Code and Processes

Just in time for Halloween, Rainy Day Games has risen from the dead.  It used to be an e-commerce site selling board games.  However they closed their door a few years back, but still owns all the content (over 400 products and reviews). 

First, from a technical perspective, we had to update them from classic ASP to ASP.Net MVC, give them a new SEO friendly URL structure, and update the HTML from a table layout to a DIV structure.  We kept the old look and feel and the category structure.

Second, from a business model, they added Adsense and affiliated links to Funagain Games.  This required setting up accounts and loading 400 game IDs in to the database.

Finally, we did some load testing and added some caching to help with performance.  We also found and solved a memory leak when using XSL which I will post about shortly.

Just moved another site, NBCPC.org over to ASP.mvc.  We also convert the base html over to divs instead of tables.  Finally, we added a Adsense component.  The new URL structure should help with traffic greatly.

We also used URL rewriting instead of IIS for redirections of the old URL to the new ones.  It’s a lot slicker then using the one by one method of IIS.

We finally updated the Lucky Dog Biscuits website to MVC 2.0.  Since they stopped the ecom part of the site, it was an easy map to the new content management system.   We also decided to target the site to “compare dog food” since that term gets 28,000 searches for the first position and make about $76 a day in adsense.

It will take them a few months to do the back linking effort, but the competition isn’t that strong.

One final note, we did not update the html.  It still uses tables for layout…  yuck!  It bloats the site to three times the size if we used more modern methods.

We updated J.R. Hudson from old school asp to ASP.MVC in C#.  We didn’t change the style or content, however, the HTML does need to be updated from the old way of tables to the better practice of Div based layout.  Also, the Gallery effects is very basic and could enjoy the effects of jQuery

With the new MVC framework, we took advantage with a new SEO friendly URL structure.  We used the keywords “custom” and “installations” in the directories for added boost.  A couple of things are still outstanding:

•  They need more content.
• The images need alt and title tags
• More back links
• Google profile for it’s local listing