Long time client Coast Host has recently undergone a website face lift! Over the years we have done small edits to their site while also managing their SEO and PPC. While we have done a great job driving the qualified traffic to the website, Coast Host discussed with us ways to decrease their bounce rate and increase the length of time spent on the website. After reviewing the monthly reports and having a brief consultation, we decided it would be advantageous to redesign the home page to be more visually exciting and updated.

You can view the before and after shots below.

Before:

After:

You can see we have incorporated rich graphics, a more modern color palette and callouts to drive viewers to specific pages of the website. Coast Host is active in the social media marketing and email marketing, so we wanted to enhance this. The new design includes a Facebook callout, as well as email sign up and an automatic events pull. Complete with a new logo, new tagline and new look and feel, this site is a complete makeover! Keeping all pages and content the same, no functionality was changed in this alteration—it was strictly a facelift!

Be sure to check it out!

Yesterday we launched the new and improved site for Jeff Harbaugh. Jeff’s previous site contained a database in which he stored PDFs of articles and excerpts written by him, however the user functionality of commenting and searching easily was missing. Our solution was to completely redesign and rebuild within WordPress. Jeff’s articles are now categorized and organized within the Public Company Analysis or Market Watch Column. Complete with over 170 posts already, this new site has an edgy, yet clean look to convey the business of action sports. Jeff is overjoyed by the ability to manage this site and has already hit the ground running with keeping the content fresh and updated.

We are proud to have recently launched the beautiful and highly functional site for Coalition Tactical Medicine. This non-profit site serves as a central communication hub that links both military and civilian medical providers to lifesaving information. This completely custom website built within a WordPress platform houses a number of informational pages including donation and scholarship applications, email alerts and a private Board of Directors page. The primary informational source is the interactive blog (branded as the MedMash knowledge Gateway) which is currently registration and login only to review the information. Coalition Tactical Medicine has gone the extra mile and are taking advantage of Social Media Marketing and are auto-feeding ‘snipets’ of the MedMash posts to both Facebook and Twitter. The client is thrilled beyond words about the presentation and functionality of this site and is ecstatic about being able to edit content, posts, approve users, capture registration information and even update the rotating header images.

For any photographer showing their work to the public is the name of the game and personal websites are today’s best tools for that job.  PhotoShelter has made this easier than ever before. This great software offers a variety of design templates as well as the option to custom design your website.  It also incorporates very well with WordPress for those interested in a blogging and showcasing their photography.  Market you site and work effectively and give users the option to view their personal images, buy photos, and much more.  Check out this great software!

“If you are planning to refresh some of your site content, make sure to consider the SEO impacts. Many organizations make the mistake of updating their site content for a new product launch or some other business goal, only to realize that they also lost all of their existing SEO equity in the process. If you’ve already got some good shelf space, don’t do anything to screw it up!

It’s hard enough to get a top ranking position. Don’t overlook SEO in these important content planning stages. I’ve received panicked phone calls from Marketing Execs that just completed a site refresh and now don’t see their site’s rank. How awkward would it be to explain that to all of your stakeholders? Here’s 3 tips to avoid this and to make sure you’re taking all of this into consideration when refreshing your site content.

Run a rank report for all URLs that will be updated

I can’t overstate how important this is. This is the foundation that will drive a lot of your content decisions. You’ll want to see where you are currently ranking for your keyword landscape and which URLs are driving search traffic. This will help you establish your top priority URLs that need to be carefully assessed with any content changes. Remember, you may have a top ranking position due to the way your content is currently structured.

Changing the content on those top priority URLs may impact your ranking position and you could see a drop in rank and, thus, traffic. Once you’ve established these top priority URLs, make sure the people in your organization can clearly understand what the current SEO equity is, which will help with the content planning and overall strategy.

For example, your marketing department may want to overhaul the home page, removing the existing content and replacing it with a video introduction by your CEO. Now, if you do it the right way, you can structure your video content in a way where it’s SEO friendly. But – why would you go this route if your home page has a top 5 ranking for 10 different keywords and is already driving a lot of traffic? A better idea would be to assess what content is helping keep those top ranking positions and leave it alone. You can always create other calls to action on the home page, such as “see our CEO introduce our new product” – which would link over to a new page.”

Get more at Search Engine Land.

This tool is amazing! If you do photo retouch work, this is going to save days. What will they think of next?

“Remember the day you first discovered Google search. Now, think back to what search was like before, using Altavista and Lycos. It was pretty painful stuff. Google, with its plain-vanilla HTML interface, simple black text, blue links and one sole graphic did nothing but revolutionize my search experience, and judging by the brand it has built since, I don’t suspect I’m the only one.

In fact, many of us can’t imagine life without Google, despite the valiant contender efforts of Bing and the old faves of Yahoo and AOL. That is until you head East. When we first adopted Google we were all on dial-up and time waiting for graphic-rich content was secondary to getting data results — fast! Yet, in a culture where consumers have always had high-speed broadband from day one, such as South Korea, who has the world’s deepest penetration of internet users, those rules just never applied. In fact, for them, search has always been an entirely different affair.” read more at adage.com