Website Design Category
Redesign of Manufacturing Website
This home page redesign project for Hamilton Caster in ways was more challenging than revamping an entire site.
While the old site looks dated, it ranked exceptionally well on major search engines. To avoid
mucking this up, we analyzed the site structure, website analytics and researched competitive sites.
Hamilton Caster is an international manufacturer of casters, wheels and trucks with customers ranging from Mercedes Benz to the NFL.
Home Page as Marketing Weapon
Web visitors take about 3 seconds to decide if they’ll remain at your site. Impact, speed and a meaningful message are critical. With Hamilton, we wanted visitors to rethink the importance of caster selection by showing the heavy duty customers that specified them.
Expandable Sites Stretch Your Investment
The design of the new home page features 5 target industries. The setup expands to add new industries or swap out additional executions. Aspects of the design have already been applied to the interior of the site, which is now ready for additional development.
Design informed by Web Analytics
Our team used web analytics information to identify popular pages on the site, important landing pages other then the home page, navigation paths and search engine performance.
Testing Design for Roadworthiness
While aspects of design are subjective, usability is not. With Hamilton Caster, we tested our work from paper prototypes through final design and programming to ensure
users could find critical navigation to find their way through a large site. Testing at each step saves time and money on rework at later stages.
Dig Into Interactive at Ideopia
Ideopia not only designs, builds and maintains websites, we create the fabric of digital and off-line marketing that keeps them healthy: fresh content, tech checks, SEO, blogs, social media,
and email marketing.
Did Google’s Panda Eat Your Website?
Have your search rankings taken a dive recently? It’s possible Google’s Panda, the latest update to the search giant’s algorithm, has thrashed you. As with previous updates, Google is aiming to squash certain types of sites called link farms. In the past, large numbers of links from these sites would boost your ranking. Now Google is lowering your ranking for these links, because their relevance to your site’s content is low.
So what makes a good or a bad page? The SEOBook.com has these useful guidelines: A useful document…
1. will pass a human inspection
2. is not ad heavy
3. is well linked externally
4. is not a copy of another document
5. is typically created by a brand or an entity which has a distribution channel outside of the search channel
6. does not have a 100% bounce rate followed by a click on a different search result for that same search query
To learn more, consult this mostly non-technical guide to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines from FeedTheBot.com.
Find out about strategic SEO at Ideopia.
Tweak Your Website With a User Test
A project for a client earlier this month reminded us that while user tests are invaluable in website development, they also have tremendous value for existing sites. The purpose of a user test is to determine whether someone can complete critical tasks on your site…like spend money!
For example, plunk a user down on the site’s homepage, and ask her to find a specific product, complete a transaction or find contact information. Some fixes we’ve found, like changing the names on navigation tabs, are incredibly simple.
For how-to tips on conducting a user tests, see this excellent article from the University of Texas at Austin, and sign up for Jakob Nielsen’s newsletter at useit.com.
Getting Up to Speed on SEO
Maybe you don’t want to rip the guts out of your website and tweak URLs for better SEO, but it sure doesn’t hurt to know what the fuss is all about. So we’re heartily recommending Google’s Guide for webmasters. It’s 20-pages-long, non-technical, and it does a great job explaining how search works, and how to make it work better. Download it from Google’s Webmaster blog, and the next time you bump into Spock from IT, you can chat with him about canonical urls.
Redesign Home Page without Tanking Search Rankings
It’s no secret that some websites that perform well on search engines will never win a beauty contest. Just look at Wikipedia. With solid analytics and research, it’s possible to have the beauty and the beast. Our approach, put simply, is to thoroughly understand why a site works and not break it. See our Case Study on Website Redesign to find out how we remade and rebranded the home page for a major manufacturer while maintaining the luster of its search engine rankings.