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Website for Fisher’s Tudor House

February 2, 2012 By 2 Comments

It may not look like it on the surface, but this was a huge project. The mandate was to take two very dated, very old school websites and bring them into 2012. There were so many pages and interior links that just sorting it out required a flow chart. The SEO was Jurassic but losing ranking in such a competitive market wasn’t an option. Top it all off with an eCommerce component and a former webmaster that didn’t want to be a team player. I even pulled in old friend Marc Fuller to tweak the SEO.

 

The shining light was a client I just love. He understood the challenges and listened to my advice. Now he is no longer held hostage and is amazed at how easily he can update the new site himself.

Fisher’s Tudor House 2012

Just so you can get some idea of where we started…

thanks Pete.

Filed Under: Announcement, Website Design, Website marketing Tagged With: , , , ,

New Websites

May 23, 2011 By 1 Comment

I know I have been MIA alot lately. Well, I’ve been deep in the pixel mines creating sites for 3(4 sort of) of the most wonderful clients ever.

First up, are the wild and wacky Koko Brothers, an entertainment firm out of Baltimore. I loved working with Lou and Angelo, they cracked me up every time we spoke. If you are in the Baltimore area, or anywhere else in the world for that matter and want to have a lot of fun at your event, give them a call.

Next was a site redesign for dear friend of Think, Vicki Sanders at Branching Out Event Florist. I had built her last site but she’s been taking my advice about re-inventing. She is expanding into vintage rental and needed an update to reflect that. We still have to polish up the floors in her portfolio, but that can wait until she gets past the unbelievably busy May she has. You go Girl!

 

Then of course, there was the site for eWedNewz. That one went up in 24 hours because it had to.

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Photographer’s Website

September 15, 2010 By 2 Comments

For the longest time photographers have been caught up in having a Flash website. They do it because of the galleries and yes they can look great. The unintended consequence is the loss of search and now the loss of readability on mobile phones is also a huge issue.

Is there a fix? You bet there is.

Take a look at Paul Maynard Photography.

His site has big beautiful galleries that can be animated if he chooses. There is a slide show on the homepage that renders beautifully on phones and he can update the whole thing himself with the push of a button. Now isn’t that cool?

If you look closely at the image of the slideshow in the picture below, you will see that I caught this capture mid-fade. That’s cool too.

Filed Under: Announcement, Clients, Website marketing Tagged With: , , ,

Healthy Solutions Goes Live

April 29, 2010 By Leave a Comment

I thought you might like this site that went live over the weekend; Healthy Solutions Medical Weight Loss.

I know it a bit outside the wedding industry that I usually deal with but still fun to do.

The site went live on Sunday and by Tuesday they already had new patients coming in with their forms already printed out and filled in! The staff loves it, especially the ones that answer the phone.

I love happy clients :-D

What could a new website do for yHealthy Solutions eCommerce Websiteou?

Filed Under: Clients, Website marketing Tagged With: , ,

New Site for Something Blue Too

November 19, 2009 By Leave a Comment

I just handed off a new site to a wonderful client, Sarah Morris.  We had recently built Sarah a new site for her company, The Something Blue Shoppe and this was a sister site for her prom shop, Something Blue Too.Website for a Prom Store

Sarah wanted a site that carried the basic look of SBS but with more punch for a younger audience. Since she loved the way the first site worked she asked that we use the same CMS for the prom site. Both sites were built on the same Premium WordPress theme with a ton of customization.

Filed Under: Blog, Clients, Marketing Tagged With: , ,

What It Takes to Build a Great Website

September 22, 2009 By 5 Comments

There are so many things that go into propelling your blog or website to the top of search. One of the things that so many people forget is the basic structure that supports it all. So hung up are they on keywords and shiny new tools like Facebook and Twitter that they think that site structure itself isn’t important. Maybe that explains why so many people are still struggling to make their flash site search. You can keep throwing money at self proclaimed SEO experts but unless you have the proper foundation it won’t really make any difference.

You know by now how strongly I feel about using WordPress as the content management system for not only your blog but your entire website. There is more to it than just that. Not all WP themes are created equal. As they say “the devil is in the details”

You need a team that understands all the nuances and details behind all of the themes and what makes a great WordPress blog/website. A team that knows how to find the one theme that will not only work for you in terms of look and content layout, but more importantly how each of them is inherently optimized to behave and react in a way that the search engines expect. You need someone with a deep understanding of how the search engines work. Additionally you need someone that knows which plugins, set which way are going to add to your search mojo. And most of all you need someone who can create a great look, so that you grab the interest of the visitors the search engine delivers.

Let me tell you a little story.The Wedding Dish. Custom build blog by The Agency @ Think Last Friday we set the Wedding Dish to maintenance mode and rolled it to a different WP theme. Over the course of the next 24 hours we dressed it up, added a plugin here, tweaked a bit there and set it back to live. By Sunday, the unique visitors had increased by 20%! What’s more, the number of page views per visitor and time on the site went through the roof. That is overnight folks. We did nothing, not one thing to the content. This is purely the power of the right theme, optimized correctly with a look that engages the site visitors. Those numbers have continued to climb each day since and I don’t foresee that changing anytime soon.

Here at the Agency, we have assembled a team with the experts that understand the power of WordPress and how to build a site that can harness that, an award winning graphics team that can give you the look you need to keep you visitor engaged and express your brand and the deep background in the wedding industry to understand how to appeal to today’s brides.

So tell me, what is stopping you from rebuilding your foundation?

Filed Under: Blog, Marketing, Website marketing Tagged With: , , , , , ,

The Synergy of Email Marketing and WordPress

September 9, 2009 By 3 Comments

Many wedding professionals are using Email blasts for marketing. Let me show you why moving to WordPress will make that easier and more beneficial.

In today’s fast paced environment, email marketing works best when it teases several articles rather than using the full Think Like A Bride Newsletterarticle content. If a reader doesn’t get hooked by the first one, there are more chances on down the page.
I have been doing this with my Think Like A Bride newsletter. The great thing about it is I can look at the stats for the email campaign and see what articles are catching my reader’s eyes. Then I of course write more of them. The thing is, you have to have somewhere for those full articles to live.

Publishing content remains a huge barrier to small businesses who too often rely on static Web sites – and sometimes-expensive, often-hard-to-reach Webmasters to update those sites.
That is where WordPress comes in. Publishing via WordPress is something that most anyone can grasp. It becomes a simple task to get your content online. Even if your newsletter is just a collection of images from the last month’s weddings, you can still manage it yourself.

In each teaser in your newsletter you link to the post for the full article on your WordPress site. By posting it on your site you have the benefit of added content and better SEO. That is something that just putting it in an email won’t give you.

Additionally, WordPress sites are set up to easily allow you to install the tools needed to gather leads as well as cross post your material to all the other social networks like Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed. Again, great for SEO and a timesaver for you.

Even if you aren’t ready to completely switch you website to a WordPress CMS, (which I highly recommend) you can still just have a WP blog set up on your existing site. Call it something like “Latest News” or “Fresh Ideas” and let your articles live there.

It is something to think about. Why not get all the benefit you can out of the effort you put into writing articles for your newsletter? Kind of seems like a no brainer to me.

Filed Under: Blog, Marketing, Social Media, Website marketing Tagged With: , , , , ,

New Bridal Salon Dialogue Website

August 26, 2009 By 1 Comment

We just completed another social media dialogueBridal Salon Website website for The Something Blue Shoppe, a full service bridal and prom salon located in Hartselle Alabama.

Sarah Morris, the owner, contacted me after hearing a presentation I did on Doing Social Media Right for 2Be University in St.Louis. Sarah wanted all the advantages that goes along with our all WordPress based websites, including:

  • Easy do it yourself content additions, upgrades, and site maintenance.
  • Complete automatic interaction and cross posting with Facebook and Twitter
  • Integrated blog
  • Low cost hosting
  • And the truly best SEO that only WordPress based websites can deliver.

We updated the look and layout, while still keeping the established branding of The Something Blue Shoppe

After just one lesson, Sarah is doing her own updates like a pro. I wish you could have heard the excitement in her voice when she realized just how easy her new site was to manage.

Please take a look.

Filed Under: Announcement, Blog, Clients, Marketing Tagged With: , , ,

A website and a blog and a SHOPPING CART! All-in-one!

July 12, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Last year we began pioneering the concept of using WordPress not only for a blog, but even better using it’s content management system for a full website including the blog. Our clients saw instant search marketing results. Plus the new found ability to manage their own websites with lower costs. The win-win of a web/blogsite.

For the last few weeks I have been working to add a shopping cart to a new WordPress web/blogsite I am creating for a friend. We are doing the full site from art to design to programming/implementation. The purpose of the site is to market Trollbeads. The goal was to have a small business affordable website, that can be managed by the business owner and with superior front page organic search results, so the choice of WordPress was pretty quick.

But what for the cart? Third party shopping carts even from Yahoo or GoDaddy can cost $50 to $100+ a month plus transaction and processing fees. We wanted a less costly option with better styling options. We looked at ZenCart, osCommerce and WPe-Commerce. All of them were good and provided an excellent low cost self hosted cart with the ability extension. I was familiar with ZenCart from some other projects but wanted to try something a little different and that would not have the standard Zencart look.

WP e-Commerce is what we used for Trollbeads Trail. Like many WordPress plugins, it is free with full functionality and the upgrades with a grid layout and really cool drag and drop cart are very inexpensive. It is a little complex to setup (all shopping carts are to some degree), but very straight forward once you understand the application’s terms (the developers are from New Zealand).

The finished look is outstanding and the SEO power over the first 30 days has been even better than expected. So much so that we cloned it for a second site for the same customer replacing the existing website for her jewelry store, Santa Fe Trail Jewelry.

This is excellent for anyone wanting to increase their item sales or rental potential while keeping expenses as low as possible. Take a look at the finished site, remember it is all WordPress even the shopping cart, and let us show you how we can put this feature to work for you -

TrollbeadsTrail.com Screencap

Filed Under: Announcement, Clients, Marketing Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

What do Martha Stewart, the NFL and a Coyote in Wyoming All Have in Common?

September 10, 2008 By 2 Comments

What an odd question. The truth is that they have something important in common, something you that you also need: a great, functional website with a killer Content Management System. As different as they are, all three entities have sites built on the same platform we use to build our client’s sites. WordPress [Read more...]

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