Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Bradley thanks for the response.  When you say 'he has a working knowledge of SEO', you mean the new designer, correct?

Hello everyone, I've asked a few questions in here regarding website design, etc.  So first I want to thank you guys for the responses, and second I want to apologize I hope I am not boring you guys.  I just feel like this is a forum of qualified people and I value your opinions greatly.

Now to my question, I am considering a redesign as we are not happy with our current site located http://www.studentdebtrelief.us/.  We think it feels outdated, not structured well, no good call to actions, ten different fonts, blurry images, does have good integration with social media, boring and bland news page, etc.

I just wanted some opinions on these other sites that were designed by the fellow we are considering hiring.  I've gotten some feedback from a friend that he doesn't think they would be an upgrade from our current site, which I totally disagree with. Though I am the first to admit design/creativity is not my strong suit, so I don't value my own opinion on this very much either, lol. I am hoping I can get some insight from you guys here.  Do you think the designs below are of higher quality than our current site? Would you be more inclined to continue reading these sites than our own? Is there one in particular you think is the best?

http://www.jayhafling.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/archive.jpg

http://www.jayhafling.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/zazachat.jpg

http://www.jayhafling.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/jetpeppers3.jpg

http://www.jayhafling.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/pbs_9001.png

http://www.jayhafling.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/fidgetfeed.png

http://www.jayhafling.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/haute.jpg

http://www.jayhafling.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/worketc-732x1362.jpg

Thanks for the help

Thanks I will take a look at them as well.  So you wouldn't recommend a page being developed without using a theme?

Thanks for all the information.  Is there a reason to be using Genesis -vs- not using a theme at all?  This designer Jay Hafling doesn't use any themes and develops the site from scratch.  Is this good or bad?

I took a look at Greg Reindels site but there isnt much to make a decision on from his website.

We are currently browsing around to have a new site built for us as we are not happy with the current one. I checked out webdevstudio and it looks like they build quality sites, but they told me they aren't taking on small projects like mine currently.  So browsing around I found this designer from the Ukraine with a nice site and nice portfolio.  I am wondering if anyone has worked with him, and maybe to get some opinions on his work?  I don't want to make the wrong choice here..

What do you guys think?

http://www.jayhafling.com

Thomas thanks again for the information.  I took a look at those sites and it looks like webdevstudios does build nice wordpress sites.

Why do you recommend those hosts rather than anyold host? I dont get the reason.  We currently use godaddy and are satisfied with their service.  Is there some benefit of using a WP host that I am not aware of?

Thanks Thomas and please, we welcome real feedback and that means negative as well  The funny part is the guy who designed this for us is a regular on 99designs, but yeah it may be better to see lots of options rather than a few.

Maybe its time for me to think more about a complete redesign (we just built our current page one month ago for $1,250).  We aren't really happy with the way it came out we want a more professional feel.  Its difficult figuring out who to hire for something like this.  Guess thats going a bit off topic for now.

Thanks for the feedback Tim.  We would love to try to split test though we don't currently have a webmaster that can help us with that and our budget is pretty low (new company, only a couple months old).

I was hoping to get some feedback from you guys regarding some banner redesign we are working on for our website.  We are currently using the blue one, but we werent happy with the logo we had of the hat and hands shaking.  So once we started working on a new logo, that logo doesnt match at all with the current design so we were messing around with the banner and came up with these ideas.

Id appreciate some feedback good or bad

edit: sorry guess [img] doesnt work in here

Current Banner

http://i403.photobucket.com/albums/pp120/jimrawr/banner_zpse92b853f.jpg

New 1

http://i403.photobucket.com/albums/pp120/jimrawr/21-03-banner_zpsfc224501.jpg

New 2

http://i403.photobucket.com/albums/pp120/jimrawr/19-03-banner_zps17c3f2f1.jpg

New 3

http://i403.photobucket.com/albums/pp120/jimrawr/20-03-banner_zps966bb780.jpg

I am looking to hire a company to start a backlink campaign for me.  In my search I have stumbled across one which essentially charges a good amount of money to secure backlinks on .edu and .gov sites ($500 per link).  This would be in context links.  This company is an SEOMOZ recommended company so I am thinking the links will be well earned and not simple paid for to the university as to prevent future issues.

My question is, how can I put a value on these links for my website? Like lets says I have a DA of 1 right now, and I get one backlink with DA of 70 PA of 70, how will that effect my DA? How can I quantify how many .edu .gov links I will need before I start to place? I realize I will need some more mixed up there so it does not seem unnatural, but my business has a lot to do with universities and government entities.

I am trying to figure out how I can calculate the value of these links to me

Yep, that's understood completely.  I just don't want to wait around for 3 months to find out what we are doing is not enough and our rankings stink. Then after that period hire someone to help us which will take another 3 months.  I want to do this correctly from today, we just don't have unlimited funds so I am trying to figure out what is the most important next step for us.

If it helps, we are a service business that does all our sales over the phone, no internet sales.

I do need to do more research on making our PPC better.  Right now I do it myself and do not have much experience other than a few weeks of optimizing.  I feel like all of our competitors are doing the same thing and hardly any are organic, and isn't something like 94% of all clicks organic? So there's a lot of clicks to be hard vs continuing only using PPC

Hello everyone

I have started a new small business which currently we do only PPC marketing.  We are spending roughly $1,700 per week in this medium, and would rather invest this money into getting ourselves organic.  I am trying to figure out how we can best invest what money we have without stopping the PPC campaign, as we are only a month old with a limited budget ($2,000 month to spend on SEO).

Our website right now has a fair amount of content, and we are blogging 3x a week at around 700-1000 words average per blog.  We have zero backlinks at the moment, or at least from what I can see on opensiteexplorer, and of course this is expected.  I have used seomoz to optimize my pages, and keyword tool to figure out which keywords we want to go after.  Some of the better keywords available seem like it would be very hard to get on Google first page as most of the links are authorative .edu/.gov links.

So we dont know exactly where to invest now.  All our pages are optimized well via the seomoz tool, we get an A on all our pages for certain keywords.  It seems to me the next step would be back links building, but I want to make sure and hire a reputable company (going to use the SEOMOZ recommended list) so we dont have issues in the future.

Before doing so I was hoping to get some input from everyone here as to what might be the best path to take on a limited budget.  What are my priorities lets say if we could rank them? I should probably mention we are on facebook with 50 likes and about 50 shares via the blogs.

We are ranking on some of our keywords (only one first page on bing/yahoo, none on google), but I take this as a good sign for only having this website up for about 10 days. We have another website at first put up really quickly by a friend, then went to our new site.

Thanks for the help