The old site homepage

The New Landing page

Part of the redesign was to improve the landing page of tonkapark.com to better address new clients. Some of the information previously was hidden in sub pages. Additionally, with my new focus on internet marketing and development I wanted the content to connect with those areas.

Internet Marketing

The Lake of the Ozark small businesses could use some help in the area of search engine marketing and optimization. Many businesses have websites but often are poorly maintained. So I want Tonka Park to position itself to help these businesses generate new online traffic and improve their online presence. To coincide with this move I have begun new websites to begin driving new traffic to Tonka Park as well as keep my experience up to date with the latest in affiliate marketing. Check out camdentonwebdesign.com and fallasleepquick.com to see some of the work I am doing in this area.

Website Uplifts

Another area that I will be looking to take advantage of is quick website uplifts for small businesses trying to take existing content to the next level without too much cost in the design. A website uplift could be where a client or myself selects a template from a site like themeforest.net and I implement it either as a static html site or integrated with WordPress. This helps keep out the cost of hiring a designer and a PSD slicing company.

E-Commerce

Recently much of my traffic is centered around several e-commerce solutions. For the front page I wanted to draw attention to the e-commerce services I offer to businesses in Lake of the Ozarks and around the country. Many of the visitors to my site are investigating Etsy, Big Cartel and Spree for e-commerce solutions for small businesses. I hope that by bringing that to the front page potential clients will see the services I offer in regards to consulting on e-commerce implementations.

The Tonka Park Blog

The blog is no longer featured on the front page with the most recent posts. I wanted to put just a small separation from the business information to the posts. The blog sees some much needed visual improvements as well as new wordpress plugins installed. I worked with several base wordpress themes to get a good typography implementation. Much better than the previous site. I hope this helps encourage my readers to return. Another new addition to the blog is the use of the Sociable plugin to allow posts to be shared via a variety of social applications such as twitter and facebook. And to help readers find other related posts I have installed the yet another related posts plugin for wordpress. I hope these two things help out my visitors and improve their experience at the Tonka Park blog.

Enjoy the new look and please if you have any questions or projects that you would like help with please do not hesitate to email us at hello@tonkapark.com.

Visit the site: Lake of the Ozarks web services

Disqus allows you to off load the coding and maintenance of comments and spam. Users can login with their social network accounts, such as twitter or facebook. The comments then can be integrated into the social network of those leaving comments. It seems to be working for many sites out there, I am just not sure it is for this project.

The project includes a user registration for purchases. I was hoping to eventually integrate the comment functionality from the blog posts to the reviews and utilize the existing user authentication system. Now perhaps I will rethink that and allow reviews or comments on the products via the disqus comment system.

For an example of Disqus in action head over to the Brand5 blog.

If you are using ruby on rails I did come across a gem on github to make disqus integration simple.

Any thoughts about using Disqus in an application that has a user system integrated?