Today I decided to buckle down to a project that I have been meaning to get to for the last three years. My wife had a children's dress up tea party business in Denver that we put on the shelf when we moved to Toronto four years ago. At the time I had some vague plans about re-purposing the site from an info and "call me" site to a site that sold tea party plans in ebook format and also sold templates and plans for people that were looking to set up their own DUTP business in their local area.

Of course, with the move, getting settled in, the new job and renovating the new house this has been one of the last items on the priority list. However, now that I am getting my side business off the ground which involves web site development, search engine optimization and web hosting services, I thought this would be a perfect example project for me to put into my blog to showcase my talents. I have been working and learning in these areas for the last seven years on a part time basis but recently have had some significant successes for my clients that gave me the impetus to expand a hobby into a business.

I did the site in 2001 using Frontpage and haven't touched it since, other than to put up the out of business notice when we moved. I now know that there are a ton of things wrong with it, both from an esthetic marketing and search engine marketing perspective, so I won't bother to detail them here. At the time I thought it was pretty good and we did get a fair number of leads from the site, both by email and by phone, so it was worth the effort because it converted visitors. Don't ask me the conversion rate, seven years ago tracking and testing on the net was not commonplace.

Live and learn… that's what it's all about right? In my next article I go about figuring out which key words I want to craft the home and internal pages around. See yah then …