Month: March 2009

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Web site in progress for wedding officiant

I am currently working on a new web web site for a St Louis wedding officiant. 

At the start of any project, as part of the discovery process, I asked my clients to send me a few URL’s of web sites they like and ones they don’t. From the sites they send, I can get a really good idea of the looks that appeal to them and vice versa.

My client on this project did a great job picking out sites. I did a search on wedding officiants and about 90% of the sites out there are awful – bad design, impossible navigation, no call to action, unpolished and generally just yucky. 

I can gaurentee that the site created for my client will NOT be in that 90%.
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This is not a web project

I recently turned my design skills to something other than web sites. It was an interesting project, the creative brief was to construct a crocodile costume for 4 dancers. The costume will be used in the production of Peter Pan by Wildwood Dance and Arts.

Here is the head (made of sculpture wire and pacier mache) which will be held by the lead dancer, the three other dancers will be draped in fabric and the 4th dancer has a tail.
It was a lot of fun to make!
croc

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The quality of your web coding and SEO

Today I have been working on a site I recently took over.

The site has a clean well functioning design with no usability flaws. However it has not been doing well in the search engines for the keywords and phrases the client is targeting, so they have asked me to do some SEO work .

Delving into the code “behind” the site I have come across a number of problems that have not been helping the situation. The code is bloated beyond belief with font tags, span tags and nested tables. It appears that the original creator of the site had a “thing” about using tables…even simple lists were put into a table.

I have stripped away the superfluous code and used css to control the look and feel of the content. The code is cleaner and shorter ( from around 240 lines to 70 lines) and the web site looks exactly the same to the user.

Tomorrow I will work on adding elements that will enrich the keyword density of the pages.

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The time commitment of blogging: St Louis web designers tip of the day

Blogging can be a great tool to add to your marketing mix. It can improve the visibility of your online presence and allow easy interaction with your clients and site visitors.

For small business owners serious about getting their sites to perform well in the search engines (internet marketing, SEO) I generally suggest adding a blog if … and this is a “big if”, they can devote the time to write it. A new blog will require at least two to three post a week for the first few months to get it rolling and at least one per week after that.

There is no way you can cheat either. I subscribed a year or so back to a blog which, until the weekend, appeared to be dead. However over the last few days posts have been rolling into my reader from this blog, all post dated. To readers new to the blog it looks like the blog has been updated on a regular basis …but the search engines will know better.

Coming up with regular fresh content can be a challenge, but you most definitely “reap what you sow”

The St Louis web designer Tip of the day