In 2001, the internet bubble had already burst and some speculated that it would not last much longer. At that time, very few people had a website running with databases. The free PHP programming language that is so ubiquitous today was in its infancy back then. The few lucky websites with content management systems were mostly programmed in Pearl or expensive ASP and ColdFusion.
In 2001, if you wanted a website you had to find the smartest person you knew and pay them a lot of money to create one for you. Programmers also didn't make website management easy for you.
We've come a long way since Palm Pilots, clunky websites and search engines like MetaCrawler and AltaVista. Technology is a lot friendlier now, and even Grandma is able to send email, talk on her cell phone and surf the web at the same time. If you still have trouble doing these 3 things simultaneously, we recommend asking your own grandma for directions.
So what does this little stroll down memory lane have to do with today's Golden Nugget?
If you were lucky enough to have a database website built for you between 2001 and 2006, it's probably not a very good system. Most likely, it's not very user friendly and was created from a programmer's point of view that they understand, but leaves you clueless.
Eventually you will need to upgrade your website to a new content management system. It doesn't matter if your website is 1 year old, 5 years old or 10 years old, you simply will need to upgrade as technology changes. Just like you trade in your car every few years for a better one, you eventually need to trade in the website software.
When that day comes there are two things you need to request of your web programmer: 1. Maintain the same exact web page names and directory structure. 2. Or correctly redirect all the old URLs to the corresponding new pages.
Those two points are absolutely paramount. If you get that wrong, you will lose all the years of link building and off-page search engine optimization, which means those 10,000 visitors per month will suddenly vanish, and with them all your sales.
Please don't simply trust your web programmer to do #2 correctly; you have to check to make sure they did it.
It's your business and a bad programmer and bad content management system could put you out of business overnight, so be careful in what you decide or hire a consultant to help you make the right choice.
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BEHIND THE SCENES jWAG is Free!
There's a lot of good SEO training stuff out there, but we're the only website who use jewelry terms in our examples...
jWAG is the research and training department of JewelerWebsites.com, and we provide our online training for free. No scam, no gimmick, everything you read on jWAG
is the same SEO and online marketing techniques that we provide our paying customers.
Our Daily Golden Nugget email subscribers are occasionally offered free services so we can evaluate new SEO techniques and emerging web technologies.
A typical SEO firm will request you fill out a "quote form" before they tell you exactly what they do for you or their price. We know that
many of you guys--our readers from the jewelry industry--are cautious about your technology investments and media buying. This is why we've created jWAG, to
help you learn a little and understand what it takes to have a successful jewelry website and online marketing.
With a little SEO knowledge you can better evaluate any SEO firm before hiring them.
Will you have time to do this yourself? Maybe not, but feel free to hire your own in-house web person and give them the job of reading and using jWAG.
That will be much less expensive than hiring us or someone else.
We try to write everything on jWAG so you can easily follow without too much geek speak. All our examples are written using jewelry lexicon so you can use them directly
or copy the techniques directly without rethinking. We hope it's a great time saver.
If you do decide to throw up your hands and give up we'd hope
you give us a call, but before you do, make sure to check out your options from your POS company because they might have an easy beginner website. Another beginner
website could come from one of your jewelry vendors.
When you are ready to use the power of jWAG you should just call JewelerWebsites.com or do a Google search
for "jewelry website design" for the other experts in the jewelry website design industry.
Here are some quick links into JewelerWebsites.com:
