thanks for the feedback Cole. I changed up the "contact me" page by wording it a little better(i think) and setting up some more professional looking email addresses that I just forwarded to my gmail. As for Twitter, it is something I would like to get in there but I am having trouble getting a good plug in, as I agree the default Twitter option is pretty worthless right now. Can anyone recommend a good Twitter plug in?

I'm working on getting a bio up and I'll work on making the blog posts a little longer. Do you think quality is more important than quantity for this particular website?

Thanks again for the feedback.

i've played around with a ton of the twitter plugins and have found this one to be the best by far for what i've needed to do:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/xhanch-my-twitter/

definitely. it's going to be way too hard to rank for competitive terms like "pga teaching pro" or "club fitting," i would just try to put up really quality stuff and focus on having anyone who does show up at your site really wanting to get a lesson / fitting / whatever with you.

You can definitely target local coaching or whatever other services you offer with an effective SEO campaign. In general, I think sites that offer real life services in a saturated/competitive market should look more toward CPC campaigns and actual advertising. SEO can still be profitable on a smaller sale like local searches, but direct advertising can really be +EV if your services are expensive enough to produce a sick ROI. Companies like landscapers, furniture movers, etc. should be putting lots of money into **** like that because their ROI would be through the roof with an effective campaign.

nxt,

Design wise I think it'd look a lot better with a lighter color scheme, but that's just my personal preference. I also think with you should make your landing page more specific to the services you offer. The domain is one of the most telling features about a sites content. Your domain is your personal name so that's not helpful to the reader. I think you should make it more obvious that you're a golf coach or a club fitter or whatever. I skimmed the site and I'm still not 100% about what services you offer. I think the most optimal landing page would be a "services" one which clearly lists the services you offer in direct detail with additional links to the services themselves which contain more info.

SEO wise it's not optimized properly at all, but there's tons of things that can be said for that. And like I said earlier, an effective ad campaign could probably benefit you as much as a thorough SEO campaign, if not more.

It depends heavily on your target audience, area, and the keywords and competition of said keywords, but I think buying a second domain for your services might be a good idea. I think keeping the NA site as a personal bio/blog would be neat, but something more related to golf would be better. Again, that's for SEO, and traffic being driven by direct advertising would negate the need for a properly SEO'd site.

I'd like to see it look more like the original theme with fewer customizations:


As far as SEO goes, I'd change the heading text of "Welcome to... " to something more descriptive of what you do.

I'd probably just recommend a locally targeted PPC campaign.

Haha, that's like the cliff notes to my post.

Pretty much. Your advice is solid.

But after putting the time into editing a screen shot of the original theme, I still had to say something.

Disagree strongly. If I had a golf website and needed those terms top 10 on the SERP would be guaranteed and top 3 also attainable. Those terms are just not very competitive even for one person to take solid positions in. I like the local idea Im just not particularly well versed in that arena to offer advice for local verticals.

I'd just be curious whether it would be worthwhile to try to rank for those things. I mean unless you have the kind of personal brand that would make fly cross country to get coaching it seems like dominating local keywords would be way better for business.

Yup. Although he could monetize the site in additional ways to make all kinds of traffic a potential revenue stream. But yeah, I think local would be the way to go via PPC and small time SEO. I think offline marketing would be something to look into as well. It shouldn't be hard to get your business cards or whatever in shops around the way.

This looks so much better. White text on a black background is awful. There are many people who can not read white text on a black background do to poor eyesight.

damn... owned me

yea I'm starting to think a lighter color scheme looks better. So I will work on that. Still a pretty big noob so well see how I do.

Also as far as marketing and what not, I put the website up since we are getting a new piece of technology soon(the TrackMan) and wanted to have a website to put on business cards and promotional material that we will pass out at local golf outings/tournaments. Thanks for all of the feedback guys, this is amazing.

I definitely didn't mean to own you or anything. I really didn't even do much.

I was just trying to show that you don't have to do much to a good wordpress theme to a have a decent looking site (at least good enough to get started).

Replace logo image.
Replace slideshow images.
Add your content.

Here is the original size logo image that I used:


You can have it to mess around with if you want it. I'm not really sure what it should say so PM me if you want the PSD.

I posted before regarding this, but still have some doubts. I'm starting a custom tshirt design company and need a website made. I currently have put my project out to bid. What should I look for in a good web design company?
Initially I had planned spending around $2000. But alot of the companies I have spoken seem to indicate that I need to be paying around $4k-$5k.

I can afford that, but obviously I just want the most bang for my buck and understand they will be trying to upsell a lot of stuff to me. I don't want to put out a lot of money and be disappointed because I overpaid for services like a sucker. At the same time I don't want to pay too little and get a crappy site.(Which is the main reason I'm not outsourcing it to some guy for $400 from ELance or ODesk). Any advice from people who have gone through similar situations?

I think you're in a tricky spot where 2k could be way too much or 4k+ could be about right. It really depends on the direction you want to go.

You could go with a simple CMS/theme based site with a basic order form w/ PayPal etc (less than $1k) or you could go with a completely custom shopping cart system with an on-site payment system ($4k+).

I think I might consider using WordPress/theme + a WuFoo form with payment integration to get it done for $500-1k + ~$400 per year (depending on how complicated the order form would need to be).

Thanks for all the input guys. I'm with mdm in that ranking for some of these terms isn't going to return enough for the work it would take. Nobody is going to be traveling more than a couple hours to come get lessons or a fitting.

I am definitely going to do a decent amount of offline marketing, but in regards to online marketing are there any good local options? Do you think facebook ads have any value? because I've looked into it and I can specify the demographics I'm looking to target(such as "people within 25 mile radius", "people listing golf as an interest", "people interested in sports that have kids") Just trying to decide if its worth it to run a campaign on FB. Anyone have any experience?

Google Adwords is probably going to be your best bet. It looks like the search term "junior golf" would cost ~$2 per click and yield ~3 clicks per day in the Atlanta area.

If you'd be opening a new Adwords account you should be able to find a code for $100 free to get started. I might have a code if you can't find one.

Also, I think the site looks a lot better. Something that you might want to try is to find a decent sized image of something golf related in your local area and use it as a full screen, stationary background image.

Something like this:
http://designshack.co.uk/articles/ja...s-with-jquery/

It may or may not look good but if I were working on it, it's something I'd try.

ok thanks txpstwx. Pretty sure I have a code laying around for some free adwords and a free facebook campaign as well. Maybe I'll test them out. Thanks again for letting me use the logo you made, and I'll look into a background image.

It's been a while since I've used AdWords, but I'm pretty sure their CPC estimate works differently than that. If $2 is the estimated CPC, that's for a top spot. You can bid on that keyword and set your max bid for less than $2 and still appear in the ads.

Something else you could do in addition to search/content marketing is to go directly to publishers who rank well for local search terms. For example this site http://www.atlantagolfer.com/ is number two for Atlanta golf and has Adwords ads on the site. By approaching the site owner directly you could meet in the middle between the price that you would pay through Google and the 68% cut that the publisher gets. You may have to play around with the Display Network ads to get an idea of how much is a fair price, however.

Another pretty good opportunity is that this completely useless page from Demand Media ranks second for "atlanta golf lessons" and they offer self serve ads/use Adsense. I don't know how well you'd be able to limit it to that specific page, but I imagine a lot of visitors that come looking for golf lessons would click your ad a lot when the rest of the page is an irrelevant golf club directory.

Your niches are pretty small, so I don't know if you'd be able to find place to target just juniors or just people looking for club fitting through direct ad buys, but if the price is right it could be worthwhile.

Two can ninja edit I suppose. lol

Yeah, I didn't really have much of value to add, I just wouldn't call that page useless. There's tons of advertising opportunities for him on and offline.

I take back calling the page useless, a directory is useful, it's just not a good result for that query. It's like searching for "las vegas craps" and getting a list of every casino in Clark County. Sure, they all offer craps, but it seems pretty clear the user is looking for more topical information.

hey i own a .me domain, three letters and last letter is a "c". A local middle eastern IT/Webdesign company contacted me and told me a client is interest in purchasing the domain. What is the best way the value the domain.

THey offered me 500$.

No website is uploaded, only the domain.
The letters arent the initials of any big company.

I'd snap sell for $500 if you have no major plans for it. It sounds like a favourable price to me.