carricdesign.com

The Rearrangements website was a great opportunity to redesign a well-functioning website and take it up a notch.  The overall goals included not only making the site look professional, but re-organizing the material to make it easier to find.  A common problem with websites, this one had been added onto over the months since its first creation and had become a little disjointed.

One thing that this website owner understands is that content is king on the web.  The site is well-indexed by Google and shows up well in organic search results because the of excellent, keyword-rich, readable content that has been prepared and installed on the site.  While Google had no problem with the content, the key became re-organizing things so that humans were better able to find what they were looking for.

The result is a clean-looking, easy-to-navigate site that presents a great face for the business of home staging for this owner.

screen shot for Rearrangements Home Staging Services

Visit the site at www.rearrangements.ca.

I came across this little gem today while doing some research for something else (isn’t that how it always goes?) and couldn’t resist the opportunity to share.

Flash Website Flow Chart

In case you are wondering, I’m not against the use of all things Flash.  I love Flash for moving things, galleries, adding the ‘wow’ factor, etc – but not for entire sites.  In fact, I get a little ticked off sometimes when I see a site entirely built in Flash that could easily be rendered in HTML/CSS with little or no loss of …well…flash-i-ness.

You can read the entire (short) article that holds as true today as when it was written in 2006.  In fact, you can see in the comments that it has continually shown up in conversations over the years, because people are still asking the question.

The simple bottom line is that plug-ins, such as Flash, require the user to actually have the plug-in before they view your site – how rude!

Some people prefer to browse the web without plug-ins or with plug-ins disabled to avoid the longer download time or the annoying moving graphics that distract them from the real content on the site.

Others are using devices on which plug-ins have been disabled (think iPhone…) or blocked.

Whatever the reason, consider the user of your site when planning your platform.  Unless the majority of your site’s users are going to be creative-types (we love Flash and always have it enabled because it does such cool stuff!), think about dialing it back a bit.

Update April 6/10 – I was reading a blog called Nine by Blue where I read a great example of why a website shouldn’t be built entirely in Flash.  Here’s the tell-all paragraph:

The individual pages don’t have corresponding unique URLs. All content loads on a single URL — www.heartlandcafeseattle.com. This means that search engines can’t index the content as they don’t have URLs to associate with that content. In addition, the content can’t be shared on social media. The site has an events calendar, but if I saw a cool event there and I wanted to post on Facebook about it and invite my friends, I’d have to tell them to go to the home page, then click events in the sidebar, then click…  Why is this? Well, the site is entirely in Flash. It absolutely doesn’t need to be in Flash. The site could keep the exact look and feel it currently has and be in HTML.

(from Nine By Blue “Should Restaurants Care About Local Search, accessed April 6, 2010)

Hopefully the restaurant in question sees the blog and changes the site, but if nothing else, it is a great example for the rest of us of what happens when you choose ‘flashy’ over ‘web-savvy’.

Adding copyright to your website reminds users that the content on your site was created by you (it was, wasn’t it?!?) and that you own the rights to it.

Because websites are generally created over time, the copyright information contains two years – the year that the information was first published to the internet and the year when changes were last made.  Many websites simply update the last date to the current year in January, but it really shouldn’t change until you put new content on your site.

Besides reminding people about who owns the content on your site, your copyright information helps users to know that you are adding new material to your website.  A website with the current year’s date in the copyright seems much fresher than one that is dated even one year prior. Internet users expect web content to be refreshed and updated regularly.

Summing up life in 140 characters has become a challenge and skill (that’s 66 – but this is a blog, so I don’t have to be done yet!).

Using Twitter and Facebook to communicate with the world has made me think about the necessity of getting right to the point, saying what you mean to say and getting out of there. These two particular portals have now trained me to think in smaller bites of information.

All this led me to think about site architecture on websites.

Too many times, I see websites that are all about the owner and not the user. By this I mean that the owner or developer pays the most attention to information or content that is important to them and spends seemingly little time on presenting the information for which the user is most likely looking.

Perhaps a better approach would be to start out thinking about what the user is likely coming to the website for and then building a website that serves that purpose.

With that in mind, the next two websites from CarricDesign will feature bold, easy to follow choice paths right from the home page. If the implementation follows as it is being designed to work, these websites will be different and set apart from their competitors, simply because they will make it very easy for users to find the most commonly sought-after information first.

I can’t wait to see how this affects the usability and user-ship of the websites!

The website for Celebrity Professional Teeth Whitening was a whirlwind wrapped in a hurricane.  The design and development happened over about 3 days, since we were racing the clock to get things up and running before the radio ad started.

screenshot from Celebrity Professional Teeth Whitening

The result is a very minimalist kind of site (which I like anyway) that is still able to portray the fun, energetic spirit of Celebrity without the clutter that can build up during a prolonged planning stage.

Would I like to build every site like this? Probably not. However, it was great to see how things could come together quickly and how elements, like the polaroid-type pictures, repeated throughout the site, could add continuity and flavour without clutter.

The site can be found at www.celebritywhitening.ca.