Website Design
Having a website is extremely cost-effective. In many cases it is cheaper to have a website thats always on and available than to run a one-time print advertisement. Your site should scale and grow along with your business and change as your needs change. You want a website with sharp well-produced graphics, and a layout design that is created by the latest web standards. This allows for faster smaller updates as well as efficient redesigns when the time comes.
Case Study: Chris Bell 3rd & Company
Chris Bell had sought out someone who could create his new business site that would allow him the flexible editing of a blog, a creative but business style, and leverage his growing activity within the social media sphere. We started with WordPress and built the design around his logo and colors. We added features such as links to his social media presence, videos and making his new company's services stand out. Terri Holley at Creative Blog Solutions was instrumental in connecting his social media accounts back to his website to sync them up to get his website properly "plugged in."
Chris was absolutely clear on the direction of his site, providing good content and suggestions, but left many of the right design decisions open. The result is a memorable site and an enjoyable working relationship. Chris is able to promote his site easily through his accounts on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn and the postings on each of these are cross connected back on the site to eliminate redundant work.
Case Study: Artistic Soup Wedding & Event Photography
Angela Lamb at Artistic Soup needed help. The company she hired to create her blog and work on Search Engine Optimization appeared to have falsely represented themselves. They started out doing a poor job constructing the design, and after several months revealed themselves to be a fraudulent service and instantly took her new blog without warning demanding more payment not agreed upon.
Luckily Angela had registered her domain name separately and we were able to create a new and better blog, grabbing some of Google's cached content and she was up and running just 2 days later.
After optimizing the code both on her new blog and on her main website, immediately Angela's websites begin seeing continuous improvement in search recognition and ranking in search engines. Search Engine Marketing and Optimization is a long-term process, so we wrote a custom project plan giving several methods by which to gain popularity. Angela writes frequent blog posts where she showcases her favorite recent wedding and engagement photos. This allows her to celebrate her clients special day while promoting her services and brand at the same time.
A Case Study: Sharing Healthy Experiences (SHE Forum)
http://www.sharinghealthyexperiences.com
SHE stands for "Sharing Healthy Experiences". The 'SHE' Forum is an organization and a series of workshops in Arizona that aims to build self-confidence in middle-school age girls and to help prevent bullying in and relational aggression among peers. The website was needed as the organization desired to grow to larger size 'forum' events. Starting out as an online brochure, phase 2 of the site allowed for interested local visitors to sign up for the upcoming forum.
Printed posters and bookmarks were designed to promote the event and lead people back to the website. As more and more SHE events are held, more resources will be added and the site will continue to be used to register for events as well as provide parents with helpful information on the challenges these young girls face in middle-school.
A Case Study: Paws For Consideration
http://www.pawsforconsideration.com
Paws For Consideration is a young non-profit in St. Louis who works extremely hard to save animals from euthanization by finding both foster pet homes and adopting families. They also have a network of volunteers and donors to keep foster facilities operating with food and supplies, cleaning cages and much more. Their existing site needed changing due to the previous designer leaving. SmickWorks realigned the design using modern layout techniques. Re-purposing some of the original elements held consistency while vastly improving navigation, site structure and ongoing management.
Services covered when having SmickWorks design your site:
- Thorough planning assessment of needs and going by the 90/10 rule. Look at what 90% of the people will be doing with your site and focus on that. The extra 10% is notorious for being (wouldn't it be great if...?) type of ideas that cause the most delay. We do 100% of the work, but we don't let Scope-creep get the best of us.
- Professional page layout with CSS control over the layout and typography.
- Beautiful branded banner graphics, static or animated, customized using photographic art, stock photos, original 3D, and vector art.
- Flash animation and interactive development, not just for eye-candy, but also for advertisement and web components.
- Page editing from the browser (so you can do your own text updates and make your own pages if you desire)
- Very affordable site hosting annual fee - $40 / Year (No we're not joking)
- Email addresses hosted or forwarded to existing addresses.
- Community discussion forums based on the Vanilla forum engine.
- Deployment of open source technologies wherever possible, avoiding lock-in to any particular vendor, server or system.
- Efficient template design, whether you are doing something similar to a design already out there, or going with a custom site design.
- Contact forms and custom forms to fit your specific needs. Data transactions can be secured with SSL.
- Shopping Cart capabilities - (requires setup costs and merchant account for credit card processing).
- Photo galleries, Flash and QuickTime video, or videos displayed from Youtube, Vimeo, Revver and other services.
- PDFs or other letterhead designed to match your site (on request).
- All graphics and other content available on backup media CD or DVD. You own everything so you can do whatever you want with it.
More Examples
Japan-America Society
The Heart of America Japan-America Society is a cultural organization in Kansas City. The objective was to create a site that would contain information about their cultural mission as well as post their newsletter and communicate upcoming events. The site serves to promote the organization and drive new visitors to attend interesting events and meetings. Several contact forms have been added to allow volunteers to sign up to work key events during the year. Multiple RSS feeds of Japan news are also embedded into pages. Currently we are working on an animated learning program developed in flash for learning Hiragana and Katakana writing.
Mass emails are frequently sent out to a site mailing list. Members are also encouraged to add their own content to the site, given a password for editing if so desired.
Robb Insurance Agency
Tammy Robb needed an online presence that was more flexible than her umbrella agency was going to allow. Already prepared with the page content copy, it was a matter of finding a layout and implementing the graphics. A thorough webform was created to send information to the agents to process quotes for potential clients.
Unlocking the Secrets Radio Podcast
http://www.unlockingthesecretsradio.com
A small business-oriented weekly AM radio program needed a site to post podcasts of the shows. Each show was converted to MP3 format and posted for download. An RSS feed was created to allow for podcast subscription. Advertiser links were later added and promoted on a sponsors page. As of summer 2007, the host has moved onto other things but the show downloads will likely remain available for some time.
Greater Kansas City Japan Festival
The Japan Festival Committee has for many years depended on SmickWorks to build their online presence in order to bring the largest possible crowd turnout to this one-day event every fall. Most of the original site structure stays the same year to year, but the content is always changing to reflect new event performers, workshops and the event schedule. Notable features of the Japan Festival site include a newsletter sign-up form, an embedded flash paper PDF of the event program, photo galleries and performer videos. Depending on the years events, you may also find a talent show sign-up and an online event survey for visitors to provide feedback of the event.
