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I appologize.  I never got the meeting??  I did talk to someone from your firm, but no one set the meeting to me and would love to hear what you guys have to say and what you can do.  Sending you a pm with my number

Two years ago I had no experience what so ever with web design, development, or seo.  Didn't know what it was.  Through a lot of work and finding this site and the great people on it I was able to build something that pulled organic returns and was acceptible enough to get some art sold on our site www.originalartbroker.com

I originally built it as a favor for a friend with no budget as a side project.  Just wanted to learn being I am the owner of three small businesses.

I have reached the point where we have made a few sales and can justify spending the money to build a professional website by someone that "knows" what they are doing.

In the last month and a half I have looked through over 100 freelancers and dozens of us based firms to find someone that can build us a new site that conforms with todays best seo practices.

During this endevor all I can find junk.  There doesn't seem to be a firm out there that caters to anything, but the blind.  My homestead.com site that I have built out performs most of the refrences these companies send over.  That is a little disappointing considering I know so little about development and seo.  I have so little experience.

I would love to find a frim that has a good product and isn't looking to build their margin by cutting corners.   I don't need one more pitch that includes for another 1k we can tell you what sites your competitors link to and what keywords are used to enter their sites.

Bottom line is we are ready to take the next step and ready to dump this bloated site.  Ready to hire someone that can manage the seo of our site as I am far to busy.  Someone that is honest and will give us what we are paying for.

I have almost lost my patience in trying to find a web developer for our project.  I have searched high and low from freelancers to us based firms.  All I can find; freelancers that can't get the job done, but promise they can and us based firms that are currently getting away with murder charging through the nose on work that is not acceptable to say the least.

US based Firms

1. Seem to give you as little work as possible to increase their margin.  I get it we all need to make money.

2. Everyone knows how to do everything until you start telling them that you have a little education in the industry and will be testing their work.  All of the sudden they no longer talk to you.

3. Got a few recommendations and they are all subpar performers.   After asking them why their builds load so slow or have so many errors they have excuses that point to the customer

Freelancers over seas.

1. I am not sure where to start with this.  I have searched high and low in freelancer for someone that I can trust to build a site.  Of course there is a ton of junk to look through.  After countless hours of narrowing down the individuals I am thinking of giving a shot I find that they are not capable of the job.

All I want is a new website from a firm that is honest and knows what they are doing.  That is educated in seo best practices.  That can build a quality website and actually has references of sites they built that are still up and running and test out alright.

It is pretty bad when web development companies miss simple items like h tags.  Really?

Does anyone know of someone that knows what they are doing?  That can work with someone that knows how to run a dvd player.  Just disappointing to see all these web companies and freelancers that get away with murder.

Who earns their keep in this industry?!?!?!?

hahaha Great answer.  I am aware that with our design it makes it harder for us to sell.  And don't mind the criticism so thank you for your honesty.  I sent a PM.  Look forward to hearing your solution

Hey Seomoz friends

My friends and I started buying and selling art 5 years ago.  We did it all on ebay.  Two years ago I decided to try an attempt at building us a website to further our business outside of ebay.  www.originalartbroker.com I used homestead.com software aka intuit to do this.

I was able to get a lot of first page results in seo after a ton of work and willing to do a lot more.  I'm sure the homestead site slowed my efforts down.  I need more power

What we do.  We sell fine art.  We are trying to aspire to the leading seller of fine contemporary art online.  We will do whatever it takes to get there.  Our issue is not our product.  Our issue is getting traffic to the site.  I only have 175-200 visitors a day.  I need better results for the keywords of our artists and inquires that surround them.  We have a bounce rate of 70%, average time on site of 1 minute 50 seconds, and a slow loading site that is almost impossible to create individual pages for pieces (mgmt nightmare)

Outside of our site we have blogs, squidoo pages, facebook account with 2500 fans, twitter page with 2k followers, youtube channel, and a blog on the site for new arrivals.

We have a 200-250 piece on our site at any given time.  We add probably ten pieces on average a week.  We don't need any kind of ecommerce management software as most of our sales are done over the phone being that it is higher end art.  I need a site that out performs my competition.  I need to be in the top three when someone types in "leroy neiman" "peter max"  and so on.  I, with limited knowledge, need to be able to use the software everyday to upload new art as it comes in.  I want every piece to have its own page so that I can also add pieces to a google merchant account.  When I add new pieces under a certain artists and it creates its own page i want it to create h tags and an url extension for each product as I add them based off the discription and artists name.  I would like some sort of blog integration to post our new arrivals as we get them.  I would like some sort of customer capture.  I am thinking something along the lines of them prociding email, name, and zip code to see the prices on the site.

You are the seo pro so you know what it takes.  I would like to know what a solution would cost to get us on the ground with more seo power.  A site with speed that is easily indexed.  It doesn't need to have a lot of bells and whistles.

Please look at my site and let me know what you think.  You can get an idea from that of what we are doing.  Please give me an idea of what you can do and what it would cost.

Thank you

we really don't have logistics nightmares as we sell less items with bigger margin.  Shipping for us is not a concern and don't need it even calculated.  Most times we just include shipping and custom framing with out pieces.

Just wondering what people are using out there product sites and what they like.  Something that is seo friendly.  Easy to customize.  People rarely by high end art without communicating with us first so the functionality isn't that important when it comes to product management etc....

Seo is most important to me

do you have any sites that you can suggest looking at that use this software?

what addon for wordpress for the ecommerce side do you like the most?  I would want something that is seo strong and would allow the product to create its own individual page and url for viewing and combining with google merchant etc

Thank you Ryan.   Do you have any recommendations of plugins that would work well with what we are doing?  If you get a chance can you visit my site and give me a suggestion on what plugins to purseu with wordpress?  What is the best ecommerce plugin for wordpress? Something that is also seo powerful and will allow manipulation of the url extension or create it based off the product information given on the new piece being added to the site

Do you have any expamples of product sites that you have built with wordpress?  What ecommerce plugins work best for the ecommerce side?  I need to be able to add a product and it for it to create a page for that product while leaving the thumbnail of that product on the main artists page.  I would like for it to create a url extension based of the product information that is inputed.  I would like it to create automatic H tags for that specific product on its product page based off the information that is given on it.   Basically something that is seo storng and does some of the work for me

Who will design my site will be determined once I figure out the best solution for my site.  I will at that time find someone that is efficient with that certain platform.  I am not going to work around a certain person and their limitations and would rather hear what experts on this site have to say and do my research from there.  I will hire whoever I can find that will be able tow ork with that platform at that time.

We finally have a budget and want to dump our intuit/homestead site www.originalartbroker.com  Our budget is 5k-10k but could do more if needed.  I am slowly catching my competition with this homestead site that I built.  But I do realize it is time to step back, figure out what is best, and hire a pro to get the job done.

I am green in the seo and web development arena so please go easy on me and please help to point me in the right direction.  Just went out on a limb a couple years ago playing with homestead.com site software and built what we have today.  Didn't know anything about website development...it sort of just happened.  I feel and know that homestead.com solution is hindering what we could be doing due to the bloated nature of the site and inability to perform such task as 301 redirects etc....

I have been able to slowly attain first page seo rankings on keywords based of the artists we carry using this po-dunk homestead platform to build my site after a ton of work education thanks to seomoz and a lot of you.  But, have never asked for help and could really use some generosity of time in explaining a solution that would work best for our business.

Do we just go with a wordpress site that is similar to our current setup and use their plugins?  Do we use a cms software solution like magneto or joomla?  We will only have 200-300 pieces at any given time. We are constantly selling and buying new pieces providing us content.  We are need of a site that can perform well in terms of seo.  I have heard of a lot of people talking about joomla, wordpress, and magneto.

Would like to be able to have a product catalogue that ultimately sends whatever inventory we are uploading to our social sites and blogs so I don’t have to pump the product out to all of these sites.  We offer free custom framing with our pieces and it would be nice to have a program that could wrap the photos of the pieces with the different frames for our customers.  When I add a new piece I would like this software to have a predesigned product page that it plugs the information into.  I would like it to create the url extension based of the artists name, medium used, and piece name to create unique and individual urls.  I would like it to also create its own H tags throughout that product page according to the artist name description, and medium used.  I would like to be able to sink this up to google merchant and other sites to carry our product.

Bottom line is we sell art.  We sell pieces by specific artists.   We are constantly buying and selling.  I need something powerful that keeps up with our content