Web Design

Johnson-Condon’s new site features a modern and professional design that will give people a sense of trust and authority in their work. The content was updated to reflect the company, their attorneys, and their practice areas.

Take a look at their attorneys page to see how their attorneys have been highlighted. We wanted to include everything there is to know about each attorney including their practice areas, biography, contact information, and professional accomplishments.

Visit the website: http://www.johnson-condon.com

Projects

Five Technology knew it was important to capture Fehn Companies in action. That is why we did photography at three key job sites. We used these images on the projects page to illustrate what Fehn Companies can do.

Check out their Monticello Theatre & Bank Demolition project and see for yourself. This page features an informative description, a beautiful photo gallery and has excellent SEO value.

We’re excited for what we’ve seen Fehn Companies do but we’re even more excited to see what Fehn Companies does in the future.

Visit the website: http://www.fehncompanies.com/

Focused On The Work
It was important to bring the amazing work of DOMUS right to the forefront.  The biggest focus of the website is their past and current architecture projects.

Each project features a photo gallery, project overview, highlights and design inspiration.  One of the projects, The Bridge House, features a video tour and the site was built for future videos to be easily added.

The web design turned out great and we enjoyed being trusted by DOMUS to share their great work with the world.  See their talent for yourself.

Visit the website: http://www.domus-inc.com

A Web Redesign 10 Years Later
It’s a little crazy for me to even type this, but I designed FiberStock’s first website over 10 years ago.  While the old site lacked in design compared to today’s web design capabilities, it’s SEO trust continued to bring leads and business.

Although it was hard to change something that was working, they knew they needed to show more of their success, talent, offering and city art projects with a new website design.

FiberStock can create darn near any type of statue out of fiberglass and their work has been in movies, national museums, malls, universities and more.

Web Redesign Project Components

• Custom web redesign
• Built on our CMS for complete content management
• Photo and project galleries
• SEO friendly build and content optimization
• Custom blog with WordPress

Two things really stand out to me from this project.  The first is the opportunity to work with a client and their business for over 10 years, the second is that building a website the right way can lead to a REALLY long shelf life, no matter the design style.  Results win out.

View the website: http://www.fiberstock.com

A Website With A Message
The fun part about a microsite is the focused message. Cotton Incorporated needed to reach dairy farmers with the benefits of feeding whole cottonseed to their herds in new ways online.  The website is filled with valuable information on WCS facts, feeding, storage, pricing and more.

We built a custom WordPress blog as whole cottonseed news delivery feature that allows for the posting of news, press releases and video updates.

The website also features information on WCS dealers so that dairy farmers can locate where to get pricing information and buy product.

Components Of The Web Design Project
For a microsite, we still packed in a bunch of great features into this project.

• Web design
• Custom jQuery JavaScript slideshow
• Content management with the SMC
• Custom WordPress blog/news feature
• Video player
• Integrated Twitter feed
• Custom contest entry forms
• Dealer locator
• Media and resources
• Email marketing opt-in

We’re looking forward to further work with Harvest PR and Cotton Incorporated to achieve macro results.

Visit the website: http://www.wholecottonseed.com/

Below is a project we have recently started with example of the sketch, the wireframe and the final website concept for the home page.  With most projects, we are repeating this process for  2 to 5 types of layouts and pages based on content and functions.

Web Design Sketch
I like to start mapping things out on paper from what I envision in my head.  As we discuss the goals and content of the website, I often sketch out how I see things coming together.

Web Design Wireframe
The next step is the team discussing the sketch and starting to formalize the content areas and web design elements needed.  Things move from a loose drawing to a more detailed wireframe.

Web Design Creative Mock
Once the wireframe is completed, we then get down to the details of colors, shading, exact sizing and other finishing touches.  The web design concept brings the initial ideas to life with the look of a website ready to be clicked.

As you can see, adjustments are made in between these phases as we work together on making the finished product the right tool for the client and the targeted user.

Hope you enjoyed this brief peek at some of the initial stages of the web design process.  We’re moving on to coding this one!

(View full Google Preview search screenshot)

I think this is a fabulous feature for the user and it also plays into the hands of those who create well designed websites and content pages.  Not only does the searcher have a meta title and description tag to factor into what they click, but now a visual of the destination.

In Google’s research so far, they have found that people who use Instant Previews are about 5% more likely to be satisfied with the results they click.

Good Web Design Can Bring Clicks
It’s always been true, but good design and content structure step up a notch in importance with this feature.  Consider these web design techniques to create a page that increases the chances your search result is clicked:

1.First impressions. They’re everything right?  Previewing a page with a clean, professional web design will only help you stand out from the other results.

2. A big and clear page content title. The preview is often big enough that the title of the page will clearly show up. Seeing the keywords in the title will only build trust that your page has the needed information.

3. Good content structure. If your page looks like a giant block of text, you’re likely to get skipped.  The web is a scanable read, so having a preview that shows well organized content, brief paragraphs, bullet pointed content and good uses of headers and sub-headers will let the searcher know your page will be easy to read.

The feature will even block and highlight text from your page it perceives as being the most relevant to the search.

4. The mix of content types like photos, video and graphics. Many users will prefer to access a page with strong visuals as well as text content.  Seeing that your result has a graph, photo or video like the example below to accompany the text will separate you from all of the non-visual results.

5. Flash? Forget it. As you can see from the example below, Google’s preview feature will not display Flash.  For me, just add that to the other 100 reasons not to use Flash as a main design element in your web design.

These are just my first observations and we’ll see the proof as Google rolls search previews out in the coming days.

I’m rarely excited for a change in SERPS, but this one plays right into the recipe that we’ve used for years: Good web design and good content can be created and optimized for great results.

• You can  take this search feature for a test drive here.

What are your thoughts on Google’s Preview feature?

A New Logo Design
Here is the refreshed logo for Excel Mechanical.

Website Redesign
The website redesign focused on communicating the experience and professionalism that Excel offers to their clients.  Their plumbing services are well outlined on the new website and speak to their capabilities and offering for residential and commercial projects.

An addition to the website was providing a project gallery to show their work.  Users can see their abilities in a master bathroom remodel or help a commercial contractor see that Excel can handle a large medical facility project.

Custom Blog Design
Excel had realized that business blogging and creating content is a great strategy for a small business well before they sought us out.  The only issue was that Excel was using a free Blogger site to post content, thus missing out on almost all of the brand and search engine benefits that a blog provides.

Five integrated a WordPress blog into their new web design and then imported their past Blogger posts into the new blog.  Excel is already adding great new posts highlighting their product lines and knowledge on the Ask The Plumber blog.

We’re pleased with every aspect of this project and have enjoyed that Excel’s owner and staff “get” what’s needed to succeed online.   Lastly, we helped Excel move to a .com domain (from a .us) that makes their marketing a lot easier.

Visit Website: http://www.excelmech.com

New Web Design
The old web design for COMPAR was out of date, lacked proper navigation and content structure.  The new web design focused on aligning best web practices with a design that represented their brand today and where they are headed in the future.

Content pages, like their technology solutions page, were enhanced to make the user experience easy and successful.

New Website Features
COMPAR wanted to not only update the web design feel of their website, but they needed to add new functionality to the site.  Five developed a customer portal app that allows their clients to securely log-in to order products online, view account history and other information.

We’re excited about the release of COMPAR’s new website design and custom features.  Not only can we make things look pretty, we make them work better as well.

Visit website: http://www.comparinc.com

I received a call from the client, of our client, to let us know how impressed and satisfied she was with their website.  Again, it wasn’t our client … it was the end-user of the website, a general consumer.

Wow. Of course this is one person’s opinion, but the fact they took the time to locate that we had designed the site and then picked up the phone to let us know their happiness is just plain cool.

Her name was Pam and she sure made our day start off great in the Five office.

Pam let me know that the combination of visual elegance and how easy the website was to use and navigate made her want to call and thank us.  The website she’s referring to is Simonson’s Salon & Spa, which we redesigned earlier this year.

With the end goal of our web designs always being user satisfaction, it was great to get a first hand account of this.

Sure analytics, conversions and all that user data goodness can let you know it’s a job well done, but having Pam take the time to call you is rock solid.