I was so busy tending to a few web projects and tomorrow’s Five e-letter that I didn’t bother checking out our Woopra account to see how the daily traffic was flowing.

It seems I was missing out on some big things as the Five website made the front page of CSS Vault today, one of the most respected CSS Gallery websites out there. Nothing like a surge in traffic (over 350 users) and some street cred among peers.

The various CSS Gallery sites are definite inspiration to us in our design work and we have been honored to be displayed in many of them since launching the new Five website in February. Here are a few of the others we have appeared in:

• CSS Mania
• CSS Based
• CSS Star
• CSS Ultra
• Most Inspired
• CSS 2.0
• Best CSS Gallery
• Ala Brasil

Thanks to all of those great web design galleries for showcasing us, we love the attention and hopefully we’ll get some client work onto those same great sites. On another note, we’re busy in our own kitchen cooking up some gallery type web food with a Minnesota flair. More to come on that soon …

The power of Internet video. It’s already big and continuing to grow. By luck I have two great Internet video examples today.

The first, since it has the mass appeal, is the US Open golf playoff going on right now. Thanks to the US Open website, I can watch streaming LIVE video of the bonus playoff round today between Tiger Woods and Rocco Mediate while I sit at my desk.

Without Internet video of this, I would be checking updates every 10 to 15 minutes or taking a long lunch at the bar around the corner (still sounds like a good option). Internet video brings more eyes to the web. I”ll be interested to find the stats on the increase in web visitors and viewers for todays playoff round.

Drumroll please ……
My second example is our new Five Technology company video. We finished up this minute and a half segment last week, added it to our website as well as a few video sharing sites on the net. Internet video is a great way to showcase your company in an overview, offer customer testimonials or feature a specific product or service. Five’s Internet video production can help you plan, script, shoot and edit your own video segment to really enhance your website. Todays’ website visitor needs more than a few lines of text to engage them and video on your website grabs a hold of the user and lets you tell your story. It truly is a powerful and engaging medium.

Here is our web design company video below in a YouTube player, but if you visit our Why Five page you will see we can customize and embed a Flash video player into any website or page with endless customization.

Give Five a holler with your video production needs for your website.

Five has a few web design projects that are getting ready to go LIVE in the next few weeks so I thought I would give you a sneak peek. If you are in need of a great Minnesota web design firm, holler at us!

Besides looking good, these sites have functionality including e-commerce, an account/user management system and more.

It shouldn’t be news to you that you need to write web content that engages and informs your website user / visitor first and foremost and attracts the love of the search engines second. It can be very easy to accomplish both user friendly content and search engine friendly content when you consider that visitors to your website these days are more like the search engines than ever.

1. Be basic and straight forward. Users appreciate less marketing jargon and more answers on today’s Internet.

2. Use a good mix of your main keyword term, but also mix in related or secondary keyword terms. Try to use both the industry or professional terms (if applicable) but also consider how the general public might understand your product or service.

3. Apply these basic elements to your page header, beginning paragraph, supporting information or bullet points.

You want an example? Ok.

Here is just a simple example of what I might write for a steakhouse in downtown Minneapolis. Lets consider that their downtown location and the fact that they are a premier steakhouse are the big keyword factors.

—————————————————————–

page header (H1):
Award Winning Downtown Minneapolis Steakhouse

intro paragraph: Peter’s Steak Palace is a downtown Minneapolis steakhouse and offers the best steak and food for your Minneapolis dining experience. With prime rib, filet mignon, porterhouse and our famous Pete Cut Steak, you can enjoy our award winning restaurant atmosphere and menu of steaks, salads and more.

supporting (h2): Visit Our Minneapolis Restaurant

• View our steak and menu items (list items)
• Make reservations online or call
• View our dress code and other helpful info
• View a map of our downtown location

—————————————————————–

As you can see from above I would also recommend finding a way to present your top keyword terms in anchor text to supporting pages. The “downtown Minneapois steakhouse” link can go to the “about page” and the other link to the menu page. With a bit more content, a photo or two correctly tagged and page meta data completed, you have a very well optimized page for the search engines that also helps the user (the main goal!). Mix in a few links pointing to the site and you’ve got a good SEO process starting to work.

Take a look at your content, is it basic enough? Does it clearly address what you do or offer? Where? How? If not, you would benefit from giving it a basic tweak or two that will benefit both your website visitors and search engines.

In landing a website redesign project for a window washing company we knew it had to be a clean web design, streak free content and a clear focus on local search results. Ryan Doliber, the owner of Sparkling Clean Window Washing has been in business for a few years and realized it was time to move up in the web world and decisively differ his brand appearance from the competition.

Sparkling Clean Website Before

When launching his business in 2005, Ryan utilized a do-it-yourself website building tool (Yahoo Sitebuilder) and put together the site himself. It was a web presence, better than nothing, that covered the basics but it lacked the branding, usability and search engine optimization Ryan truly wanted.

Sparkling Clean’s Website Redesign

As you can see from above and in visiting the website, we pushed things to a new level. Our website redesign was able to accomplish:

• Moving the website to a new domain that contained the business name for better branding
• A new interface design with a more inviting color scheme and stronger visual impact
• Clear content sections for home window cleaning and business services
• Best web practices, proper site structure and page structure
• An easy to use free estimate form with date and time requests
• Focused local search optimization through the use of geographical terms like Minnesota, Twin Cities, Minneapolis and lists of other main cities served.

Overall, we’re very pleased with the website redesign outcome and so is our client. Visit the new website and think about requesting a free estimate if you’re in the Minneapolis area.

If your thinking it’s time to clean up your website, contact us about a website redesign for your site today.