The New Guy

Pretty stoked that we hired a new developer/designer/SEO person! Double stoked that we were able to hire someone who was referred to us by Deyon, my former instructor for the Website Design program at Lanier Technical College. I think we hired Bill at the exact right moment. We're not completely crushed with builds at the moment, as we will be in about 8 weeks when the landscapers start to examine and update their marketing programs. There is a decent window for him to get up to speed on our CMS/admin system, and file/folder structure before the pressure ratchets up. Half the battle when you are the new employee is finding out where everything is, and knowing what resources are available. So far he is doing excellent, and is also bringing some new ideas to the table.

A few sites have gone live over the past few weeks. One other thing that is happening is that the designs for the site are getting more complex to build out. Right now I am making an extra effort to pay attention to image file sizes, since I had some issues with slow load time on a particular site. Really trying to stay away from transparent PNG's. The designs that are happening sometimes necessitate them though. I have gotten 2 sites recently that were not design3d in house, the clients hired a graphic design company to make the wireframes and screenshots. Interesting challenges!

Crawl Grassperson

We recently launched a site for Grassperson Holiday Lighting-Lawn Care-Landscaping-TX which has been live for a little opver a week, but was last crawled on 10/23/2011, so the search results are now all pointing to dead links. Not knowing when Google will crawl a site after launching is always a source of frustration because the customers want an answer from US. This isn't as big an issue when the customer did not have a previous site.