website design, development, and seo blog - thoughts & rants

Top 3 Reasons Your Site Needs SEO

In the past few years, I have been happy to see that more companies are considering search engine optimization as a part of their annual marketing budget. Having worked for almost a hundred clients since around 2006, I’ve heard many opinions on where companies should invest their marketing money. And, still, there are clients who I come across that just are not ready to invest in SEO work. However, as times change and people begin to use the internet for most of their buying decisions, it seems to me that SEO is a fundamental wedge in a marketing wheel. Here are the top 3 reasons your site needs SEO.

It Really IS Cheaper

At first, it may sound like paying a search engine company every month for 6 months is just ludicrous, especially when you don’t see results for the first 3 months at least. But, the fact is that SEO is a long-term and lasting process. The work it takes to get a website ranked for a keyword is more than worth it. There are other alternatives. You can pay for ads or PPC listings. You can spend $2 per click for your highly competitive keyword. And, we definitely do not discourage people from getting immediate traffic. It tells us a lot about your site and the keywords you are targeting. But, do you want to rent or own? PPC is practically renting your spot. The moment you stop paying or your credit card expires, your listing is gone. Whereas, organic rankings are more like owning. You still have competition fighting for your spot. But, you don’t have to invest as much once you’re on page one as you do with PPC to stay there.

It Really Does Convert Better

Statistically, I have seen how traffic on my own sites convert better when they originate from an organic listing. I have a product website that is currently on page on of Google organically. Before I got it there, I was spending money on Google AdWords. I was incredibly frustrated at the low conversion rates I was seeing. My site was incredibly relevant. And, we are a design team, so I know it’s not the design. But, once I started appearing on organic search results, I began to see an increase in sales almost immediately. Users who are interested in high quality and who are ready to buy (not just research) a product will more likely be looking in the organic listings than the paid listings.

It Really Is All About Ego

A while back, one of our clients asked us a great question: “if you offer SEO, why aren’t you on page one for [insert random keyword here].” At first, we tried to explain that we were focusing on our own clients and not ourselves. But, it became clear that we never wanted to have this conversation again. So, we worked to get our own rankings up. Why? It’s not like we needed more business. No, it was an ego thing. We felt like we deserved it. And, now, when we are in a meeting, we are proud to say that we’re on the first page. Your company should be organically number one! If it isn’t, you are not the best. Well, at least, that is how your customers feel. The gratification you give your customers by being on page one is that they feel justified for choosing your service or product.

Filed under: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) by Sharon Jardine

Battle Between Beauty and Bulk

As the weekend approaches, I’m reflecting on a great week. We got our blog off the ground and I am so excited to start sharing some insights into web design. One of the latest discussions I’ve read is that designers are still battling with the concept of great design while keeping page sizes low. If you know anything about website development, you will know that we always try to keep our web pages lean and fast loading. But, the days of keeping web pages under 100k are long gone, in my opinion.

So, if you can’t keep your page size below 100k, what can you do to improve user experience? Well, for years, we have been using different techniques that work well. I think the best way to save on file size is to keep your code as clean as possible. We have used all CSS layouts for years, which has helped. But, there must be more. I found this great article on optimizing images with HTML5 canvas. The article discusses the ability in HTML5 Canvas to optimize your images directly on the viewers web browser.

Ok, so this seems more like a rant about development than design. But, the reason I bring it up in the design section of this blog is to mention that we, as designers, need to be constantly aware of how development and code allow us to better design our sites. As I head off into the weekend, I encourage all you designers out there to learn as much as you can about code. There is a constant battle between what we want to do as creatives, and what the development world needs from us. Knowing exactly how to live in harmony will make us stronger teams that create amazing websites.

Filed under: Design by Brian Jardine

Why Development?

Development is an all-encapsulating word that is essential to understanding how to improve your website’s user experience.  Often I see web design shops that offer great design services and maybe a small collection of select module installation and theming services, such as WordPress or Joomla installations.  It’s just not enough.

Offering development is the difference between buying a cheeseburger at some nameless McRestaurant or slapping a half pound of fresh ground chuck on the grill with your own seasonings.  Sometimes the available offerings are “good enough,” but this is your website we’re talking about.  Why settle?

So now that you’re drooling, what exactly is development?  Development embodies code written by a developer (typically a web programmer) that will add dynamic functionality to your site.  Anytime you see text on a page that changes based on who’s logged in or what time of day it is, you’re typically looking at the handiwork of a web programmer.  The interesting thing about development is that, if it’s done correctly, it shouldn’t be terribly obvious that a programmer has been there.  A good website never spits out errors at you or has a dreaded PHP “white screen of death.”  So you may ask yourself: “I just want a simple 5 page website, why would I need or even want development?”

That’s a difficult question to answer in a generic case, yet answers are all around.  Development can be as simple as a custom RSS feed on your website to a full-blown custom shopping cart.  One of the most common requests we get for development is a “Contact Us” form with a captcha.  That doesn’t seem like it would require a developer, would it?   I know designers who can do that.  What if you want to allow users to upload a word document or PDF file and send it along as well?  What if you want to have a dropdown where, depending on what they selected, the email goes to a different person?  These are all things a good web developer can do that you simply can’t get from a “copy and paste this code to your site” solution.  Yet if you didn’t know the option was available, you’d probably have all the emails go to one central place, and forward them yourself to the appropriate person.

Your website should work for you, not the other way around.  If your website is creating more tasks for you to do manually, then you’re not asking the right questions.  Why process credit cards manually when you can have a website do it 24 hours a day?  Why go with a boxed theme for your WordPress blog when you can make it look and feel exactly like your website?  Why create a sidebar where you have to manually change the article entries every few days so it looks fresh instead of having an RSS feed rotator automatically pulling down the latest content?

If you’re looking at a new website or an update to an existing site to bring it up to 2011, you need to be asking yourself what custom development can do for your time and your business.  After all, your business is more unique than a module with some color or font changes, right?  Let your website be uniquely tailored to your business, not everyone else’s.

Filed under: Development by Deric Hicks

Where I Get Design Inspiration

I have been a graphic designer since 2002, when I was already working for freelance clients as a student at university. In those years, I have often experienced times where I just didn’t know where to go with a design. Sometimes, I can be talking with a client and know exactly how the design will look before leaving the conference room. But, there are times when I just don’t have a clue where to go creatively. And, as a creative director, that’s my job! So, I thought I’d share how I approach creative projects where I am stumped and just simply lack the inspiration to create amazing work.

Word-Studies

One of my university professors taught me a trick that I still use today. A word-study is a technique used to place words that are similar or that evoke other words of more enhanced meaning on the page. These words can help a designer develop concepts that relate to the brand, product, or marketing campaign about to be created. Here’s an example. Let’s say that we were about to design a campaign for a bottled water company. The campaign would be about how their product is a higher quality and can be trusted to be more natural and clean than the competition because it comes directly from a little-known spring far, far away. A word study would place all words that are related to natural, clean, water, and fresh on the page. You might end up with 100 words. But, after a while, words like pure, flowing, clear, or unblemished might come up. These words evoke visuals in your mind. Now, in the design, you have more inspiration and clarity about your direction.

Research

Every time I begin a design, I make sure to research the industry and the competitors of my client. This is extremely important if you are trying to make your client look unique. But, it’s also a good opportunity to inspect  their competition and find ways to improve on what they have done. Then, I look at other industries and find color schemes that I think work well with the client’s idea. Here’s a warning! Do not copy the work of others! Instead, use their “direction” and develop your own unique take on the idea. For instance, if you like the way they used blue and orange in a design, there is nothing wrong with using a blue and an orange. But, change the color values. Don’t use the colors in the same way. Don’t make orange buttons if they have orange buttons as well. The point is, you are using their work as an inspiration. Don’t copy their work!

Sketchbook

I always have my sketchbook handy when I’m lost for ideas. But, don’t think for a second that I ever use what I sketch. In fact, I see my sketchbook as a filter. When I sketch ideas, I literally make my way through all the bad ideas first. This process has helped me so many times. When I see all the bad ideas put on paper, I am thankful that none of them made it to the final design. But, a strange thing often happens. Every once in a while something from those rejected images pops out at me. And, a new idea appears like it was there the entire time.

Filed under: Design by Brian Jardine

Why The World Needs Responsive Design

You’ve heard those movie trailers that start with “In a world, …” Well, if we were promoting a movie about website design in 2011 and beyond, it might start with this sentence: In a world where every web-browser has a mind of its own and every other screen is a completely different dimension, it’s clear the world needs responsive design more than ever before.

And, it’s true. The world really does need it. But, “what is responsive design?” you might ask. Well, it’s pretty much what it sounds like: design that responds to multiple browser dimensions and environments. Let’s say your browser is 1280 pixels wide. If you design your site for this width, how will it look on a mobile device that has a width of 240 pixels? Before responsive design, you really didn’t have much control over the look of your site in varying environments and platforms. Sure, you could build a complete mobile website or create a small mobile app version of your site. But, what if you could have just one website that responded to all dimensions?

Responsive design enables the designer to create design concept that will adjust to the various widths available to today’s web browsers. This effect is achieved by using percentages for widths and by using context aware image sizing. Basically, by adding certain relevant code to your .htaccess file, you can get images to load to a certain size depending on the existing browser dimensions. This means, you don’t create an initial size for your image. The code will determine what size the image needs to load to. This approach opens up multiple possibilities for developers.

Going forward, I can totally see the majority of websites out there feature some form of responsive design. And, as I begin to design more often for the mobile user, I’m realizing that there is no better way to deliver great looking web content than by using responsive design.

Filed under: Design by Brian Jardine