One of my bosses in a past life had a saying: “He who toot-eth not his own horn, hear-eth not his own horn tooted!”.  So the purpose of this post is simple, and that is to toot my horn! Last  year I joined the Real Estate Photographers of America & International.  Earlier this year, director Alan Blakely sent out a call for members’ best images as candidates to be featured on the REPA home page.  I picked out five of my best images and sent them in.  Today I got an email notifying me that one of my images made the home page

Thanks to Alan and the Real Estate Photographers of America & International for the plug!

The problem to be solved was basically a website that hadn’t had a design update since about 1998. It was still doing a pretty good job of presenting the inventory of used Jeeps to visitors and was ranked very good (#2 at Google at the time of this writing) for the main keyword, “used jeeps”.

Although the old design was very long in the tooth, it was just the tip of the iceberg shaped problem. The site was being maintained with Dreamweaver MX by the owner who really had no desire to be a webmaster. The site had been transferred to him some time ago and the previous webmaster had given the minimum of instructions on keeping it afloat. So what we really had was a workflow problem from one end to the other. Here’s a before screen-shot of the home page:

I was asked to get involved when the upstart new sales guy at Gilbert’s (my Uncle, Dennis ) talked Grant into purchasing a new PC. The only way they had of accessing the site was through the Dreamweaver MX interface and the install disks had been misplaced and of course the new PC didn’t come with Dreamweaver pre-installed. It turned out to be a blessing because I got to see the old workflow in action and it was painful to watch!

After seeing what had been going on for several years I proposed an extreme site makeover, webejeeping edition . I wanted to set up a system so that a relatively inexperienced PC user could be trained to maintain it. The system would start with importing photos of a newly acquired Jeep and end when that vehicle sold.

On the other side of the coin, I wanted to make it as easy as possible for the site visitor to find information about all the vehicles in the current inventory including an attractive, more “sticky” design, larger more consistent images (that took up less disk space on the server too), and to lower the communication barrier by including contact forms at strategic places in the site. The old site had the email address displayed in text so that spam bots could find it easily. This new site needed to be much more spam resistant and the contact forms provided the needed protection.

Since I love to use WordPress as a Content Management System, I started looking around in my inventory of premium WordPress Themes from iThemes and decided that the iCar Theme would make an excellent starting point for the major framework of the site.

Here’s a shot of what I came up with:

To optimize the images, I had been using the Image Resizing Power Toy application from Microsoft, but it only worked with XP and since the new PC came with Vista it wouldn’t work. I found a replacement called VSO Image Resizer which is just as convenient and adds a couple of features that make it very handy. So now instead of 1mb+ images that take a long time to download the visitor gets 800 pixel wide images that are under 100k and still look great. Best of all it’s easy. The program adds a menu item to the right-click context menu so it’s super easy to launch.

I had recently watched a CSS-Tricks.com screencast about advanced uses for WordPress custom fields. It was very timely and I borrowed heavily from some of Chris’s techniques to put together custom templates for the Jeep-type index pages. I also created a custom template for the Jeep details page that utilized the full-width of the template.

Since I was making heavy use of WordPress custom fields, I needed a way to easily enter the data each time. For this I used the Custom Fields Template plugin. It worked very well. About half the vehicle data can be entered just by clicking on check boxes and radio buttons. This makes the data much more consistent and should make it easier for site visitors to compare the features of different vehicles. Other plugins that came in handy were Lightbox 2 for full-size image display and RSS Includes Pages which makes sure all pages get included in the RSS feed and not just posts which is default.

I got help from several other sites that I didn’t make note of (sorry!) as well as the WordPress Codex. I’m happy with the results so far! They have already had people coming to the lot after looking at the vehicles online and had good things to say about the ease of navigation and nice presentation of information. The volume of email coming in from the site has picked up quite a bit as well. The web forms really lower the barrier between the visitor and the business.

So go browse around on WeBeJeeping.com right now. If you’re working on a WordPress project and see a feature you have questions about feel free to email me with questions. Also I can now officially offer web hosting along with design services and I’d love to quote your website project.

Oh yeah, if you’re in the market for a Jeep, then find one you like, contact Grant or Dennis at Gilbert’s and make an offer!

Brett

Brett

As of a couple of months ago I’ve started a virtual tour business (panoramic photography) that will serve real estate agents and business in Middle Tennessee and North Alabama. It’s called SpotLight Virtual Tours. As in “Put your property in the SpotLight”. Check out the website to learn more and refer anyone you know who could use virtual tours to market their business…please!

While working on SpotLight Virtual Tours I have re-awakened my love of photography. This post is getting long, so I’ll tell that story in a later post. I’m taking a lot of pictures lately and started posting them to Flickr as you can tell from the last couple of posts. While I’m in the mood this may become a photography blog so that I can record all sorts of things that I learn from photography. I will probably share a lot of my photos and also resources that I find around the web.

Be sure to check out my Filckr photos and feel free to comment. I need a “Pro” account on Flickr so that I have unlimited uploads, so if you’re feeling generous….

Well, this post has grown long enough. I just wanted to let you know what I’d been up to over the last few months. I know better than to promise regular posting, but I’ll try.

Brett

Especially if you have a network marketing business.

If you have any kind of business you should be reading Seth Godin. This is the first time I’ve linked to Seth’s Blog, but he is a fantastic marketer and I like to keep up with what he has to say and I recommend you do the same.

Check out this post on Seth’s Blog about getting referrals for your business.

Brett Weaver

http://brettweaver.com

First though I want to a little about my story.

I have always been interested in computers and I spent my share of time playing PC games, etc. in the early 90′s. I was a little bit slow to see the commercial potential of the internet, but about four years ago I started looking around for ways to make money online.

My problem (I thought) was that I didn’t know HTML or anything about networks or web server software, etc. As it turns out that was really not a problem at all. . .I’ll tell you why later.

The first thing I learned was about affiliate programs. Basically you get paid for referring your site visitors to a leading merchant and as a thank you they send you a percentage of the sales you generate in the form of a check. This can happen 24/7 even while you’re sleeping by the way! But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Of course it’s not magic though. There’s one little detail that you have to take care of and that’s TRAFFIC. You must have traffic on your site to make money. Traffic is not the ONLY piece of the puzzle, but without it you site is doomed to be little more than a hobby and conversation piece for your family and friends.

You can search the web and and find all the tools you need to be successful. You can learn to submit your site to the search engines, sign up with a good autoresponder company, write pages about topics that you HOPE your audience wants to hear. You can learn to build our own look and feel, your own forms for polls, and on and on, but how long would that take? If you’re not extremely motivated you could be scared off before you even get your first page published.
OR

You can do what I did. . .just worry about writing content and let Site Build It! do all the rest. Follow the SBI system and you will KNOW what topics you should write about, your pages will automatically get submitted to the search engines and you will get up to speed and earning money much quicker than you would on your own.

I’ll admit it. . .the Web is one SCARY place for small businesses. What else can you say about a 99% failure rate? You could say that they don’t have a GHOST of a chance. They *DO* with SBI!. As a matter of fact, they have a success rate that’s unmatched anywhere in the world. . .Where else has ANYONE seen results like this?

From now until the midnight witching hour, October 31, you can get Site Build It! for a song and sing your own song! Click Here for more information.

I will be glad to answer any questions you may have. Good luck!