Marketing Strategy and Web Development

I just wanted to quickly share a fantastic web application that i’m currently working with. In fact I see myself using this heavily moving forward.

Simpleology. It’s a “to-do” style application that for me has a huge difference – it focuses on the training and structure needed to actually simplify your schedule. To put it bluntly it works to reverse the dyslexic habits that we as computer users are all cultivating.

In my example, I work as a creative director for a company during the day, but by night I work on the online marketing for my partner’s Boudoir Photography Business. As you can imagine this requires two completely different modes of thinking, that very much conflict each other. As a creative person I am always getting new ideas, that love to pop into my head at the most inappropriate times – and I can’t always just switch over and work on them as the inspiration hits.

So, back to Simpleology - here’s what I love about it.

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Here is the new incarnation the website for Neo Photo Studio. My partner and I made the decision to refine our niche to Boudoir Photography, and also offer Glamour and Standard Portraiture services. Since the switch, our search rankings have improved dramatically, and advertising costs have been slashed. Moving into a refined niche has had a great number of benefits.

We now only need to focus on boudoir related search terms in google adwords. This means that we are spending less money to deliver much more appropriate ads (we no longer need to compete with the baby, weddings and corporate niches). From this our bounce rate dropped significantly as our traffic is landing on far more relevant landing pages. Our graphic design, copywriting and galleries are now much easier to produce as we have a razor sharp vision in mind for our vertical.

Previously we had tried to take on a much more broad spectrum of photography services, for fear of closing off opportunities for work. This however was our biggest mistake. By attemting to keep our niche too broad we watered down our advertising budget and produced a confusing message to our prospective clients due to conflicting images and language.

I’ve been spending a lot of my time working on my new business Neo Photo Studio with my partner Kia.

We’re a Gold Coast Photography Studio specialising in Baby Photography, Family Portraits, Glamour Photography and Corporate Headshots.

Making the website was the easy part – the hard part for me was learning SEO and PPC. Just like a lot of creative people I’m ADD or Dyslexic or something, so structured thinking, planning and management is fairly painful.

Nevertheless I’m about 4 weeks in to a 6 week Internet Marketing course now and things are starting to sink in finally.

Please take a look!

For me one of the best updates that came with the iPhone iOS5 update was the addition of:

-webkit-overflow-scrolling: touch;

What this means is you can ad native touch scrolling to any element. Here’s an example (You’ll have to use your iPhone/iPad to see it):

I’ve had some time to work on the redesign for this site.

With the help of the Forrst community & my friend Julianne Powell it’s coming together very nicely! Click on the pic below to see a high res version of the layout.

I found a great Jquery plugin for creating advanced box shadows:

http://www.bitstorm.org/jquery/shadow-animation/

Very cool, it solves an annoying problem I was having with the new theme of this website.

I’d been looking for a way to animate CSS shadows in a way that simulated a button press, this takes care of the outer and inner shadow and also controls the animation between the up & down states.

Going to give the iOS wordpress app a try. So far I like what I see, though I can’t see it being useful for anything other than quick updates. Also the editor window seems to combine the HTML/visual editor of WordPress in a bizzare way.

At any rate, the add image/video feature is pretty good. I’d recommend it for a blog that just does “status update” style posts.

Just put up the coming soon page for my wife’s website – Kia Groat Gold Coast Photographer

I’ll be working on the wordpress theme for the rest of the day – them working to make the theme available for download!

Keep Posted!

It’s important that search engines are able to read and interpret your site correctly. The best way to guarantee this is with an .xml sitemap. This is effectively a “contents page” for your site, providing a list of links to all of the pages/posts in your site in a convenient format for search engines.

To make it easy to keep on top of updating your sitemap (and submitting it to search engines) I would recommend using a plugin that can automate the whole process. One that I have been using for some time now is Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress.

Welcome to the first post on my personal portfolio site.

The usual procedure when setting up a wordpress blog would be to delete the “hello world” test post. I opted to capitalize on the irony – given the nature of this site – and leave it in… It was funnier in my head.

Hello world!