digitalapplejuice.com

Web rankings depend on a mysterious mix of incoming and outgoing links, the quality of said links, and content. To achieve better rankings, most people assume external links (links from other websites) are more important. The truth is internal pages actually offer more link value. Alt tags, page titles, keywords all work together to make a  site search engine friendly. Even so, content is king.  Search engines crave new content therefore they give more importance to sites with constantly changing content.

New content & Digg can drive enough traffic to your site to compensate for not really understanding the SEO rules of website design.

Try updating your content on a regular basis using Dreamweaver. Its a challenge. Even using templates, the process is tedious and not particularly inviting for me much less clients who may want to update the website at their convenience. The process of daily posting makes for a truly unpleasant experience.

Adobe’s solution has been their neglected child app "Contribute". I just grew even more annoyed with Adobe after using Contribute for a week. The worse part  was its image handling. It won’t compress the images upon upload (can’t they incorporate some basic Imageready technology?). Worse- it locks the files on the server so you cannot overwrite it with a compressed image. ugh. Oh yeah- and it restricts the size of an image in the post so you have to sneak around the backend and hack some invisible file to change that. Yep- people who can barely get their email will be able to manage that.

DigitalAppleJuice uses Wordpress. It should be said that we didn’t exactly choose Wordpress. Instead we chose Brian Gardner’s Revolution Magazine Theme which runs on Wordpress. One run through the demo site was enough to convince me. It has all the cms potential of Joomla without the klunky backend. The words "user-friendly" comes to mind.

It was only after we bought it that I actually got to look under the hood. Maybe because its the only paid theme I have ever owned but it is just lovely.  The foundation of the Wordpress universe- the loop- is so visible, the code so clean and elegant, I was able to customize the theme without having any real understanding of php or the Wordpress framework within two days. Juice v1 was launched in December.

In fact, in the three months i have had The Revolution Magazine theme, it has changed my business model. I can use wordpress to create sites for just about any requirements. Whether its a brochure site for bricks and mortar, a blog, or a portfolio site, I know that i can create a site that my clients will be able to update in the future as they see fit.

Did I mention that Wordpress is free? Revolution Magazine isn’t , but its less than half the price of Dreamweaver. You can share the balance with the plugin developers that will make your CMS the talk of the town.

 This is the loop:

To read more about the loop:

http://codex.wordpress.org/The_Loop