Case Study: How A Site Redesign Can Increase Traffic and Revenue

Giving your site a new look can help boost traffic and user engagement. It's also a good time to optimize the site's HTML. The importance of on-page SEO is often overlooked in favor of link building so I wanted to look at an example where it made a big difference.

Years ago I had developed a website which was a customized CMS system for a local SMB. They're in the B2B (business to business) space meaning they don't provide products and services to a large market. Their expectations for traffic weren't very high as they have a very specific focus.

They came back to me at a later point asking for some enhancements to their site and we both agreed the site's design could use a major update. It had been a few years and web trends had significantly changed.

After more than two years I took a look at the results and we're both quite happy with them.

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Updating Old Web Applications

The past few days I've been working on some websites that I wrote years ago. Part of the motivation was to add new features but there were also some bugs that developed when external APIs changed or in some cases disappeared.

Some of it was painless, other parts had me banging my head up against the wall.

I thought I'd document some of the problems I ran across and some of the things that have helped make the update process easier.

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Bloggers using Java

Some popular services that bloggers use, use Java. Two of them are Blogger and FeedBurner.

This may not be big news to some, but it's not something that has been publicized much. There's a lot of buzz on other web programming languages such as PHP, Ruby on Rails, Python, Perl, etc. So I thought I'd take the time to highlight these sites and others that use Java.

You'd think that anything related to Web 2.0 would be about RoR, LAMP, etc. Not Java, which has been around since mid 90's and has been used on many popular sites.

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