An Affordable Web Design Solution

For many small businesses a good website is out of reach due to the costs involved. In addition finding a good web developer is a daunting task due to the huge amount of spam and misleading information found in the search results these days. In my efforts to build my web design business in Atlanta I have researched every web designer in the top 20 Google, Yahoo and Bing results and I am amazed at what I both see and have learned.

This has inspired me even more to work harder at helping those small to medium businesses get a great website for a low cost while doing more than just the design work. It is important to me that all of my customers not just have a new website but also have the support and training to make it work for them. Therefore I work hard with all of my clients to help them have a good working site that both promotes their business as well as brings them new prospects and clients or customers.

So the bottom line is if you need an affordable web design and more please give us a look and allow us to show you the difference.
I am at your service!

Safer Online Buying and Selling Tip

I thought I would share this with everyone here and maybe get some new ideas from the readers. I have been doing business online for a little over 11 years now and most of it by selling products and services via ether my website or EBay. I have been an EBay seller for about 10 years and thus I have been with PayPal about the same amount of time. If anyone has sold items via either you have probably had the experience of a charge back or have heard the stories. In addition I am sure most of you have at least heard the other stories of someone getting ripped off because they bought something online. I know it has happened to me back in my early years and so I sat down and came up with what has proven to be a pretty foolproof system to protect myself and most of all my money.

If you do this you will feel a lot safer buying and selling online from now on.

First you need to bank with a bank or preferably a Credit Union that offers free checking with no strings or hidden fees. Then do this, open a new checking account at the same bank where you primary personal or business checking accounts are serviced. You are going to name this new checking account “Firewall” Account. You will want to get a Visa or MasterCard Debit Card with the account also. Have them put the name Firewall on it so it is easy to keep separate and you don’t use the wrong card in an online purchase. If you have a PayPal account go into your settings and link this new account to it and go through the verification process. You can list the new Debit Card if you want to in addition to the checking account. Make sure you delete any accounts you have listed currently and also remove any credit cards. In addition be sure to tell your bank or credit card company not to allow charges from PayPal anymore on the accounts you removed.  Now when you find something online you just have to have go into your banks online system and transfer just enough money into the firewall account to pay for the item. It should credit immediately and then go make your purchase. Never keep more than a few dollars in the firewall account and the same goes for your PayPal account. If you sell online get a PayPal Debit card they are great and payback on purchases. If you sell a big item transfer the money to your Firewall account and then move it via online transfer into your regular checking account immediately. Or you can just go by the ATM at your bank and take the money out immediately and then deposit into your regular checking.

That’s it, now you can shop with allot less risk and if you ever sell something and get a charge-back you will be in the driver’s seat with whoever you are dealing with.

Happy Shopping!

Website Design

Major New Google Search Engine Changes

I have been a bit surprised that there hasn’t been more news about this mentioned in the mainstream. It was by chance that I found out about it, and yes as the title states Google is making a huge change to their search engine algorithm that is going to have a big impact on the page rank of many websites around the world. Google page rank for those of you not SEO educated is the rank a website gets from Google to determine basically where a site appears in their search results. The higher the page rank the closer to the first page in search results for the given keyword queries you ask Google to show. Example: website design. I have read the blog several times now and still have not made my final decision as to opinion on this. I am leaning toward the “this is a good thing” but I still want to know more before I make that permanent.

What I will say for now is if you are concerned about the success of your website and online advertizing campaign then go read the blog. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/finding-more-high-quality-sites-in.html If what you read is going to affect your site then get busy making the changes now to avoid the gut wrenching experience of seeing your years of hard work gaining Google page rank go to waste. If not then use this to your advantage and start creating new original content that will take advantage of this and help you gain new page rank hopefully.

If you have any questions or I can help in any way feel free to contact me through our website http://gfdwebdesign.com

1 AM Friday Morning!

The life of a website designer is one where inspiration comes and it is not always at such a good time. The ideas sometimes hit you in the weirdest times. For example: Sitting in rush hour traffic, at Moms house having lunch, in a boring meeting, and at one o’clock in the morning while fast asleep in bed. I really need a good nights sleep but I got up hit my You Tube Channel to do a creative tweak and found this very cool tool or better yet free toy on You Tube that kept me awake for way longer than I wanted. Oh well that is the life of a creative spirit, My dear old Dad tried to warn me! Our website Design Site!

New Joomla Website

I have been working on a new Joomla site for my business.  It has been allot of fun and Joomla is really great. I am going to try Word Press next to see how it works out. Please take a look at my new site and let me know what you think. http://gfdwebdesign.com

My Introduction

Greetings,

Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Frank Dollar and I am the owner of GFD Web Design. I made the decision a couple of years ago to start a new website design business based on the fact that I love the World Wide Web and creating web stuff. I bought my first computer, a Commodore 64 in 1982 and fast became the local champion of Hang Man. I later bought my first real PC in 1989 and logged onto the World Wide Web in 1994 the day after Al Gore turned it on. Within 2 weeks I bought a book on Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) and went to work on my first of many websites. I was a Builder at the time and spent most of my free time pecking away on my new best friend. In late 1999 I made the decision to change from building stuff to designing stuff to build. I founded GFD Architectural Design http://www.gfddesign.com in 2000 and went to work on the website for it and continued to work on that site and doing sites for friends and some of my Builder Clients. I can truly say that I have been and continue to be in love with the whole information sharing technology thing for close to 20 years now.

Enough about me, I am glad you stopped by and I hope you will give us a chance to take good care of you and your website needs. I give my fervent guarantee that I will oversee everything we do personally for you and I will do whatever possible to make sure you are a satisfied customer. There are thousands of web design companies out there and I know that to get good business you have to do good business. As a fellow business manager and entrepreneur with over 30 years successful experience I feel I bring something to your business that most cannot.

Thank you for taking time to look us over and please if I can be of any help, do not hesitate to give me a call.

I am at your service.

Oxylus Ruined My Week!

Control Your web

Greets!

Ok so here I am got my WPress all set up and now what? Ok I know, try to follow this.

After 10 years owning my own fairly successful business doing Architectural Design I have decided to follow a dream and start doing Website Design. It has been a hobby of mine since 1994 (See About) and so I finally did it. See the economy has all but wiped out my architectural design business and so I had to do something right? Well I am not one to sit around and feel sorry, mad hell yes, sorry no. So at any rate I hope to bring some fresh perspective here and share some ideas and insights from a real business / entrepreneur that has consumed and been consumed by the Wx3. (World Wide Web)

For example I just bought a really cool flash, php, xml, html, css and theme from a freelancer on active den. I paid 40.00 bucks for it after spending a week looking around at content management systems that I could use to show case my new venture.  Well as I have seen numerous times it turned out to be a sub beta version that hardly did what the author / developer said it would “OXYLUS”.  I think the right title would be an Alpha version of the thing.

Here is the description they give:

Hello everyone and welcome to another truly amazing full website template by Oxylus Flash.

We’ll start off by clearly stating that this is one of the most flexible, feature rich, complex and (funny enough) easy to use and implement flash template you can buy today !

This template has 677 unique XML settings, comes with 14 (that’s right, fourteen) amazing modules including full e-commerce capability (shop) and blog with comments, it’s bundled with two quite differently styled skins and most importantly you receive our amazing full Content Management System (CMS – aka Admin Panel) so managing your content will be a breeze !

Our CMS has been updated with great new features like a very easy to use installer (hence a very quick and simple set up), an advanced image cropper so you don’t have to edit your images before uploading, user management (permissions – ability to have sub-admins with limited privileges) and many more.

Our CMS will also generate a HTML clone of your site for Search Engines (SEO) and in conjunction with the flash templates full deep-linking support your clients will find you and be able to access the deep pages straight away ! We will soon update our CMS so that a mobile html version is also generated for iPhone iPad and other such devices.

We’ve included both a XML driven version and the Admin version of the template so it’s up to you which one you’d like to use.

As you can imagine since there are simply so many settings you can change we can’t go through all of them, however we can tell you it’s probably the most flexible templates around, you can change pretty much everything from module dimensions and spacing to animations.

Pretty much all the text fields are html formatted and support all the common special characters (german, french, spanish etc.).

The previews for this template don’t do it justice because there are simply so many extra features we can’t demonstrate, like the fact that you can use images and video as background with playlist/slideshow. That means you’ll have a nice surprise once you purchase it and see how powerful it really is.

You also get 83 pages of help split in sections so hopefully everything is covered from the admin installation to all the different settings and features you can use.

Pretty impressive looking right? Like I said I spent a week researching this and I missed the damn Super Bowl last Sunday installing it and getting it ready to go Monday. The set up went well as this was not my first rodeo setting up stuff on a web server.  Then after a huge sacrifice of a beautiful Sunday and missing the commercials on the S.B. I awoke Monday and set about setting up my new baby. I had already done all the textual content so I was ready and then the trouble starts. The text editor is total fubar and took me all day to get 2 pages done. Then Tuesday it was time to upload some images, damn what a joke it wouldn’t do anything but throw errors. I figured out a work around and just did it the hard way via FTP and then copy past the links to the code ect. Later in the day I was so frustrated I went on their so called “Support Forums” and asked for help. There I see several other poor victims having the same issues and asking for help. Some had posted weeks before and not one had received an answer. I went ahead and posted a very humble request for help to no avail. I then followed up with an even more humble email direct to one of the cough developers. Talk about CUSTOMER NO SERVICE, I have had no reply, none nada nothing and here it is Friday night.

Well here we go, this wil be my new theme here on Word Press. I will tell everyone about my adventure in the start up of my new business and share all I can about all the stuff I learn and experience.

Maybe you learn something and maybe I save you from the same mistakes and blunders I will make.

We shall see, right!