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.
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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
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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:
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.
For me there is nothing better than hitting up some of the great CSS gallery websites as well as the different CSS and web resources out there. I’m one of those in a constant push to find new techniques, angles, connections and develop new lines of thinking.
That said, I’m not a radical or into confusing a user for the sake of “cool”. I am however after the almighty goal of creating easy to use web interfaces and designs that make an impression so my client can win business by being remembered (branding ya say!).
So today I came across a new resource when viewing the updated screenshots on CSS Mania. Take a peak at Noupe if you like posts/articles with tutorials, links and examples galore.
Here are 3 articles that I thought rocked. Glad I found another source of creative knowledge, from another source of inspiration.
Have a great weekend.
You need a change, you need control of your website. Maybe you have depended on a webmaster or an internal employee with some web skills to make updates to your website, but it no longer is the right method. You want things to happen quicker, you want to enhance your content and functionality and you’ve heard it can be done without knowing all that HTML stuff. You want a content management system and you’ve heard right, it can be easy.
Five uses a content management system called the Site Management Console (SMC), developed by our parent company, Intrcomm.
In simple terms it allows your organization to fully control your website, without web skills … add pages, edit text, photos, create online forms and more. On the complex side of things it can handle just about anything you throw at it from e-commerce to user accounts to database integration.
We usually integrate our SMC tool when we are doing a new web design or a website redesign, but sometimes we will just integrate an existing website design into the SMC. Below is an example of a basic conversion to our content management tool we just did this week.
Content Management System Integration Example
National Wall, a concrete wall systems company, had contracted another firm to build their first website just last year, but they soon needed control to update the site with more information. In reviewing their website, we could see they had more areas for improvement, but getting them control was first and foremost.
National Wall’s SMC enabled website has only been up for two days, but in that time they have already:
Below is a screenshot of the SMC console for editing basic page content. As you may notice, it’s similar to creating or editing a Word document.
During the SMC conversion process we also corrected some of the site’s structure and usability issues making it a little more attractive to the search engines as well as users. There is still work to be done down the road on the interface design and SEO, but it’s much better off today then last week. If you have the need for control of your website, drop us a comment, a contact form or call us.
 The five spot is the blog for Five Technology, a web design and Internet marketing firm. aaron (at) fivetechnology.com |
