The mission of the Association of Legal Administrators is to promote and enhance the competence of professionalism of all members of the legal management team; improve the quality of management in law firms and other legal service organizations; and represent professional legal management and managers to the legal community and to the community at large.

Visit their website, below.

Association of Legal Administrators Tulsa Chapter

If your organization is a non-profit and is in need of a website please contact us. We offer discounts to non-profits and in some cases will design and develop them as a charitable donation.

Following up a report that online-only retailers experienced an 11% increase in visits for Black Friday 2008 (over 2007), Hitwise released additional numbers for Cyber Monday 2008, traditionally expected to be a better day in terms of online traffic and sales for e-tailers.

Cyber Monday 2008 snapshot

• Among the top 500 Retail Web sites, the percentage of U.S. visits were down 1% on Cyber Monday 2008, compared to 2007.
• U.S visits to Brick and Mortar store Web sites (100 total) were down>4% on Cyber Monday.
• U.S visits to Online-only Web sites (100 total) were up 5% on on Cyber Monday.
• U.S visits to the Comparison Shopping Web sites were down 21% on yber Monday.
• U.S visits to the Catalog Web sites were down 4% on Cyber Monday.

Cyber Monday visits to top retailers

Percentages based on U.S. visits to the top 500 Retail Web sites.

1. Amazon.com - 10.77%
2. Walmart.com - 8.55%
3. Target.com - 4.56%
4. BestBuy.com - 3.81%
5. Sears.com - 2.74%

Amazon.com’s traffic increased 21% on Cyber Monday 2008 vs. 2007. Walmart.com’s traffic increased 6%.

The search is on for the perfect gift

Meanwhile, search engines Google and Lycos released the hottest gifts and most searched for products this holiday season. Google Product search released a 2008 Holiday Shopping guide, complete with special offers to use Google Checkout.

Google’s most searched gifts:

1. nintendo wii
2. wii fit
3. ipod touch
4. xbox 360
5. nintendo ds
6. ipod nano
7. uggs
8. nikon d90
9. zune
10. digital picture frame

Lycos.com Top 10 toy searches

1. iPod
2. Poker
3. Naruto
4. Pokemon
5. Dragonball
6. Barbie
7. Inuyasha
8. Blackjack
9. Webkinz
10. Wii

In the video game wars, Xbox 360 is beating out Playstation 3 on Lycos for most wanted game console, and Guitar Hero World Tour is well ahead of Rock Band 2. Most popular video games include 1) RuneScape, 2) Halo 3, 3) Final Fantasy XIII, 4) Diablo III and 5) Grand Theft Auto IV.

The following post is an excerpt from seomoz.org

Why? What makes SEO more attractive in a down market? While I can’t say for certain, I’ll enumerate the most common explanations and motivations I’ve heard and perceived:

1. The Web Outperforms Other Sales Channel
   When organizations look at the paths leading to sales and income (a critical analysis whenever budgets are under scrutiny), the web almost always comes out with one of two assessments. Either it’s a leading sales channel (especially from an ROI perspective) or it’s deemed to be an area with the greatest opportunity for growth. In both scenarios, web marketing and, in correlation, SEO, takes center stage.
2. It’s the Right Time to Re-Tool
   Established companies frequently use down cycles as a chance to focus attention inward and analyze themselves. Consequently, there’s a spike in website redesigns and SEO along with it.
3. Paid Search Drives Interest in SEO
   Paid search spending is still reaching all-time highs, and when companies evaluate the cost and value, there’s a nagging little voice saying “70%+ of the clicks don’t even happen in the ads; use SEO.”
4. SEO is Losing its Stigma
   Google is releasing SEO guides, Microsoft and Yahoo! both have in-house SEO departments and the “SEO is BS” crowd have lost a little of their swagger and a lot of their arguments. No surprise - solid evidence trumps wishful thinking, especially when times are tough.
5. Marketing Departments are in a Brainstorming Cycle
   A high percentage of companies are asking the big questions - “how do we get new customers?” and “what avenues still offer opportunity?” Whenever that happens, SEO is bound to show up near the top of the “to be investigated” pile.
6. Search Traffic Will Be Relatively Unscathed by the Market
   Sales might drop, conversion rates might falter a bit but raw search traffic isn’t going anywhere. A recession doesn’t mean that people stop searching the web, and with broadband adoption rates, Internet penetration and searches per users consistently rising, search is no fad - it’s here for the long haul.
7. Web Budgets are Being Reassessed
   We’ve all seen the news about display advertising falling considerably - that can only happen when managers meet to discuss how to address budget concerns. Get 10 Internet marketing managers into rooms with their teams and at least 4 or 5 are bound to discuss SEO and how they can grab that “free” traffic.
8. Someone Finally Looked at the Web Analytics
   It’s sad, but true. When a downturn arrives or panic sets in, someone, maybe the first someone in a long time, checks the web analytics to see where revenue is still coming in. Not surprisingly, search engine referrals with their exceptional targeting and intent-matching are ranking high on the list.

I did not realize it but I ran into a killer Flash based website. The user interface is very progressive in that it uses a depth of field page navigation interface to allow the user to navigate the site in a stream of time warp style pages ala Apple TimeMachine, except with a unique spiraling human genomesq infinite spiral.

This site is noteworthy because it is uses a fresh unique dimensional content generation and page delivery schema.

It is my intention to assemble the logo concepts and screen shots from the last 4 years of Winston Web Development Inc. For now I just have a screen shot of the interface we used for the last year or so:

Just one month ago I decided to make the switch to Wordpress from the Joomla site I originally created the sites on. Wordpress is a blog platform which we often modify to become a full CMS system. In addition to its ease of use and great presentation, Wordpress is great for SEO. I installed Wordpress, created a custom theme and began with the on-site optimization.

As with all SEO, the process begins with extensive keyword research. I had to understand my market fully and my competitors before I could make an educated decision as far what keywords to target. I looked at “modern architecture” , “modern houses” , “modern” and the like to identify the following:

1. What terms were being searched for?
2. What was the search volume?
3. What sites were being found?
4. Could my site compete?

It is very important to make good decisions because this sets the goal for all future efforts (for the immediate future anyways).

The terms I honed in on and ultimately selected were “modern home” which generates approx. 80k searches per month and “modern homes for sale” which generates 4k per month. The first was a long term goal for me that I’d hope to hit within the year. The second, though not huge volume would provide quality traffic and also was somewhat of a vanity term for me.

In any case, I dialed in the on-site optimization and began making some off site changes as well by building links and re-naming existing links towards my sites. This is a process and results are not seen immediately. In my case, I did have mature sites with a pretty good foundation of inbound links.

However, I was quite impressed with how quickly Google reacted to my changes. Literally, within a couple weeks I had moved from page 10 on Google to page 4 for “modern home” and on the second page for “modern homes for sale“. This was exciting!

I had to ride it out for a few more weeks checking my SERPS almost daily to find Google had not crawled my site since last visit and no change in rankings.

It wasn’t until my report ran yesterday that I found I had placed both sites, yes both sites on the front page of Google for “modern homes for sale”. That’s two out of ten. Now we’re talking!

Today I checked my rankings for my second term “modern home” to once again be thrilled. Google had crawled my site and I was now #5 baby on page one! This is huge and I expect this to push my site up to the next level with a huge increase in traffic. And best of all, it’s likely going to be very qualified visitors with no long term costs.

I’ll report back with traffic reports later.

Below is is a picture of the first page of Google for “Modern Homes” - Movemodern.com is ranking #5

Below is the first page of Google for “Modern Homes for Sale” Movemodern.com is #8 and Moderntulsa.net is #10

There are number of different ways to change and update the content on a website. In this article I will go over the different options so that you will better be able to find the correct solution for your budget.

1. Webmaster
The first way to manage, update, change or create new content for a website is to have a dedicated webmaster working as an internal employee for your organization. This webmaster must have a working knowledge of such technologies as HTML, CSS, FTP, Graphic Design and other basic web development and web design methodologies. The webmaster would serve as the primary vehicle through which updates and modifications would be made to the website, through the utilization of professional web development protocol.

Pro
100% flexibility and customizability. With a full time webmaster, you may add, change or create any part of your website at anytime you please and you may change to look feel and function any way you want. You have 100% flexibility to add and change the website with absolutely no restrictions but the skill set and capabilities of your webmaster.

Con
Cost - to hire a full time web professional you must have enough updates and changes to the website to justify the salary of a full or part time employee.

2. Third Party Service Provider
This is a commonly used scenario for many organizations who do not have the need for a full or part time webmaster. In this scenario your organization would contract with a third party service provider - often the same company who built the website in the first place. When your organization needs updates or changes to the website, you would email or call the service provider who would implement those changes to the website. In this scenario there are two major fee structures:

1. Hourly
In the hourly fee structure the service provider performs the updates to the website and bills your organization based on the time it took to implement the changes. This is a good scenario for organizations who have non predictable changes that don’t occur in a regularly scheduled or predictable manner.

2. Contract
The contract fee scenario is best for situations where you organization will have regularly scheduled changes to the website such as monthly or weekly specials, promotions, events or constantly changing job postings. Since the workload is the same for every content change the service provider can quote a monthly contract price to make the changes to the site. This scenario is best for companies who have no full or part time webmaster and who are unwilling or unable to invest in the up front cost of the development of a content management system for their website.

3. Content Management System
Content Management Systems (CMS) are becoming more and more popular these days as organizations realize the benefit of having an up to date, dynamic and alive web presence. CMS allows non-technical employees of your organization to make changes to the website without having to understand professional web development protocols such as HTML, CSS, FTP or graphic design.

Through this option the web development agency who designs the website, builds into the site specific pieces of functionality and usability that allow non-technical content providers to serve as webmasters; updating, changing, modifying and adding content.

There are two major kinds of CMS:
1. Database Driven Control Panels
2. Software Based Contributions

Database CMS Approach
In the Database Model approach, an advanced CMS method, the web developer will build custom data structures to hold and store the web content, which is set up to automatically publish the content to the website. The non-technical content contributor would utilize user friendly forms to input the data which would then be stored in the database and automatically served up on the web page.

For example: For an news page, the web site content contributor would login into the Control Panel and fill out a form with data fields such as “News Item Title” “News Item Date” “News Item Description” etc. Then click “SAVE” that piece of content would then be stored in a database and automatically published onto the website with no further action required by the content contributor.

Pro
Anyone can modify the website, anyone who knows basic computing can login in and modify or change content. Low ongoing cost compared to hiring a 3rd party service provider at hourly or contract rates.

Con
Unnecessary cost for organizations with little or infrequent website changes. Large upfront and/or ongoing cost for advanced CMS for database and advanced server costs. Updateable pieces of the website are hard coded, so all updateable items much be identified at the outset of the development. Slightly more rigid options for updating content versus the Software Method.

Software CMS Approach
In the Software Based CMS method the web development agency builds the website using a specific methodology that will allow the website to work with specialized web design software. The software is comprised of basic word editing and layout tools similar to Microsoft Word, but has the capability of connecting directly to a web page and allowing the user to make changes to the website. This method eliminates the need for content contributors to have advanced web development proficiencies in HTML, CSS, FTP and Graphic Design by enabling them to utilize a simple and basic graphical user interface.

Pro
Anyone who knows how to use Microsoft Word can make modifications to the website. Low ongoing cost compared to hiring a 3rd party service provider at hourly or contract rates. Low upfront and ongoing cost compared to the Database CMS Model. Great flexibility, non-technical content contributor can operate with great freedom to make changes to the website.

Con
Small learning curve necessary for software. Lack of heavy constraints used in Database method gives user the freedom, but can result in non standardized web formatting and jumbled content structures.

In Conclusion
Regardless of which method you use to change and modify the content of your website, the most important thing is that you are keeping the content on your site fresh and alive.

In todays market of sophisticated web users, it is easy to sniff out stale and dusty content on websites that have not been changed in years. The ability of your website to remain alive, active, dynamic and constantly refreshing is a major contributing factor to your organizations ability to remain competitive online.

For more information about Content Management Systems and how they can help improve your web presence please contact us and we will set up a time to further educate you on the benefits and opportunities of CMS.

I hope to have it completed within the next few days so we can start blogging our heads off.

Talk soon!