VTWebProperties

After Midnight Jewelers is a jewelry repair and custom jewelry design store located in the University Mall in South Burlington, VT. When Scott Richardson first contacted me about redesigning their website I was shocked to see the one they had in place – a throwback to the early days of the internet with flashy graphics and no attention paid to either the keyword content or usability of the site.

We set out in short order to deliver a new website that allowed After Midnight Jewelers to be found for keywords important to their business by providing individual pages for all the services they provide. As a result the new website is now finding itself starting to rank for some competitive keywords in the local market. Combined with a managed, localized PPC Google AdWords campaign, After Midnight Jewelers is seeing a dramatic increase in exposure of their website and that translates to more foot traffic in the store.

A trusted employee of After Midnight Jewelers attended a recent workshop I gave on Facebook for Small Business and is now actively running their Facebook Page.  Congratulations to Scott and the team at After Midnight Jewelers on a great leap forward!

No Comments | In: Website Launch | tags: After Midnight Jewelers, jewelry, Website Launch. | #

One of the students in the last SEO course I was teaching at the Randolph Technical Career Center was sharing with a friend of hers some of what she was learning in my course and that fortuitous moment led to my meeting with Bruce McCarty. When I had my initial conversation with Coach Bruce, I was pretty impressed with his business model and also pretty quickly tuned into the biggest opportunity he had available to him and the biggest problems his website faced.

Bruce runs fund raisers – the kind where kids come home from school with catalogs of products to sell to their family and neighbors to raise money for their class, cheer leading squad, marching band or sports team. He has a website and was spending good money on AdWords advertising without the conversions that a well-targeted site would get. With this in mind we worked together to develop a plan to change things.

One of the primary fund raiser activities Bruce provides is pizza fundraising and it became apparent to us both that since he wanted to place special  focus on this singular fund raising activity, he ought to better position his web presence with a site that is dedicated to the subject matter. After selecting a keyword-rich domain name (PizzaKitFundraising.com) and discussing in detail the goals of the site, we set about to develop his new strategy.

The strategy includes:

• Creating landing pages for PPC ads which are highly targeted to the audiences most often looking for fund raising opportunities.
• Creating a blog where Bruce and his staff can share the success stories of others who have used his pizza kit fund raisers.
• Creating the site with best practices for search engine optimization so he stands the best chance at getting natural search engine rankings for the keywords he is now targeting with ads.
• Tying blog posts and site pages together so related articles show on the site pages.
• Using targeted images as well as text to visually connect with the target audience.

The primary goal of the new website is to deliver more forms being filled out – getting more people to contact Bruce to set up a fund raiser. I look forward to being able to come back here and report on the success of our strategy.

In the meantime Bruce and I have more websites to work on together…

No Comments | In: Website Launch | tags: PizzaKitFundraising.com, Website Launch. | #

Sometimes what a client wants is above and beyond the typical, and sometimes that is because the client has a business that is itself above and beyond the ordinary. This is the case with studio jeweler Dawn Russell who creates marvelous pieces of art inspired by nature.

Dawn came to VT Web Properties with a need to get her site built and live in a real hurry. Her online portfolio is an extremely important part of her image as she presents her work to museums, art galleries and shows around the country by pointing them to her website. When she approached VT Web Properties she was already beyond the deadline she had set for her site and frustrated by the lack of progress her previous web developer had made.

Taking the intricate design, VT Web Properties forged ahead with a plan to nail down the portfolio first so her most critical business need was met. After rebuilding  the database and administrative functions on the site, we then progressed on each page to complete the project as quickly as possible.

Among the technical challenges presented by the design were custom scrollbars, complex layouts and the need to maintain Analytics on the AJAX-heavy portfolio. We worked together to create a reflection of the  inspirations in nature that drive her fabulous  jewelry designs and came away with some inspirations of our own.

No Comments | In: Web Design, Website Launch | tags: Dawn Russell, jewelry, Website Launch. | #