Hello World

Wow, it looks like webforumz.com has reached critical mass with a lot of members active. I am anticipating that this is a really strong resource for me to draw ideas and suggestions from.

About me - I am a 43 year old father of two, one in college and one in high school. Previously in my career I owned a project management consulting firm specializing in IT projects and was CIO for a couple of fairly large companies, one in the chemical industry and the other in services with just under 40,000 employees. I got burned out of the corporate life with mediocre performers and what I considered to be unethical senior management. I have no formal training in html, SEM or SEO. I was doing SEM and SEO before those terms were even coined...and I suspect I can learn a lot from those that live in the world every day. Maintaining the website is only a fraction of what I do in the business, but it is a very important piece of the business.

I got into a family business my cousin started more than 20 years ago by developing his website in 2001. The week we decided to go live he had a heart attack and passed away. I remained active continuing to build the site (www.katom.com) and implementing PPC advertising which we have relied heavily upon since early 2002.

About the site - I built it with Miva Merchant and used NetBlazon for customization. We have a number of third party and custom modules, way too many to list here. I wrote an update program during 2001 using Visual FoxPro that grabs all product information from our business software (Navision) and rebuilds the Miva databases. We have a dedicated server with dual processors, but the traffic from customers and search engines kept it overloaded. In 2005 we implemented Merchant Optimizer which creates a static page for all category pages and have experienced no further server load issues. Product static pages are created by the Visual FoxPro program I wrote giving me a lot of flexibility for the html.

I will make a separate post for a website critique, but if you see this first, I take constructive criticism very well and appreciate your input.

Dennis G

Welcome to Webforumz, Dennis. Good to have your experience here. We can always use those with knowledge.

Welcome to Webforumz!!

This will be the best resource you will ever find, there are a lot of professionals that are the tops in their field of web design and development. This can be a great place to learn and start answering questions yourself, all you have to do is just ask!! No Joke!!

Jacob's right! Welcome!

I'm really glad you chose us for your forum, what a wealth of experience you must have! I hope you can find what you're looking from here...

Welcome to the WebForumz Dennisg!

welcome

Hey Guys,

Thanks very much for the warm welcome. I appreciate the comments about my 'wealth of knowledge', and I hope I didn't misrepresent myself in the intro. While I do have some lessons learned the hard way over the past 5 years, I feel like a novice and I know I am at the bottom of the hill of SEO knowledge. What I know I know...what I don't know scares the hell out of me.

Dennis

yeah, I know how you feel there, and I kinda feel the same way with PHP and MySQL...but it all comes with time and asking questions!!

Welcome. I found this site to be the best web forum on the internet Dennis.

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I am no pro on either, but I have managed to fumble my way through so I sort of understand. I am sure there are those here who do really understand so maybe we can all help you.