, how does it look? I guarantee it will look completely different. So different in fact, that users may not be able to view your page at all!

As a web developer, every site we create is tested on Internet Explorer 7, 6 and 5.5, as well as Safari and Firefox. This covers the major browsers and about 98% of your audience. This allows (almost) complete coverage without having to spend a fortune developing hacks for smaller lesser known browsers.

If you are not sure if what your website looks like on other browsers you can test it by downloading and installing Firefox, Safari and Multiple IE’s.

If you have any questions about this article, or any other please contact us

Early morning customers lined up at the gates

There has been a lot of talk in the industry as of late about e-Marketing: How to do it? How to measure it’s success? Does it really work?

Well, let me answer a few of these questions for you. As many of you know webgarden works closely with Potters Nursery on the maintenece and development of their website. We also assist in all of Potters online marketing campaigns. Potters has built it’s success and reputation by relying heavily on print marketing. Nearly every week you will find a full page ad in the local Surrey, Langley, Delta and White Rock newspapers.  These ads undoubtably have contributed to the sucess of all 3 of the Potters locations.

Towards the end of October, the Potters 152 location was planning a surprise sale. Instead of taking out an ad in the local paper, they decided to send out a single e-Letter on October 21st telling customers about the sale on Saturday October 24th. This was a big opportunity for webgarden as never before had we had a chance to directly measure the results of a single marketing campaign for Potters. (Normally they are always combined with newspaper ads)

After sending any e-Newsletter we are always able to monitor the recipients by viewing who opened it, who clicked on which links as well as the bounce rates. However, just because your e-letter is opened and viewed doesn’t guarantee the customer will be at the store for the sale!

Finally Saturday came around and I got word from Potters that the marketing of the Oct 24th sale HUGE success!!! Not only is sending an e-Letter a FRACTION of the cost of a newspaper ad (as low as $200) , the results are spectacular!

Most business use PC to get their work done. Your windows based PC could be an HP, a Dell, Compaq, Acer… the list goes on, but you get the idea! Most of us in business also use the Microsoft office suite (that is Word, Excel, Powerpoint etc) which is incredibly important for creating and sharing documents and spreadsheets. The cost of MS office is usually around $400 – the student edition is also available for $150. But lets say you are a student (or more likely the parent of a student) – and you have just spent $700 on a laptop for collage – it is quite possible you can not (or do not want) to spend an addition $150 for MS Office. Did you know there is a free program that is so similar to Microsoft office that I dare say it is EXACTLY the same?
The name is Neo Office and you can download it here. While signing up to download, you will be asked to make a donation – I suggest donating $15 or $20 to the developers (come on… you just saved yourself $400!)
Once you have downloaded an installed Neo Office, you will notice that their text document and spreadsheet documents look very similar to word and excel (read: Exactly the same…) and after creating a file, you can select “save as” and save your documents as a word or excel file.

If you would like more information about Neo Office you can check out the help documents here. If you decide to install Neo Office, make sure you keep your copy up to date and always download the updates when prompted!

As you may know Webgarden focuses primarily on web site design & web page creation for the BC horticultural industry. Most of our customers are landscapers, retail garden centers or greenhouse growers based in the Vancouver lower mainland. In today’s article I am going to list  10 ways for retail garden centers and local landscapers to improve their google page rank.

1. Keep your website up-to-date. Make sure you update your content with upcoming events such as trade shows or ceremonies – or even awards you may have won. Give your readers an incentive to come back to your site for current and relevant information by keeping your site up to date.
2. Blog, Blog, Blog: The easiest way for website owners to share industry related information is to blog about it. Blogging is a great way to add brand new content to your website as well as positioning your company as an online industry expert. Blog posts usually rank highly in the search engines because blogs are usually updated frequently and since most posts are dated, the information can be sorted by relevance.
3. Use Heading Tags properly. In your website you likely have several different pages (home page, about us, contact us) Instead of using a generic heading such as “Contact Us” use your company name so it would be “Contact Webgarden”, or “About Webgarden Website Design” This helps differentiate your contact page from the millions of other “contact us” pages on the web.
4. Use original website content. Do not copy and paste text from other websites ( I know it is tempting especially if you hate writing) but google knows if content is repeated or copied and pasted from somewhere else and it will not only ignore your copied pages – google may penalize you as well.
5. Avoid pages that have no written content. If you have a home page that is just one big image it is going to be harder to improve your rankings than a home page with introductory text and a few images.
6. Send your website designer your written content and TRUST US that we can tweak it so that you will improve your search engine rankings. It is all in the little things for example instead of saying “Our company prides it’s self in growing the best plants” You should say “Webgarden prides itself in growing the best plants” But you don’t want to go overboard so that when human readers are reviewing your website it sounds like poorly written English. There is a fine line so perhaps it’s best to let the experts help you…
7. Utilize your location. You may be the only orchid grower in Canada but on the web you are up against thousands of orchid growers in the USA, Thailand, Singapore…. Promote your website to Canadian readers by mentioning your location on the home page of your site as well as on the contact page. Google indexes our searches based on the location of the computer we are searching from.
8. Don’t be affraid to use bold formatting. Using bold for a few key phrases in a few of your web pages (please do NOT go overboard here) can help google distinguish important information. If you are not sure how to do this, then it is better to not do it at all. You don’t want to go overboard and bold everything – it will work against you.
9. Select a few clever keywords or phrases that you believe your customers will use to search for you on the web. It is not realistic to think that you can have top rankings for the word “lily” or the word “grower”. However “Vancouver Oriental Lily Grower” is an attainable goal.
10. Be patient. It takes time for google to find your site. You can help it along by signing up for an analytics account and submitting a site map, but there is no gaurentee your site will be found any quicker. The big guys at Google keep search engine algorithms top secret – nobody really knows how or when the googlebots crawl – but these 10 steps I have laid out are tried and true methods that have proven time and time again to work.

I hope you have enjoyed this post and I hope you can apply some of this information to your own site. If you have found this post useful drop me a comment – I would love to hear what you think!

The majority of Webgarden’s customers want a website they can update and manage themselves. We call this a content management system (or CMS for short) Webgarden has now created a number of online tutorials to walk you through updating and maintaining your customized CMS. You can view our tutorials anytime online. If there is a specific tutorial you would like to see online that we do not yet have, please let us know- we would be happy to accommodate you!