Website Redesign: Pharaoh Scents

This client sells aromatherapy sprays made with essential oils. The feel of the new site was to be very slick and atmospheric, fully themed with the product line.

While not the worst website out there, it sure needed help. The sprawling white pages were too bright with little imagery to compliment the text. It was a design that worked with monitors available at the time of creation (i.e. 1024x768 or smaller), but with today's laptops and large desktop monitors, the dynamic layout was very strange looking.

The central work included nice clear recreations of the logo and other artwork, new product photos, and top-to-bottom code rewriting. It lacked even the simplest elements like H1 and ALT tags! This website had a full range of typical deficiencies, never mind SEO.

Online shopping will be added to the site in coming weeks, but the redesign is basically complete. Work will now continue towards improving the search rankings and driving traffic, with ongoing adjustments to the content and copywriting, as well as reaching out through social media. There are also several legitimate directories this company should be in that are specific to the products they sell.

Top-Ranking Success: Naylor Systems

Naylor Systems manufactures very high quality marine equipment like aluminum docks, boat lifts, roller ramps for boats, and much more.

They're a market leader in Ontario, with over 50 dealers selling their products. By virtue of their genuine popularity and credibility the website was actually ranking ok, the main issue was the look. Extra planning was needed to ensure smooth redirects from old pages, clear on-topic content, and continuing ranking success.

This was another tale of a site built by a prior employee and now outdated and not representative of their business. The photos were blurry, the layout confusing and inconsistent, product information was both old and not prioritized well, and the look was late-1990s at best. Not to mention the automated Flash slideshows with background music! I hadn't seen such a thing in years. I thought the internet was free of such insanity!

Many of the photos sent by the client were taken during a thunderstorm, with dark skies. And since this redesign was occurring in October and November (when people pack up their docks and equipment), there was no chance to get better pictures. Much time was spent to salvage these otherwise good photos.

The website really turned into an online sales brochure, focusing on the details of their products. A lot of information is provided, yet the site remains simple and easy to use. Some of this was accomplished by putting non-core information in pop-ups (using pure CSS, so they work even on Internet Explorer 8 on Windows XP!). Great client, great business, and now a great new website with compliments coming in!

Top-Ranking Success: Granite Ridge Estates

Our latest top-10 website client is Granite Ridge Estates in Buckhorn, Ontario. They build custom luxury homes in their own subdivision in Buckhorn, as well as throughout the Kawartha Lakes.

They had an old website that was outdated and didn't reflect their current business very well. It was more or less just awful Flash slideshows and very little text.

The focus of the site now, aside from proper descriptions of what the company does, is tons of interior and exterior home photos (galleries that clearly show all the images available and can be navigated freely), plus actual floor plans of their various base models that can be printed out.

Work included an update to their logo, several on-location photo shoots, new high-resolution scans of dozens of floor plans, and lots more. The look of the site was made clean and classy by using simple black and white along with earth-toned colours like those found in the homes they build.

You Must Be Joking: "Security" Questions?

Over the past few weeks I've been checking to see if some websites are allowing more secure passwords.

As a side effect of this, I came across a variety of "security" questions to be used for secondary identification and/or password reset requests. You've probably seen many of these.

The problem is most of the questions are about things that are either already public knowledge, or things that could easily be found out!

Don't you think all of the following information could be found in about two minutes by anyone who wanted it? Couldn't a smart network admin come up with better questions that only you would possibly know the answer to?

• Your mother's maiden name
• Your father's middle name
• Your birth place
• Your high school
• Your high school mascot
• The street where you grew up
• Your favorite pet's name
• Your first job or employer
• Your first car (particularly obvious for young people, who may have only ever owned one!)

If everyone on Facebook knows the answer, maybe it's not a very good "security" question, lol.

Old School Web Design: A "Contact" Page

Is there anything more inexplicable about a business website than being unable to find contact information?

You're interested, ready to buy, or simply want more information, but ...you can't find the email address, street address, or phone number!

Which is because it's been stuck on a page all by itself somewhere else on the site. Not a shred of contact information anywhere except that one page.

This is another classic design mistake that heralds back to the days when graphic designers were told to make websites, and sought to create as many pages as possible from a slim amount of information.

It seems like an extension of the website-as-brochure mindset from the early days. Maybe graphic designers were so used to putting contact information only on the back of a flyer they figured it would only have one place on a website as well.

But it's more helpful to think of web pages in terms of a letterhead, where there should be essential information at your fingertips at all times. A visitor should be able to call a business or send an email from whatever page they happen to be on, instead of having to wander off to a separate part of the site. That breaks how visitors naturally move around a website, and demands they take at least one extra step just to get in touch... and probably moves them away from what got them interested in the first place!

In fairness, a contact page isn’t pointless in every case, just misused on a grand scale. If you have 35 offices, then yes, a contact page is appropriate, but at least a head office or 1-800 number should still appear on every page.

Just like the "enter" or "splash" page, never make your visitors jump through a hoop to do something as basic as contacting you.

Old School Web Design: Works Only On Internet Explorer

This issue stems from the fact that about 15 years ago Internet Explorer was the dominant web browser by a huge margin. But 15 years is a heck of a long time, and anyone today still building websites using FrontPage or any other WIndows-specific design tool needs to give their head a shake!

For some reason there are websites still being built today that only look and work correctly on Internet Explorer. Do these designers not understand that different browsers render code differently? Could they not bother spending a few minutes to test their sites? Why are they even building websites if they don't know what they're doing? How can they sleep at night knowing they are charging good money to build websites that won't even work right for many of the people who try to use them?

There are five major browsers in use today, and while Internet Explorer is still common on desktop computers, it is essentially non-existent on mobile devices. And we all know how mobile device use has skyrocketed in the last few years, soon to overtake laptops and desktops for overall internet use.

Building websites that only look and work right on IE is a sure way to neglect at least half of the visitors to an average website, close to all the visitors of any tech or geek-related site (typically using Chrome or Firefox), and basically everyone using a mobile device.

Now sure, some websites built for IE will work correctly on other browsers by default without any extra effort, as long as they are of simple and standard design. But the days of designing primarily for IE and hoping for the best are long gone. It simply isn't the dominant browser like it was 15 years ago.

We build websites that look and work exactly the same on any browser at any resolution. It takes a bit of extra work, but it's not that hard. Don’t let anyone tell you some nonsense about what they think your customers and prospects prefer, or tell you it's hard to make compatible or standardized websites, or tell you it will cost more. It's easy for anyone who ought to be calling themselves a "web designer".

Old School Web Design: An “Enter” page

Also known as a splash page. Have you ever come across one of these? It’s basically a huge empty page with a logo and a link to enter the actual website.

This is a leftover from times when no one really knew what to do with a website, but wanted more than just one page with their flyer on it, so they tossed up an extra page with nothing but the company logo on it.

It might say something like: "Welcome, you are now at the website of Joe’s Peanuts. Please click HERE to enter our site..."

There are only two types of sites that might need a landing page or splash page: A multi-national site asking you to select a language or country, or a porn site that requires a legal warning or disclaimer. For all other sites an entry page is pointless and indicates an amateurish delight in having as many pages as possible, which is nothing but detrimental and irritating to users.

Your home page needs to be a real home page, rich with content.

Entry pages also present a huge problem in terms of ranking in web searches. If one home page is completely devoid of content, how do you suppose it stacks up against other websites with normal home pages full of information? Do you think Google and Bing would consider it more useful or less useful to users?

Give your visitors what they came for. Never make someone jump through a hoop just for the privilege of getting to your home page!

(P.S. If you do need to remove a splash page from your site, make sure your webmaster is going to do a proper 301 redirect.)

Old School Web Design: A "Website" That's Just A Giant Animation

This is the more modern equivalent to using a single picture as a web page: using a single animation as a web page.

Some graphic designers with a knack for using animation software will take all the elements of a normal web page and put them into an animation file rather than a picture file.

It’s easy to get caught up in something familiar and use it for everything that comes along, without regard for the user experience, the purpose of the site, the way search engines work, the need for regular updates, compatibility across devices, or the advantages and opportunities of new coding developments.

It's the old “When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail” situation that existed in the early days of the web, when design options were very limited.

Illustrators figured websites would be elaborate illustrations. Animators envisioned websites as animations. Neither was wrong, it's just that those familiar individual preferences have become out of date because the internet has evolved so much.

Modern websites can include text, pictures, video, audio, animations, and more. They all have their place, and to build an entire website in only one medium is unnecessarily limiting to users. The choice should belong to the user, and, for example, not alienate blind or deaf visitors due to content they can't experience.

To be fair, in both cases (a "web page" that's either a picture or animation) it's often the design and animation software that is largely to blame, by having misleading options like "export as web page" or "export for web". These are handy software features, and perhaps suitable for personal web pages, but certainly not for business websites that need to be built to maximize search engine comprehension, accommodate all users on all devices, and correspond with how the internet works today.