Mar 04
adminHouse Renovations do it yourself, home improvement, house, renovations
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AQUA PAINT – Lovely
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Living Room – Before
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View From the Kitchen
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Painting the Ceiling
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Primer and Chandelier
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Installing the Floor
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More Flooring
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More Floor…
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Moving In
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Living Rm Done
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Baseboards and Furniture
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New Chandelier
Okay I’m switching gears here and I am finally going to post some pictures of our house renovations. We bought our house almost two years ago, and I am just now getting around to posting the work we did (and are still doing). So I’ll concentrate on a room per blog post. Today I’m going to start with the living room/dining room.
When we first saw the house, we thought the living area looked a bit like a funeral parlor. I’m not really sure if that’s an accurate description but it smelled a little musty and was empty except for one small table at the end. The previous owner had given away most of his living furniture. This was no big deal. The big deal about this room was the paint!
AQUA PAINT - Lovely
My goodness there was aqua marine paint everywhere. Pictures cannot ever do this paint color justice. Once we moved in and removed the carpet and drapes, I felt like I was living in a pool.
Okay so the first thing we did after pulling down all of the 70s drapes, was to pull up the 70s carpet and start painting that puppy! Boy oh boy is it difficult to cover 25+ year old paint. We primed and the next day I swear the color was more intense and aqua than it had been before we primed. It was like we were splattering the walls with milk –skim milk. After trying to prime, we decided to texture the walls so they would be a little easier to paint. Even after the primer and joint compound cover, it still took two coats of paint and a third layer of “touch up”! I should have chosen a darker color but the house was so dark, I really wanted to lighten it up.
Painting the Ceiling
Okay, so once the painting was done, we patched the floors where the carpet tacks had ripped out the cement. Then it was laminate time! We laid down the moisture barrier and bought Pergo with the cushion attached. My hubby Ken and I aren’t very good at making quick decisions. This has been a long and sometimes painful process having to make so many decisions. The first thing we decided on was the floor. It went on sale at Lowes and as soon as I decided I wanted it, when my husband, Ken, went to go get it, someone else decided it was nice too and took all of the boxes. I think we visited four or five Lowes with the “other person” grabbing all of the boxes of flooring just minutes before we arrived. Finally, we found one store with enough boxes but they weren’t on sale. Ken used his charm and bargaining power and got the manager to give us a lower price and we bought all of the remaining boxes.
Installing the flooring was interesting!
Installing the Floor
My husband and I were under the impression that a five year old could install this stuff. It was a real pain getting started. The first few pieces did NOT want to go together and we bent a few grooves and had to toss some of the boards. After a day of pure frustration and only getting two rows done, we finally figured out what we were doing. By the next day we finished most of the room, except for the entry and a closet. We even brought our then five year old in to tap in a few pieces. So yeah, once you figure out what the heck you are doing, a five year old CAN do it!
We thought we’d have more time to renovate before moving in, but we sold our other house quickly (which was a good thing) and had to move into the house way before it was done. So we moved in and placed most of the furniture into the middle of the rooms so we could finish the baseboards. So we worked on the baseboards which came out very nicely. Special thanks go out to my brother-in-law Tim who let us borrow his miter saw. That saw rocks! If you ever need to install baseboards, don’t attempt to do it without a good miter saw. We were worried that the baseboards were going to be a real problem. The first couple of cuts took us several hours to get right, but once we realized that 1/16th of an inch makes a huge difference, we found our groove, worked well together, and got them done fairly quickly. I have to say doing the baseboards was probably one of my favorite parts of the renovation. They really make the house look “finished”.
New Chandelier
And for this room, one of the last things we did was get a new chandelier. The original was interesting and I actually liked it. My sister liked it too, because she took it! I think that chandelier would work better in a house with taller ceilings and I tend to like more contemporary things. Anyway, I like the new light and it was reasonably inexpensive.
So that’s the living/dining area! That took us about two months to complete. Of course, we were working on other things at the time and small things like new drapes and the light came much later.
Let me know what you think.
Living Room with Baseboards and Furniture
Feb 22
adminSEO blogs, business, business strategy, search engine optimization, SEO, social media, successful business plan, Twitter, web
After years in web development and spending the past five years trying to understand Google and the Google Dance and Yahoo! and Bing and all of the search engines and why one ranks you number one for all of your keywords and the others won’t even list you, I’ve discovered the secret to great SEO. Here are the top three things you need to make your site rank higher than your competition.
1) Clear mission: This sounds like business-talk and it is. Most good business people will tell you that you must have a clear mission and set of goals before you embark on a successful business. Why should a website be any different? Before starting a website, ask yourself, “What is it that I’m trying to accomplish?” If the answer is “Make Money” you need to start over. All businesses want to make money. You must dig deeper and determine how you will make money. What is going to drive people to your site and why? What will keep people coming back to your site? If your main mission is to make money, you will fail because even if you get people to your site, you won’t keep them and they won’t come back. They’ll see through your tactics. You have to offer something of value. For example, say you found an affiliate that pays you 70% for all referrals. Sounds great, right? You sign up and start selling the product. Have you tried the product? Have you researched and made sure it doesn’t turn people’s urine purple? Seriously, you need to be the expert on that product. Obviously with 70% return, you’ll have a lot of competition and you have to stand out from the crowd. You become the expert and people will come to you. Your mission here is to become the expert on said affiliate product. The result will probably be that you will “make money”.
2) Market that Puppy: Blog, Tweet and By All Means Tell People You Are Out There!: One of my favorite lines is from Field of Dreams where they say over and over, “If you build it they will come!” Well, if we all had an all-star ghost baseball team lined up ready to play for us that might be true, but for those of us trying to make our way ahead of millions of other sites, it’s going to take a little more work. You must let people know that you are there. Some of the easiest ways to do that is by social marketing yourself. Signing up for twitter probably takes 90 seconds and that’s while you’re getting yourself another cup of coffee. Seriously, sign up, write a profile, and add a link to your page. Find some friends. If you start following people and you are a legitimate person or business, chances are they will follow you too. If you start tweeting about things that make sense, are important to people and are interesting, more people will following you, you’ll get retweeted and things will actually start to roll in your favor.
Also you need to blog. If you don’t have a blog on your own site there are plenty of places you can set up shop for free, like blogger.com. If you have a blog, make sure to register it on business specific sites, and sites like technorati.com. Also, go out and start commenting on other people’s blogs. Make a name for yourself. Marketing is a huge topic, but you get the idea.
3) Clean code: I’m going to get a little “techie” on you. The more valid your code is and the more direct, concise and easy it is to read, the better. Why does anyone care what my site looks like on the backside, it works and looks good! ? Well, the less cumbersome your code is on the backside, the easier it is for the bots (Googlebot especially) to find and properly index your site. Less tags and code on the backside make it easier for your keywords to be spotted and keyword density to be noted. Also, the pages will load more quickly and bandwidth will be saved. I highly recommend a tableless design with a separate css page. Sometimes this last step is easier said than done, but if you start cleaning up your code, Google (and others) will reward you for it. I’ve personally optimized two sites with the same area of focus, one with clean code and one without (I did not build the one without – I tried my best to make it better though). Even though the site with the not-so-good code had more backlinks, exposure and a blog, the site with the squeaky clean code actually ended up at the top of the natural search results. Go figure!
A combination of all three of the above must haves will keep people coming back to your site and help your popularity. You must realize that true results require a lot of hard work and dedication. This doesn’t happen overnight. Anyone who tells you they can get you to the top in seven days is either lying or is utilizing “black hat” or inappropriate techniques to help your rank and in the end you will be penalized. Google will find sites that don’t play by the rules. I think this list is actually just common sense. Have a business plan, market yourself and do it well. Easy!
Feb 17
adminSEO paid ads, search engine optimization, SEM, SEO
Often when I tell friends and family what I do, I’ll get a puzzled look as a response. Sometimes, to keep things simple, I just tell people I do “web stuff”. For those more business oriented or for anyone who has a website, the term SEO probably has meaning. When I posted SEO under my Facebook profile I had one friend message me and ask me to explain and another friend wanting me to take a look at his blog to see what could be done about it. One guy knew exactly what SEO was and how important it was to building a lasting presence online.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and is the “art” of driving organic traffic to your site via search results from a search engine such as Google or Yahoo. I call it an “art” because there is a bit of trial and error and dancing to get things optimized so that your site shows up naturally in the search engine results.
You may be asking, “Why would anyone care about that, can’t you just advertise and get the number one search spot?” SEM, or search engine marketing will get you to the top of the ranks, indeed. This, of course, comes at a price – and a big price at that. Most search engine marketing campaigns run on a cost per click scale. When someone types in your keywords, your ad appears either on the top or on the side of the “natural” listings. In a cost per click setup you only have to pay if someone clicks on your ad and goes to your site. Impressions occur when your ad is seen (i.e. makes an impression on the customer) but is not clicked and these don’t cost you money in a cost per click scenario. The downside to the SEM approach is that it can cost you a fortune. Some ads may only cost a quarter while most competitive ones will run you from $3-12 per click, depending on the competition. SEM is a much bigger topic that will be explored later.
Back to SEO…
A site that is well optimized will return natural search results near the top of the page and you don’t have to pay anything to the search engine for that. It’s free – well sort of! SEO can come at a price. If you have an obscure website with unique content, you may have an easy time getting your site listed at the top of the search results. If you are trying to make your mark on the Las Vegas, Nevada Real Estate search results, you have a lot of work ahead of you and may have to hire a professional to get your site on the organic map!
In the coming weeks I’ll explore some of the basic things you can do to help get your site better suited for the search engines and we will also explore the costs associated with professional SEO and when and if it is worth it for your business.
Feb 16
adminDesign epoff.com, web, web design, Wordpress templates
Welcome to the new Epoff.com! It’s about time!
About four years ago I launched my site after spending about 30 minutes on design and content. I wanted to launch something quickly, but knew I would go back and fix it up shortly.
So here I am, four years later, fixing her up!
I decided to use a pre-made Wordpress template since I am busy with other projects. I’m sure I could have designed and created at least a dozen templates with the time it took me to decide on one. I looked at over a 1000 templates. Yes, that’s correct, there are three zeros there – that’s not a typo. Anyway, I’m not sure how my path led me N.design studios, but I finally found my template! This template is simple, soothing to look at and list-like! (I’m a big list maker so this really fit with my personality). It was easy for me to add my twitter feed and set it up the way I wanted. So far, I really like this design and am so happy for wonderfully talented people who share their skills with the rest of us.
I hope to post some useful information in the days, weeks, months and years to come. I had a New Year’s Resolution to share some of my knowledge and use this site more fully. I love to share my knowledge (it’s the teacher in me) and hopefully I can offer some SEO tips and tricks, web design and development opinions and talk about appropriate e-learning practices. I have a lot of opinions too, so I’m sure if you keep up you’ll get a myriad of information.
If you haven’t already, follow me on Twitter – if you are a person or viable business I’ll follow you back. If you are trying to sell skin, I’m not interested!
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