Recently, I have been purchasing domains that catch my eye. Each time I pick one up I brainstorm for a while about what I can do with them. Since I’m seriously toying with the idea of quiting my day job and doing web design and development, each domain I’ve bought has an underlying theme of business in Colorado Springs. Now all the SEO research I’ve done says that these all really need to point to some unique content. So now I have some choices to make. Should I take each domain and point it to the sites I have that are related? That’s probably a bad idea. No, what I think I’m going to do with them is either park them or create sub-sites that ultimately point to my business website for contact generation.

Building websites used to be so damn simple. You got a call from a client asking you for a quote to build a website. Once the client accepted, you began the arduous task of designing a site that they like. After it was delivered, you submitted it to the search engines and hoped that one day soon they would appear in a search. Now the process has gotten so complex that only the true geeks out there can figure out exactly what needs to be done in order to get a site on a search engine. Do you spend the time coming up with keywords or do you place all the money on the title tags? Do you spend your days posting to other peoples blogs in hopes that eventually they’ll create a link to your site and thus improve the page rank of your site? How confusing can we make this?

Now with the population on the web ever expanding, I know the search engines need some way to distinguish which sites are better than others but come on, small businesses really have little options about getting their site ranked over the larger ones other than paying Overture or someone else to get their site listed.

This brings me back to my original point. I purchased some domains so that I can build my own linking network, not only for me but also for other businesses in my predicament. Now granted, I’m writing these sites along with all the applications that will make them useful. I’m going to eat the initial development time in the hopes that someone finds the site and discovers my business was the one that created it and decides “Hey, I like this guys work. I should give him a call.” I know what you’re saying, that seems like a long way to go for a few links and a possible call from a potential client. Well you’re right. My diabolical plan is actually to use these sites to make contacts that I can exploit later for business opportunities.

Well, with any luck, this will all pay off. If not, I guess I’ll be pimping my web skills on the streets of Colorado Springs to anyone willing to take a chance on me.

At any rate, as I roll out these sites, I’ll post them here for your viewing pleasure.

Take care.

Todd

Dialog Fader Example

If any of you have ever tried to create a form that prompts with a dialog and fades out the rest of the page without using pop-ups, then you might want to check out the attached file. It uses YUI and some basic Javascript. I’d been trying to get this working for a while and finally sat down today and wrote an example of it. I was actually adding it to a custom app that I wrote a few years back for www.coachnadine.com which populates her front page with events.

If you are able to use it, I’d appreciate letting me now as well if you are able to make any improvements to it.

Thanks,

Todd