When I first decided to started my on-line business, www.woodstockbikes.com, I had planned on handling the design, build, and maintenance of the site myself. Then I performed some research and quickly determined that I needed to hire a professional. So I went looking for someone local to help me out and I found a really nice lady that was a stay at home mom that also had a business performing web design, build, and maintenance. I looked at some of her work and I was really impressed. She was also priced very attractively.

So I worked with her and we built my site. And I have to say that I was initially happy with her work and my site. Then, after my business didn’t really take off like I had hoped, I discovered that having a Search Engine Optimization plan was vital. My nice lady did not have any experience in this area so I found another local person to handle this for me. This SEO plan got us built up in the Search Engine hierarchies and my business did in fact increase after a few months.

Then, the local nice local lady that was handling my web-site just disappeared. Her responses to my communications went from responsive to totally unresponsive. So I started using my SEO plan administrator to make minor changes to my site when I needed them. She wasn’t really a site designer but she knew enough to get this done.

So at this point, I was about to receive my 2nd load of inventory that included a new model of mountain bike and I was going to need to make some major changes to my site. I also wanted to add the ability of my customers using any credit card they preferred instead of only offering PayPal. So I worked through my SEO plan administrator and she gave some names and I got some quotes.

Then I got a call from James Friesen, a customer of mine. James had recently bought a bike from us and said he was really impressed with his bike and our business plan, and that he wanted to design my site. He told me he could make some great changes to my site and also handle the SEO effort. James, at that time, was working in Ecuador and I was a little concerned with using someone that was as remote as Ecuador, but I had a good feeling about James and decided to take a chance on him.

I am now up and running with my new site that James designed and built and I could not be happier. In addition to just making my site more user friendly and attractive, James added some really cool “flash” technology to the site for viewing my bikes up close in detail and he also added a shopping cart that allows my customers to use any credit card they prefer. I receive SEO plan reports from James each month and these show that we are moving up the list quite nicely on all the big search sites, including Google and Yahoo. And the number of bikes we are selling has gone up every month since we went live with the new site.

Just yesterday, I had a friend of mine that I go to church with me say: “hey your web site rocks, it is better than all the big boys, including Trek, Gary Fisher, etc.”

And by the way, James also played a key role in helping me design the look of my new 2007 models by doing all the art work for me.

I highly recommend James Friesen and his company Mango Tree Media to design, build, and maintain (including your SEO plan) your web site. He is very professional and responds very fast to any requests that I make. I consider James to be my business partner, and not just a web site designer. You will not go wrong if you do business with James.