Category: Clients

Get Your Sweet On – WordPress E-Commerce

Clients Comments Off

We just launched Sweet WillYums, which is important to you for two reasons.

(1) They make something called Uncle Eric’s Granola Biscotti, and it’s the best baked good I’ve ever eaten. You should buy some… or check out their other goodies.

(2) The site is built on top of WordPress, using our very own e-commerce plugin. It’s not ready for mass distribution, but we’re using it to launch at least 3 other sites right now. Sweet WillYums integrates with PayPal, but other sites will use everything from an email-based order form to Authorize.net and other payment gateways.

Have a good weekend.

DateSpaces NYC Launches

Clients Comments Off

We’ve just “soft launched” a new site for NYC daters. DateSpaces.com is a directory of restaurants and other dating spots in New York City. Think of it as a CitySearch focused on the  “datability” of the locations rather than how good the food is. Or think of it as a WineLog for dates.

By “soft launched”, I mean a kind of “beta”. We want a few people to come to the site to test it out, but don’t want Digg or Techcrunch-style coverage just yet. So this small blog posting should get the 20 of you who follow this blog to check it out and will also get Google crawling the site.
It’s a pretty cool site, and I’ll definitely be talking about it more later.

Inspirage Oracle Consulting

Clients, SEO Comments Off

We just launched an awesome website for our friends at Inspirage.com. It’s one of Kim’s best designs ever. She’s really on a roll and producing top-notch stuff for our clients.

The site is built on top of WordPress, and when we were first installing WP we did not check the “I would like to include my website in search engines…” option. I didn’t really know what checking this did… I assumed some kind of submission to Google and Technorati. Since the site was still in development and I knew I was going to submit the site later, I left it unchecked so Google wouldn’t know about the dev version of the site until it was ready.

Well, it turns out that leaving that option unchecked actually adds a no-index and no-follow meta tags to the header of every page, asking Google and other crawlers to stay out. This is obviously a bad if you ever expect to get search engine traffic. We didn’t notice this until after we launched the site and a search for “inspirage” was returning a link to the website, but with no title or description.

You can go into the WP options and change this setting after installation… that’s what we did. Meta tags removed.

It’s been about a week and still no update on those search results though. My guess is that Google isn’t crawling the site. I’ve read that they won’t crawl the site for 180 days or so. Maybe our links in this blog post will put it back on the radar. I’m also going to submit the URL through Google’s quality form. And maybe installing Analytics on the site will wake Google up to the fact that Inspirage.com is crawlable. We can only hope.

If anyone out there has had the same problem and knows a good solution, let us know.

Guys Need Facials Too. Spa Blogging?

Clients, The Wedding Comments Off

Before our wedding in May, Kim got me a gift certificate to get a facial at a local spa. It was awesome. So relaxing. Imagine someone massaging your face and head for an hour while you try not to snore.

I vowed to always get a facial before any vacation. It just puts you in the mood. I was so excited about my discovery that I couldn’t stop talking about it at my bachelor party, and my friends couldn’t stop joking about the implied innuendo.

Anyway, I was thinking of facials because we just launched a new site for Dr. Harriet Comite at www.comiteskin.com. Shortly after, Kim bought me a facial at their Advanced Skin Care spa, which was amazing as always.

If you live near Reading, Pennsylvania and are interested in spa treatments ranging from manicures to Botox treatment, check out their office in Wyomissing.

If you’re a tech nerd like us, you might want to follow their site too. There are few qualified people blogging about the world of spas and skin care right now. If the group at Advanced Skin Care can continue to put out great content on their blog, I think they’ll have no problem booking appointments in the future. There’s an opportunity for someone in this space to take control of the blogosphere much like EnglishCut and Stormhoek did in their respective fields. I wish them luck.