Two Questions - Using New Program & Paying a Professional

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Greetings, one and all.   

Family members are telling me that my self-made website is not professional enough and that I need to have it professionally designed.  (www.ResolveChurchConflict.com)

Question #1

Currently, if a person does a search on the words "church conflict" on Google or Yahoo, I come up number one on the page and have for years.  If I use a new program, will that effect my position there?  If so, why and is there anything I can do about it?

Question #2

Depending on the answer to #1, if I wanted to stay with CSB, is there a list of people who build websites professional using CSB that I can consider?  Is there a list of professionals you could recommend if I were to leave CSB altogether?

Thanks so much.

Ken N.

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Family members are telling me that my self-made website is not professional enough and that I need to have it professionally designed.

Ok...I have to answer your questions with a question...
What do they consider Professional?   What are they expecting, do the want to see?  How about examples of websites that display the LOOK they want.


Your site is:
Clean, easy to navigate, simple to read and highly useable, contains good content for people and the search engines. You are not using frames (good thing) and you have decent rankings.
I have seen some "professionals" produce websites from $600 - $5000+ that were not as well laid out and useable or as highly ranked.

So...I go back to my questions.  What do they want to see? 
Layouts are easy to change, but I like your use of imagery (non-animated) and when appropriate, columns (like on the testimonial page). 

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Ken, I agree completely with Samantha. I had a look at your site, and was quite surprised. Considering your family members' comments, I was expecting something amateurish. But what I found is well described by Sam.

Unless you want to do a lot more work, or think it is time for a "new look", my suggestion would be to get some more specifics from your family, and perhaps do some "tweaking" to incorporate their ideas.

Rick

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To Samantha and Rick,

Thanks so much for your feedback and encouragement.  It is nice to get a neutral third party opinion.   

Just our of curiosity - if and when I ever move to another software program - do you have any idea if I would lose my #1 ranking with Google and Yahoo (e.g. of a search for "church conflict")?  In other words, does the software program have anything to do with it?

Thanks again.

Ken Newberger

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There is no doubt in my mind that changing your site has a substantial risk of affecting your ranking in the short term.

The software program may have some affect, however the main thing is to maintain the same site structure, page names, content, and links, in the new site. This will be very difficult to do, and there is no guarantee the search engines will see it as unchanged.

In my opinion, your site is fine as it is, and my recommendation, as before, is to make minor improvements to incorporate the comments of your family.

But Samantha knows more about impacting rankings and will probably give you additional comments.

Rick

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I agree with Rick!         Based on your family comments I expected something totally different.

See what your family has in mind...what they object to specifically, what do they want changed and see if you can fit some of it into existing site.  You can redesign your layout within CSB and still do well on rankings if you have incoming links AND as Rick said, maintain site structure, page naming, linking.

Take a look at this page for some more basic search engine info. Remember site rankings are flexible!  They can bend but also break! Feed the HUMAN and the COMPUTER visitor.  TEXT content is vital for search engines and you have it.
Flash is fun for the human eye but does NOTHING for the search engines.  If your family wants some flash, etc then by all means add some, but make sure you do not remove anything vital from your content that the search engines need. And do NOT use a splash page to enter your site.  Your rankings will tank!!!

Software CAN greatly impact a site's rankings. Coding is very important. CSB, though old, still creates sites that can be highly ranked. 
But design and consistency will hurt you just as much as Rick said!
- If you suddenly change your pages to have less CONTENT, search engines may find you less relevent.
- If you suddenly get rid of the id11 page naming and change to words (contactus.htm) etc, it breaks links.
So, stay consistent with page naming. 
- CSB pages do not have to all look the same.  Every site that I have made (or edited) has an individual look/feel.  They CAN look like bland templates when the author has little imagination to adjust the site.  Even if you were to use Dreamweaver, Site Spinner, Expression Web or any other web builder or content management, you would have a choice of basic templates to start your site.  It is what YOU, the author and webmaster, do to that web page that makes it unique to reflect your personality and your purpose.  There is much you can do within CSB. 
- If you do move to another software, you are better changing out pages little by little to see the effect on your rankings.

Let us know what they want and we will try to steer you to your best options!  Stay for a while longer or move to something else.... 

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Samantha and Rick,

Thanks again -  a million.   

Given your sage advice, I am not going to make any software changes.  Plus, I have always like the ability to make my own changes anytime I see fit.  Perhaps I should look a bunch of CSB websites to get more ideas to see if I want to freshen my look.  Regardless, thanks so much for your guidance.  The one thing that doesn't change throughout is the value and care found at Samisite!!!

Ken Newberger

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2 observations:

1. I made some changes to my CSB generated homepage in Front Page. In +- a weeks time my ranking fell from 9 to 50 for a certain search keywords string. It has to do with how the keywords/metatags are generated by the software. CSB is relatively clean and lean whereas other software may put a load of unnecessary info at the top of pages that reduced search engine effectiveness.

2. Searching for specific keywords is only an indication. Being No 1 for [church conflict], although important, does not mean No 1 for e.g.. [church dispute] or [arguments in church] etc. I Googled some other keywords and did not find your site in the first 30. If [church conflict] is the main search term used by people trying to find your site, don't change it! I've used StatCounter that helps select good keywords (h**p://www.statcounter.com) which one can target hits with.

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Thanks, Ed, for your insight!   

I appreciate your time and advice.

Ken N.

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Given your sage advice, I am not going to make any software changes.

Eventually we will all need to move away from CSB, and you can read about that here.

But there is a right way and a wrong way to do it.
Taking down web pages built in one software and replacing with another software can be tricky but can be done.
I guess I will have to make a page about the recommendations from all of us for people as they move to other software so they are not harmed.

Renaming pages again, can be tricky, but if done properly will not cause too much havoc to your rankings.
If you are on a LINUX server, you have more control and easier time redirecting pages. Windows servers do not offer the .htaccess file that Linux does. 

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Agreed. I also can't be without .htaccess unless there is an as cheap, easy, & efficient alternative.

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(One of the sites I assist on is on a WINDOWS server and I HATE IT....There are things I WANT to do and CAN do if it was Linux but Windows will not let me.  To do some of the same things you have to have special code written.  WHAT A PAIN!  I tried to convince the owner to switch servers since the host offers Windows AND Linux units at the same cost. But no...  )

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There are some advantages during a redesign with new software, in moving away from the CSB meaningless page names to significant names such as "contact_us" if this can be done without damaging ratings.