Panel

Eric Davis (twitter github blog)
Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code)

Discussion
01:47 - Static sites vs Wordpress

Jekyll

03:33 - Important parts of a Website

Placeholder sites
Contact information

04:27 - Getting contacted

Wufoo

07:43 - Blog Posts

theAdmin.org

08:45 - Portfolios

Eric’s Portfolio

Landing Pages

11:05 - Testimonials

11:55 - Mailing Lists/Newsletters

Trustbuilding
Waiting list of clients

14:13 - Landing Pages

Small pages
Guide people to their goal

16:33 - Social Media

17:22 - Logos

LogoWorks

19:22 - Static Site Generators

21:07 - What do you want people to do when they visit your site?

Welcome Gate: LeadBrite
Contact Me
littlestreamsoftware.com (Eric)
intentionalexcellence.net (Chuck)

23:40 - Products/eBooks

25:49 - Landing Pages

Headline
Subheadline
Call to action

29:23 - A/B Testing for Wordpress

Optimizely

30:33 - Analytics

31:23 - About Pages

Use “I” not “We”

34:07 - SEO

36:35 - Project Inclusion in Portfolios
Picks

Arkon Portable Fold-Up Stand (Eric)
Oversized Low-Profile Creeper (Chuck)
Floor Jack With Rapid Pump (2.5 Ton) (Chuck)

Transcript

[Are you a busy Ruby developer who wants to take their freelance business to the next level? Interested in working smarter not harder? Then check out the upcoming book “Next Level Freelancing - Developer Edition Practical Steps to Work Less, Travel and Make More Money”. It includes interviews and case studies with successful freelancers, who have made a killing by expanding their consultancy, develop passive income through informational products, build successful SaaS products, and become rockstar consultants making a minimum of $200/hour. There are all kinds of practical steps on getting started and if you sign up now, you’ll get 50% off when it’s released. You can find it at nextlevelfreelancing.com]

[Hosting and bandwidth provided by the Blue Box Group. Check them out at bluebox.net]

CHUCK: Hey everybody and welcome to Episode 39 of the Ruby Freelancer Show! This week on our panel, we have Eric Davis.

ERIC: Hello!

CHUCK: And I'm Charles Max Wood from devchat.tv. This week we're going to be talking about "What Should Be On My Website". And this was kind of my idea as far as something that I wanted to do mainly because I've been playing with the idea of putting together a website for my freelancing business. It's kind of shocking, I think. To think that I've been doing this for two and a half years and still don't have a really functional website for my business. But at the same time, I mean I have some ideas of things that I think should be on there, and I know Eric has been doing this for a while and has a website that does bring him business. So I thought we could just jump in and talk about some of the things that we think should be there or some of the things that people put on there that maybe they "un" put on there or maybe don't give them as much of a win as they think it gives them. So Eric, I'm a little curious before we start talking about what's on the website, is your website built on like WordPress or anything? Or is it something you built on Rails?

ERIC: Yeah so right now I was just using WordPress. Let's say I started with a static site, built a custom Ruby, or actually Rails CMS, scrapped to because I'd rather work on client projects or paid projects than to maintain my own CMS system. And I jumped around to just different stack side generators, but I ended up going back to WordPress just because it worked, it's functional, and I can get basically all the features I needed without having to tip-down and write code and maintain all the code for it. So yeah right now, it's for now on WordPress and I got a custom VPS built for it. So it's all of my sites are actually hosted on a private server, it's not like a shared host or anything.

CHUCK: Yeah that makes sense.