For Part 1 info, click here.

The website design challenge is finally over! The challenge was simple: create a fictitious company, register a new domain so the company can have a presence on the Internet and attempt to reach the first page of search results for the target market. We chose the custom swimming pool industry as our target niche and setup the website, Facebook and Twitter accounts. One of our goals was to prove that aesthetics is secondary to textual content, so we spent very little time and energy on the website's appearance. The company's website was filled with textual content that any swimming pool company would use to describe services, but we used pictures that could easily be recognized as bogus. The original intention was to publicize the fake company with social media, but after finding it extremely easy to befriend people on Facebook, we abandoned this approach and allowed only for organic visitors to find the website. Finding followers on Twitter was also rather simple, but we found it disturbing that we were able to find 48 "friends" on Facebook. In a mere month we were able to achieve a strong presence in the target niche with 27 search engine click-throughs, 9 of which were on the first page and 2 as the first search result presented.

Here are the results for the website design challenge:

• 154 visits and 1000 page views total
• 5 direct visits (average 3.6 pages per visit, 60% bounce rate)
• 17 referred from Facebook (average 2 pages per visit, 70% bounce rate)
• 27 search engine click-throughs (average 4 pages per visit, 30% bounce rate)
• 9 first-page results
• 2 first result for search term
• 5 click-throughs were from a search for a real local pool company

Our conclusion: having a website with textual content produces search results. Visitors were presented with textual content they were specifically looking for and dismissed the bogus images while they read the text. Of course, once visitors saw the images on the website they were able to see the truth, but the goal of getting that visitor onto the website was already achieved. Social Media will bring visitors to view a website, but lasting results come from content and organic searches. Optimizing textual content for search engines and having content that is relevant to searches can reach more potential clients than any other form of advertising.

*As a side note: be careful of who you accept as friends on Facebook. While a few people sent messages asking to confirm friendships, others were more than willing to accept our request and expose their private data to our made-up account. The company owner was William "Billy" Chrystal... Think about that.