This story about the website of Toronto home stagers starts about a year and a half ago when I found out that my home staging website had been built on a Flash platform and that Search Engines only recognize one page because it is like a video.  At the time this concerned me but my website designer promised to (for a fee) get me onto the first page of web searches consistently. After all, what did I know about this stuff and how to do that?  This worked for a little while, but not very well.  When he asked for a monthly retainer to keep on doing this, I dropped him.  He would send me links to show where my site was located when doing searches with different keywords. But if I would do a search starting from scratch, my site was nowhere to be found. So, enough of that, spending money when it showed no results, was not the answer!

I lived with this for a while and then decided to contract someone else to redo my website despite the fact that I love what I had so painstakingly put together.

When things started slowing down, being passionate about and loving home staging, I realized I needed to do something about not appearing on the searches.  The new designer has been very slow in finalizing the new format and I did not want to throw good money after bad so I decided to get involved; nothing like knowing what things are all about and being in control (much like staging)!

Well after much research and work and still using my Flash based website, I am appearing at the top of the 2^nd page and hope to continue inching up!  I still have a lot of work to do - like updating my before and after pictures and going back to my original designer to change the wording.  Having been in the business a while now and knowing what is required to make one's site user friendly, the whole narrative needs to be revisited.

But a word of thanks to all the AR bloggers - been getting the Active Rain Newsletter regularly of late and going through it - who have addressed topics regarding SEO and what to do to increase one's rating; they have given me a lot of insight as to problems and solutions and made me push on. A few weeks ago when I started appearing anywhere from page seven to ten, I knew I was heading in the right direction.

And a word of advice to home stagers who have or are in the process of developing a website: know what it is you want; look at other home stagers' websites and see what you like and don't like; become familiar with the lingo of website and website design i.e. SEO, html, meta tags etc. - they can all be researched on the web; ask about the importance of search engine optimization (SEO), meta tags and keywords. And if you are developing your own site, find out what your website host has to offer.  They quite often have helpful "wizards" that you can make use of.

I hope nobody thinks that the program on HGTV called "The Stagers" is based in reality!!  As a stager and owner of HG Staging and reDesign, I have yet to come accross a client who just gives me carte blanche to do with as I please. Everybody wants to know how much it is going to cost before you do anything. Yes, I realize there are different levels of staging, but putting pieces of art valued in the thousands in a home that sells in the six or seven hundred thousand dollar range?  And since when does it take four or five days to stage a home that is 1600 square feet?  Three days for a vacant condo in the 600 square feet???Any staging I have done is done in one or two days. If you include decluttering, depersonalizing and decorating then yes but that is done under the supervison of the stager and not by the stager him/herself. As well, there is no warehouse in Toronto that i am aware of where one can just peruse and select the items needed for staging.  All accessories (pillows, art, knick nacks, decorative lamps, linens, etc) are owned by the staging company. I think examples of staging on this program are totally over the the top and do not reflect the reality of the different processes involved in staging. The flightyness, bitchyness and in-fighting are not part of the process and are a pure addition for televison appeal.  This is my rant.