I recently wrote a letter to the editor of the Roundel Magazine, published by the BMW Car Club Of America, about my friend JP Cadoux at A1 Imports Autoworks in an effort to get the word out about what he does. I am kinda surprised they actually published considering I wrote in a serious manner but frustrated after reading silly articles about carbon fiber, xenon headlights, and other useless do-dads. Nevertheless, here it is.

In an effort to the use social media to gain more publicity for the fantastic work that JP does we created this video and posted it on YouTube. Within the first day it recieved a few thousand views and was honored for two weeks on the site. It generated a lot of buzz on the Internet and was picked up by Jalopnik.com due to an anonymous tipster (myself). Here is a link to the post.

When browsing the Gallery 2 installation on the A1 Imports Gallery I noticed that the default implementation was to use H2 as the headings! This is horrible, pointless, and not very well thought out. I realize that its not the job of the Gallery 2 engineers but they went far enough to make it an H2 so why not just make it an H1? Anyway the problem has been solved and we’ll see what type of results we get. Be sure to use them on your site, but use them wisely. A good rule of thumb is to only have one per page that is very specific to the content. Over-bloating your page with these tags will definitely send the wrong message to Googlebot.

In order to get the cleanest and best ranking possible, always redirect your subdomains (the ones not in use) to www! I cant stress this enough. When Google comes by and sees that http://site.com and http://www.site.com are the same it thinks that this is duplicate content, which it is! I just implemented this today for my friends site A1 Imports Autoworks. Go ahead, try it. Here is the rewrite for Apache:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^a1importsautoworks\.com(.*) [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.a1importsautoworks.com/$1 [L,R=301]

I implemented Gallery 2 on the site in hopes of increasing page churns as well as pages indexed. It was very easy to implement and is much better than most PHP open source software I have dealt with. It only took a few hours to wrap it with the current site template and voila. Done! I will report back on the SEO implications. Unfortunately the URL’s a riddled with query parameters but thats okay for now. The gallery is located here

JP Cadoux, the owner and operator of A-1 Imports Autoworks, came to me in a quest to grow his business. He has been in business for himself for over 10 years, specializing in all car repairs, especially Europeans cars. He wants his business to grow as a whole but he wants to focus more on the custom fabrication portion. The cars he creates are extremely clean and meticulously fabricated making him famous, especially in the world of 1970’s BMW’s.

Although I did not design the site, I rebuilt the current design from scratch to lighten the page weight. It had originally been built by a friend of his who used Adobe’s GoLive which doesnt exactly output lightweight xHTML code. As always, the progress will be documented on my wiki, but the updates will occur here.

Here is what we are starting with
A great business with years of skill
Loyal clientele
Small web site (un-optimized and not indexed)
No logo

Our mission
Our mission is simple. Grow the business as whole in reach as well as appeal to the high performance tuner industry that JP knows so much about.

Goals
-Create a solid brand identity around performance and reliability
-Use the Internet as the medium to find and interact with the high performance car community (think YouTube).
-Build cutting edge “blog-worthy” cars to increase buzz and traffic to the web site
-Properly tune the website for the market we are after and optimize for search engines (SEO).