Apr 09
MikeClient Spotlight, SEO, Website Launches redesign, SEO, spilled milk catering, Web Design
A few months ago, Washington DC catering company, Spilled Milk Catering, contacted us for help expanding their clientele and reaching a wider target audience. Although the site redesign and preliminary SEO took place back in February, we haven’t had a chance to sit down and tell the world about this exciting project. Actually, it worked out for the best — since a couple of months have passed, we’ve been able to get a good glimpse of how our optimization and content restructuring efforts have helped Spilled Milk.
During our analysis of the website, we noticed that there was limited content on the site and all of the search traffic was coming from brand name keywords, not a single local targeted or service specific keyword. Unless the prospective customer knew “Spilled Milk Catering”, the DC catering company was invisible. To address these concerns, we:
- Improved the site structure. Geographic pages were added to speak to each of Spilled Milk’s target markets (Maryland, DC, and Virginia). Additionally, specific service pages were added to maximize the search engine exposure of each of their individual service offerings.
- Researched and analyzed keywords. Keywords were researched and analyzed to capitalize on the high local search volume and catering-specific keywords.
- Optimized the web content. Using the keywords identified, keyword density was improved to build credibility and relevance in the eyes of the search engines.
In a short ten week span following our efforts, we’ve accomplished quite a bit.
- Improved total website traffic by 163%
- Improved the number of unique visitors by 207%
- Improved traffic coming from referral sites by 234%
- Improved the number of landing pages in which users entered the site by 120%
- Improved the number of page views by 146%
- Placed 24 keywords on the search engines radar that were not previously ranking
- Improved the ranking of the #1 desired keyword by 94 places in Google
It’s been a pleasure working with the guys over at Spilled Milk. Since SEO is an on-going process, we haven’t completed the job yet but the results are headed in the right direction. Lastly, if you have an event coming up, give them a shout. Tell them I sent you and try the Three-Cheese Puff Canapes – you won’t regret it. Yummmmm………
Apr 09
MikeClient Spotlight Aurora Feint, Client Spotlight, iPad release, Open Feint
We were excited to work with the guys at Aurora Feint back in 2009 and have been thrilled with their glowing success to-date. Last week, they were featured in Tech Crunch for their release of Aurora Feint 3, “a free-to-play massively multi-player social gaming app based around virtual goods” for the new iPad.
If you are not yet familiar with Aurora Feint 3 it is played via OpenFeint X, a social gaming platform which has become the standard for Apple devices and for which we designed their logo, website and icons for the iPhone app. To see the work, please visit the Open Feint case study.
The people behind Aurora Feint have ambitions to dominate the market for gaming on mobile devices. What began as a puzzle game for the iPhone has since developed into the social gaming platform known as OpenFeint which has attracted thousands of iPhone game and app developers to join its extensive community. OpenFeint itself is the platform behind many of the games enjoyed on the iPhone and iPod Touch, which given the global success of the iPhone and now the new, hotly anticipated iPad, we know this company will continue to grow and enjoy great success in the future.
As always, it’s great to see our clients thriving!
Aug 07
MikeClient Spotlight Bakery Print Design, Bakery SEO, Bakery Strategy, Bakery Web Design, Cupcake, Delleicious Desserts, Reef Light Interactive, Washington DC
As our first “Client Spotlight”, it’s only appropriate to shine the light on our very dear friend, Danielle at Delleicious Desserts. She’s so many things – a local Washington DC cupcakery, an amazing baker, an ongoing client and now, very dear friend. No, we’re not sucking up for free cupcakes.
One morning, Danielle called me and explained her vision to build another cupcakery in Washington DC’s already over saturated cupcake scene. Danielle did have a few things going for her though: she was widely known as Washington DC’s expert blogger on “everything cupcake”, had frequent interviews in local and national publications, a passion for baking, and an amazingly delicious product line.
From ground zero, we worked with Danielle to develop a creative brand strategy to ensure that her business shines and stands apart from the competition. Starting with her logo and business card design, we designed a look that was fresh, inviting and fun, and incorporated it in all aspects of the project: bakery website design and print design (thank you cards, fliers, menus, and more).
Today, Delleicious Desserts shines through the thick fog of competition. It’s been an absolute pleasure to work with Danielle and see her progress from a popular blogger to successful owner of arguably Washington DC’s best cupcakery. For all of our local readers – give her a shot and let us know what you think (of the cupcakes and our work). To see the work, check out the case study.
Aug 04
Jeff3D, Client Spotlight, Flash, SEO, Web Design 3d web design, Reef Light Interactive
Hi all! We’d like to welcome you to our brand new site! We’d also like to welcome you to The Lightbox, our brand new blog. In the coming months we’d like to use this space to talk about design trends and issues, highlight some of our new client work we’re especially proud of, and any other random thoughts that may pop into our collective heads. We’ll try not to talk about ourselves too much, unless it provides some value or insight into the start-up experience, or gives our readers a better sense of us personally or what our company hopes to achieve.
The Re-Branding
There comes a time in every small business where they reach a cross-road. What began as a hobby or passion has really started to take off, and your business vision is starting to materialize. New customers/clients are contacting you every day, and it’s at that point that you need to decide how to take your business to that next level.
It’s with that in my mind that we approached our re-branding. We’ve kept the same name – Reef Light Interactive – but that’s about it. Our color scheme, logo, business cards, letterhead, and most importantly, our website, have all undergone a dramatic change. These elements are all representative of what we now value:
- Exceptionally unique, quality, work
- Complex messages delivered simply
Keep these values in mind as you peruse the new site, or any of our client work. As you’ll see, we took them seriously as we overhauled the site.
The Website Redesign
Imagery — The first thing you probably noticed was the 3D lighthouse. We take pride in our 3D talent – rendering objects as realistically as possible, with articulate detail, and accurate lighting effects, so we wanted this to be front and center. It not only captures a visitor’s attention, but gives a clear indication of what our specialty is.
What’s with the cubes? Well, that’s for you to figure out. In our first draft of the redesign, we included the red and white cubes at the base of the lighthouse, to add a twist to the image. We showed family and friends, and without question the cube designs were polarizing. People thought they were visually interesting, if confusing, vs. outright disliking them. We could have easily removed them from our next iterations, but instead we’ve decided that this is a perfect representation of what we value – something exceptionally unique while visually arresting. They were perfect. Go ahead and explore them a bit more – - you may learn something about “the cubes”.
While we’re on lighthouses, the 2 other images that have been redesigned are our logo, and our watermark. With these images, we wanted to carry through the look and feel of our main lighthouse, but more simply. Be on the lookout for our watermark, which lives in the bottom right hand corner of any website we design!
Color Scheme
It’s been described as Where’s Waldo meets plastic pills…either way you look at it, the red and white jump out! With our new color scheme, we wanted to help our site really jump off the page, while still maintaining a professional look and feel. The combination of the red and white is a perfect metaphor for our values; the red being unique and eye-catching, with the white symbolizing clarity and simplicity of our designs.
Layout
With the imagery and the colors selected for the site, we got down to the business of site architecture. Although we had several pieces of content we wanted to communicate via our site, including our portfolio, about our company, our credentials, etc., we didn’t want to over complicate things.
With that in mind we decided on a simple top level navigation, with clear titles beginning with “Our..”, making it simple to read and understand what each site section contains.
Our sub-pages follow simple, self explanatory layouts. Our Expertise, Story, and Awards page layout relevant information with large visuals and easy to read fonts, and Get in Touch provides an easy to use contact form.
We reserved the footer for information outside the scope of our main site navigation; including business contact information, our newsroom, recent Lightbox blog posts, and our corporate partners.
Finally, the “Our Work” page stands apart from the rest. We encountered a challenge when designing our portfolio, as we wanted to display examples of multiple services without creating a messy user experience. How would we display web design, flash, SEO, 3d, online strategy, print, and logo services on our site – with some clients falling into 2 if not several categories? The solution soon appeared to us – AJAX! Using this technology, we were able to shuffle around thumbnails all on one page, with users able to filter by service to see what we did for which clients. A simple, yet effective technique! Beyond that, we enabled each thumbnail to provide more information upon roll over and click, so we’ve been able to build a robust gallery in a simple to use format.
That’s all folks…
As you can see, we put a lot of thought into this redesign, as we do with all of our work. I’ve always thought that a web design agency’s website is all you need to see to make a judgment of their quality of work. If they don’t take their own work seriously, how can they take a clients work? In this case, it’s okay to judge a book by its cover. We feel confident that our cover in this sense is an accurate representation of what’s inside; an agency dedicated to helping you stand apart online.
Subscribe to our rss