www.bludomain.com

Anybody had experience of these guys? They look pretty good!

Any thoughts, experiences, ideas?

Phil

I use them. Nice sites, good price, ****ty customer service. Sometimes they get back to you in 24 hours, sometimes, not at all. Typically if it's a "real" problem they get back to you within 24 hours. If you have a non-urgent question, sometimes I don't hear from them at all.

Don't do it!

Why don't you goggle BluDomain customer service before you move forward.

I have two sites from them, love them. I don't host with them though.

I use them, the customer service at the start was ridiculous.. I waited over a week to get my site ready to edit.

However, now the site is up and running, I couldn't be happier.

I'm looking into this site also, does anyone know if after you buy it can it be changed (info and pictures) at any time or is it a do it once and your stuck? (
I did read the faq's but this is my first time with a website and I have no idea what it is saying

Yes, the site is fully customizable and you can change the pictures and look anytime you want via a control panel that you have access to. it's easy and straight forward.

Great product, worst customer service I've ever dealt with.

Dont host with them and as others said their CS is the worst I have ever dealt with...end product is really nice though... I got my site from them...

Oops.. sorry... thought you were asking about web hosting, not design.

Nevermind.

In that case, I'd stay away from Flash websites.... more headache than they're worth and will get you absolutely nowhere for SEO and SE visibility.

{first post:
Go with LiquidWeb.com or LunarPages.com

I'm a web developer, and these are smaller outfits, but absolutely the best. I only use them or RackSpace. Rackspace is great, but extremely expensive unless you do this for a living.

With these two, you can get a human on the phone in minutes, and 90% of the time, it's an admin who can go over physically kick your box if need be.

I'd stay away from bluehost, bluedomain, bluegator, hostgator, etc.. They're all leased space at the Planet hosting center... Go with one of the smaller guys that actually own their datacenters.
}

^^^^^^

With bludomain's admin panel you can control meta tags...

KFormus wrote in post #8357093
^^^^^^

With bludomain's admin panel you can control meta tags...

You know that meta tags have absolutely no value in Search engine optimization right? They're from the old days and are effectively useless.

The only thing that matters is real, bonafide, selectable html-based text. This is not something that you can get when using a flash-based website and thus will severely impair the visibility of your website to search engines.

Todd Lambert wrote in post #8357174
You know that meta tags have absolutely no value in Search engine optimization right? They're from the old days and are effectively useless.

The only thing that matters is real, bonafide, selectable html-based text. This is not something that you can get when using a flash-based website and thus will severely impair the visibility of your website to search engines.

You sound like you know what you are talking about...so... After having a nice fully html based website for 2 years then moved to a full flash via bludomain our traffic went up, and we went from about the 4th page on google using varies searches to the #3 spot on the first page...all withing the last 8 months.

Please explain cause I am not knowledgeable when it comes to SEO.

Thanks!

It's hard to say without seeing the site... but it could be due to link popularity, your page rank increased, if it's a newer site (less than 2 years) it could be the site has been removed from the sandbox, etc... There's tons of variables to SERPs. The fact that your site was HTML before, may account for it even. Like I said, it's hard to say.

[edit - did a little digging, if this is your site:]
If the site in question is blacktiefoto... the site currently has a pagerank of 2 out of 10(you can't get a 10 so you'd ideally like to be at least a 3,4, or 5.) The domain has existed since Sept 2007, so you are indeed out of the Sandbox. The domain is only being renewed on a yearly basis which hurts your rankings. Google likes domains that are registered for more than two years in advance. The blog you have is probably helping you a bit, although it shows a PR of 2 as well... which is kind of odd - especially for blogspot sites. They usually tend to a bit better, but that blog is where you're ranking is coming from. The blog is giving your site link juice.

You're title tag is very bad. The only saving grace is that it has the word photography in it. It should have several other keywords that you wish to be found in Google by. These should also change from page to page, which cannot happen with your site, since the entire site encompasses one page with the Flash.

Here is what Google sees when it looks at your site:

Todd Lambert wrote in post #8358489
It's hard to say without seeing the site... but it could be due to link popularity, your page rank increased, if it's a newer site (less than 2 years) it could be the site has been removed from the sandbox, etc... There's tons of variables to SERPs. The fact that your site was HTML before, may account for it even. Like I said, it's hard to say.

[edit - did a little digging, if this is your site:]
If the site in question is blacktiefoto... the site currently has a pagerank of 2 out of 10(you can't get a 10 so you'd ideally like to be at least a 3,4, or 5.) The domain has existed since Sept 2007, so you are indeed out of the Sandbox. The domain is only being renewed on a yearly basis which hurts your rankings. Google likes domains that are registered for more than two years in advance. The blog you have is probably helping you a bit, although it shows a PR of 2 as well... which is kind of odd - especially for blogspot sites. They usually tend to a bit better, but that blog is where you're ranking is coming from. The blog is giving your site link juice.

You're title tag is very bad. The only saving grace is that it has the word photography in it. It should have several other keywords that you wish to be found in Google by. These should also change from page to page, which cannot happen with your site, since the entire site encompasses one page with the Flash.

Here is what Google sees when it looks at your site:

Not much there, is there?

You only have two links back to your website. One from POTN here, and another from stevenspoint-holiday-inn.com

Google has a whopping total of 9 pages indexed, related to your domain name. Of those 9, only 1 is valid and the rest actually either show errors or go to blank, empty directories. This is KILLING you.

Your site does not use a sitemap xml file, nor does it have a robots.txt file -the are big things that could help quite a bit (no so much with Flash, but with a normal site they would be golden)

Keyword density for the word photography:

Meta keywords: 2: 14: 14.3%
Meta description: 0: 20: 0%
Bold: 0: 0: 0%
Links: 0: 6: 0%
H1/H2/H3: 0: 0: 0%
Body: 0: 27: 0%
Title: 1: 4: 25%

That's not good.

You have pricing information visible, you know that right? There is an oldwedding.pdf file with pricing and a proposal/contract file for Kowalksky.. I bet Amy doesn't want her financial information being shared on the web, nor do you, I'd imagine.

I could go on but what I've listed, if corrected, would over time, greatly increase your website visibility.

I do web development for a living, and ranking results are historically much worse for Flash-based websites. Unless you're using blackhat techniques to embed keywords and other illegal methods of acquiring ranking, an html based site will do much better than a flash based one, every time.

That said, no matter what.. the best way to increase traffic and gain SE visibility is to produce good content often. Also getting other sites linked to you, become "authoritative" in your particular market and niche, etc.. all of these contribute to your ranking position and thus traffic.

Hope that helps... feel free to ask questions and I'll help how I can.

Well that was very informative! Thanks... As for the cheese music and what not, my business and traffic tripled since the site went live and my clients always comment on how much they love the website, so it works for me for right now! You know how quick people change what they like though!