Quality SEO Friendly Personalized Web Design at Affordable Prices in the Albany Eastern District & the Adirondacks of Upstate NY State

What We Are and Do

The name, NYRoutes.com, originated from my Adirondack travel websites where I started doing my own sites. My first site was NY Route 30, which I started back in 2002. I knew next to nothing about web design back then besides how to create a simple HTML page and upload it to a web server. But I kept them going, because I like to travel around. Those sites are still there. While they are a small part of my business, they still have a place in my heart and lots of people like them.

NYRoutes.com believe in the "keep it simple" principle of web design. I don't believe in tons of widgets, Flash and other distractions, at least on the main page. As well as CSS styles, vitally important, should be kept under control, not exceeding the actual content of the site. The html code and media (pictures, movies, audio) file sizes should be small on the main page, so it downloads easily on even an old computer and/or slow connection. If your main, or home, page takes 20 seconds or more to download and set up, someone will probably go to another site, your competitor's, before yours finishes loading. Save the heavy stuff, the larger image and media files, for other pages on your site.

A basic business site should do FIVE things well:

  1. Tell someone what you do
  2. Tell someone where you are, like what town or neighborhood, including your zip code*
  3. Tell someone how to locate your business
  4. And most important, Tell someone HOW TO contact you be it phone, email or some sort of instant messaging
  5. Finally have good natural, organic SEO, or be search engine friendly w/o lots of tricks & extra cost
* Your zip code helps the searech engines geo-locate your place of business.

Your name isn't even that important. As unglamorous as this sounds, a basic small business site's main function is a platform to feed the search engines. Say someone searches on "motels glens falls". If a potential customer finds your phone number in the first couple of listings on the FIRST page that Google, Yahoo, Ask or Bing returns on that search string, they can then call you directly without even visiting your site. Then your site has done its job perfectly even though the user never left the search engine's return page to visit it. That is not to say your site shouldn't look good, and have accurate and relevant information that is easy to find. But it has to be search engine friendly no matter how simple and inexpensive it is. SEO is not some deep mystery, there are some simple rules to follow when first making the site, that sadly many web developers and most "do it yourself", or DIY, types ignore.

Social media is the holy grail for the web these days. Your site should have a matching Facebook page at least, and maybe a Twitter account and a blog too. I will create a Facebook page and then turn it over to you to get you started. Then I can add share buttons on your site to get people to promote your site to their friends and followers on Facebook and Twitter. This is called "going viral".

Your site should also should be done in PHP, or Hypertext Preprocessor, which is just HTML with brains. This allows certain repetitive elements, like the navigation menu, the header and footer of the page to be in separate files. So no matter how many pages your site has, just by say altering only the header file, EVERY page will have its header updated. The Borg of the Web, Word Press, is PHP based as well as freebies like ZenCart and Shopify. Also, if you do want to collect data, say for online sales or just customer contacts, PHP makes it easy to collate and store their data on the server where you can view it later at your leisure. Of course, the data has to be filtered to weed out hacking attempts. As well as ALL the code; HTML, CSS, JavaScript....; the PHP code should be cleaned out and easy to follow so future updates and modifications can be done easily.