Got Back Up?
Today’s guest post is from Heid, theCEO of ProVim. They are our web host, not just for Roundpeg, but every website we build for our clients. More than anything else, we work with them because of their service. Things don’t go wrong with websites often, but when they do, I am glad we work with Provim!
Got Back Up?
Every once in a while we’ll get a call from a customer frantically describing that they accidentally just deleted their website (with no backup
in hand). Thankfully, for these customers, we’ve had backups of their sites. In the event that the abominable happens, backups serve to be a
safety net for your valuable digital resources.
How many times have you lost an important document or photo due to a hard drive crash, software error, or usb flash drive failure? I’m sure it’s
happened at least once in your life, right? Events like this teach us the importance of personal data backups. However, even with the knowledge
gained from these horrible events, it can still be easy to blank on making a backup. This is why backing up a website at the server level is important,
and is something we do with every site hosted.
Breathing New Life Into the Lung Care Group
Over the past few weeks, the Roundpeg staff has been working on a redesign for the Lung Care Group, a team of pulmonologists in Carmel, Indiana. The Lung Care Group already had a website in place, but it was obvious that the site did not adequately capture how talented the team at LCG was.
We got to work on a fully interactive overhaul of the website. We created a new layout which included downloadable forms for patients who didn’t want the inconvenience of filling them out at the doctor’s office. We also generated an interactive map for those who need directions to the Lung Care Group’s office. Not only do we feel that the final product goes a long way in improving the Lung Care Group’s brand image, but the LCG team loves it as well.
We’ve had a blast creating a website that the Lung Care Group could be proud of. Below you’ll find before and after screen shots of the site. Make sure to visit the site and check out all the new features.
Local HVAC Company Gets Web Face Lift
With a little help from Roundpeg, Make it Mowery has relaunched their website – www.makeitmowery.com.
The new website provides visitors with a more organized view of their wide product and service line. The addition of a blog offers visitors information on new trends as well as the ability to see what other consumers say about their experience with Mowery.
“Mowery is well known in the local community because we’ve been in business for 40 years,” says owner Chip Cochran. “While we wanted a fresher look, we did not want to reinvent ourselves so completely that our customers did not recognize us.”
An additional benefit of the redesign was the migration to a Wordpress Platform. With the installation of the “All in One” plugin, the site is performing well on search engines and the members of the Mowery staff can keep the content fresh with small, regular updates.
To learn more about Make it Mowery and to see the new website please visit: www.makeitmowery.com.
Five Free SEO Tools
Building a great website is only the beginning. Once built, you need to drive traffic and measure performance. Fortunately there are a number of web tools which can help. Here are just a few tools which you can use to put more power in your eMarketing strategy. Best of all, these tools are FREE
Google Webmaster Tools: Webmaster resources help answer crawling and indexing questions. Using these tools improves traffic, enhances the site’s functionality and helps grow your internet business.
Google Analytics: This tool helps you write better ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives, and improve conversion. The statistics show where visitors come from and how they interact with your site.
Google Alerts: Receive email updates or notes to your Google Reader on the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic. For example: select your company name, the name of your competitor or other hot industry topic and when Google indexes a page related to the topic you have selected you will be notified.
Yahoo Site Explorer: Explore all the web pages indexed by Yahoo! Search. View the most popular pages from any site, dive into a comprehensive site map, and find pages that link to that site or any page. Be sure to submit your site to be crawled as well!
SEOBook.com Keyword Research: A fast, easy, reliable and FREE way to perform keyword research. This tool shows you how many people search for keyword phrases in Google, Yahoo and MSN. This tool can help you write more effective copy to help you improve your position in organic searches.
For a more complete list of great tools check out this post from WebBizIdeas.com
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Eloquence Language Services Has a New Website
Eloquence Language has a new website: www.eloquencelanguage.com.
This was my first website project at Roundpeg. While I had helped Erica with other projects, this was the first one I was responsible for. I learned quite a bit along the way and am really happy with the way it turned out.
While similar to many of the sites Roundpeg has done in the past, it does have some unique features. One of the more challenging elements was the Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) section.
Owner, Karen Friedman, had written fairly lengthy answers to each question. If we had simply listed them all on one page it would have been hard for visitors to quickly find the information they were searching for. We decided instead to build a question page, which you can see in the image above, with links to answers which were actually individual blog posts.
This makes it easier to search the content and creates more opportunities to optimize each question for search.
Eloquence Langauge is a language translation and interpretation company. They translate a wide range of documents and websites, including legal, medical and health related documents and human resource information. They also provide interpretation services for meetings and conferences. To learn more about what they do visit their website at: www.eloquencelanguage.com.
Web Design Tips: Serve Content to Google and People
About 18 months ago, we stopped designing traditional websites. I said goodbye to Dreamweaver and FrontPage, and embraced Wordpress. We initially made the change because it allowed us to quickly create simple websites our small business clients could update for themselves.
Along the way, we discovered other benefits. Our Wordpress sites seemed to perform better in searches then the old style, frame based sites. At the time, we didn’t really know why, but assumed it was because Wordpress presented information to search engines in a way which enabled indexing.
Turns out, we were right. At the MBO conference a few weeks ago, I had a chance to listen to my friend John Nichols talk about web design. He clearly explained why Google ( and other search engines) have a difficult time categorizing information presented in old style Frame-Based sites.
And while Flash and lots of pictures may appeal to live human beings, the search engines prefer text, with important information both headlined and in bold.
So take a look at your website? Is it time for a change? If you are still living with a frame based site which requires significant technical expertise to make even the slightest change, you are missing huge opportunities to present new information to search engines. And, with no new information, you will find yourself dropping in search rankings.
Wordpress is not the only CMS solution, but for small business owners, we have found it to be extremely effective.
Cliffe Metal Website Redesign
by Erica Gardner
When we first met with Cliffe Metal they were looking for a new web site which met several criteria
- Easy to update - As a manufacturers representative, their product line changes frequently, as they add new principles to their lines. They were frustrated by the amount of time it took to update the site – sending changes to their designer, and waiting for her to find the time to make the updates.
- Improved SEO - The lack of fresh content, conversion forms, and key terms was clearly keeping them off the first page of Google.
- A fresh look consistent with their professional image. The red, white and blue theme made the site look like 100 other sheet metal firms, all with logos that dated back to the formation of the company.
We started with a redesign of the their logo and color scheme. Moving away from the “patriotic red, white and blue, we encouraged them to consider colors in a metallic family and stronger fonts.
We recommended a transition to Wordpress to address their update issues. The site now includes a blog where they feature pricing and product availablity updates, along with other company news. This ability to share information as it becomes available was impossible with their original site. And given the volatile nature of raw material pricing, this gives them a unique competitive edge in the marketplace.
We designed the website to showcase the specific metal products they sell. We selected theNextGEN gallery to offer a better solution for displaying their products than simple pasting images of different sizes onto each page. We also added a sidebar to feature links to their top suppliers.
Using the All in One SEO plug in, along with new content, we have begun to improve their visibility on key terms. It will take awhile to move up the rankings, but they are on their way.
Indy-Biz Redesign Part II
Written By Neil Chaggar
As most of you know, the Roundpeg team had been redesigning the Indy-biz website for for the past week. The new Indy-Biz website is up now and below are the results for the logo survey we did last week and choice “D” was pick of the most people.
As for as color goes, most people picked Black and White; however, Black and Red wasn’t far behind. Therefore, we have tried to expand the logo a bit with Black and White and a bit of Red on the side, hope you like it. Neil out!
Q1: Which Two Logos Do You Think Are The Most Memorable?
A 29.0%
B 16.1%
C 16.1%
D 29.0%
E 6.4%
F 3.2%
Q2: Which Two Logos Do You Think Are The Most Credible?
A 19.4%
B 25.8%
C 12.9%
D 29.0%
E 6.5%
F 6.5%
Q3: Which Two Logos Do You Think Are The Most Attractive?
A 29.0%
B 19.4%
C 19.4%
D 22.6%
E 9.7%
Q4: Which Two Logos Do You Think Are The Most Relevant?
A 19.4%
B 29.0%
C 16.1%
D 22.6%
E 12.9%
Q5: Which Two Logos Do You Think Are The LEAST Appropriate?
A 23.3%
B 10.0%
C 13.3%
D 3.3%
E 30.0%
F 20.0%
Q6: Which Color Scheme Do You Think is Most Appropriate for a News Site?
Black and White 33.3%
Blue and White 11.1%
Blue and Grey 16.7%
Blank and Red 27.8%
Green and Grey 5.6%
Green and Blue 5.6%
Roundpeg Website Redesign – The Final Chapter
by Jay Mattingly
Well, ladies and gentlemen, it’s come to this. After months of research, hard work, and dedication, we’ve finally finished our overhaul of the Roundpeg website.
First of all, I can’t thank everyone enough for their input on what they thought works, and more importantly, what they thought didn’t work. We went through four redesign rounds and people continuously gave positive, constructive feedback. The redesign wouldn’t have been possible without you.
We learned a lot along the way, we made some mistakes-well, at least I did-but in the end, it was worth it to be able to stand beside the final product. Look around as the overhaul has really streamlined the site as a whole. We hope you enjoy the new site, and find it’s an improvement over the previous one.
Where’s the New?
If you came looking for our new website, you are probably confused by the familiar design you found when you arrived. Our very enthusiastic new intern, Melinda has been working on the press release to go along with the launch and she hit “send”, when she should have hit “save draft”.
Of course, the well oiled Rounpdeg PR machine took off, and I found Tweets, ReTweets, and posts within minutes. Unfortunately, we are still a week or so away from a real launch, but I don’t want you to leave disappointed. So here is a link to our test site, which only you… visitors to this blog post will get to see.
Not everything is working yet, but browse around, and tell me what you think…
And be sure to watch for the real announcement next week!
