saint louis full service web design

What you should expect. From any DESIGNER

It's 2011 and there are some things a good website HAS to come with. Obviously there is crisp, clean, and inspired graphic design coupled with an easy to follow navigational structure...at a minimum. But there is so much more to making your site speak for itself while standing above the competition. The following also come standard in the price I quote for each site that I build.
  • Full Graphic Design Package
  • Site Functionality and Framework
  • Content Management System (you can update your own site with ease - no html experience required)
  • Social Networking on Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube (others upon request)
  • SEO -or- Search Engine Optimization with a focus on the big 3, Google, Yahoo, and BING
  • Extensive Contact Form (as basic or detailed as you need)
  • Multi-Administrator Functionality
  • Login Required Password Protected Site Areas (restrict access to certain areas of your site to members who sign up)
  • Multiple Email Addresses
  • Photo Galleries (Stylish jQuery photo viewing. no more picture pop up windows or Flash galleries with heavy load times)
  • WOW Effect Plug-Ins and Modules (If you see something on this site that makes you think, "You don't see that on every website!", most likely it's offered without additional fee!)
For more information on a term or technology you do not understand, please consult my page on "Terms everyone purchasing a site should know."
Keyless ignition and seat warmers are a bonus...the steering wheel is standard.

 

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saint louis graphic design

Because if it's not fun to look at...they won't STAY!

We've all seen them, and even though their intentions are good you have to turn away. The dreaded UGLY WEBSITE. There are programmers and coders galore that can make code do spectacular things, but that won't change the tiled, purple and orange background on their website that turns 90% of their traffic away in under 30 seconds. Maybe it just wasn't the info they were looking for. OR...maybe it was the 36px bright red Comic Sans Bold that was used as the body text. Taste is everything. I have an article here on the site called Trust Your Designer which gives some helpful insight as to what makes a graphical layout work, but in short, it really comes down to what is eye pleasing as well as fast loading. Simple, clean, fresh, and engaging. I bring 16 years of experience doing just this very thing for businesses in print and on the web. Let me add the eye candy that will take your site to a whole new level!

 

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saint louis content management system designer and easy updating

Make changes to your OWN site With EASE.

Have you ever wished you could fire your designer? If only you knew how to get into your site and update that ONE SIMPLE DATE ON THE CALENDAR. With Content Management now you CAN! And you can do it with little to no knowledge of HTML, CSS, or scripting. Sure, you still need a pro to help with the heavyweight stuff, but in today's fast paced WWW, you can't always be at the mercy of your designer's schedule - just as they respectively can't be on call 24/7.

Scenario #1: You are the entertainment director of a nightclub. It is Friday afternoon and the lead singer of Sunday's Dying Sorrows has just quit the band. You needed a replacement asap and Romantic Chemical Marathon has just stepped in to save the day. Within hours, if not minutes, locals are going to be searching the entertainment schedule on your site to see who is playing, but who wants an angry mob when they show up and YOU advertised the wrong band. Even worse, your web guy has left for Chicago until Sunday with no access to the web. The solution is simple. With a Content Management System implemented, you can log into the administrator backend of your site, locate the entertainment calendar, change the text from one band name to the other, and click Apply. It's LITERALLY as easy login into your email, locating a message, replying, and hitting send.

Scenario #2: You are a hands on restaurant owner who has just decided to promote your annual Valentine's Day Dinner Special. Tomato Bisque Soup with a Surf and Turf dinner. Problem - your produce supplier has just informed you of another tomato recall from the region they order from and your head chef has informed you that the lobster tails are smelling a big "gamey". You've got this! You log in to the administrator backend of your website with a simple username and password. You go to the "specials" module and update the change to reflect a nice Tuna Ceviche Salad appetizer, Beef Wellington for the main, and fresh made Cherry Ice Cream for dessert. YUM! On top of that, you take 5 minutes extra to locate your "coupon generator" module. Set the easy to define variables to "generate numbered coupon codes" - "max number of 20 generated" and generate a headline stating, "The first 20 coupons through the door receive $10.99 off our Romantic Special". All this done in 10 minutes...and Cupid Day is saved.

And that is why Content Management Systems are the way to go especially, for fast-paced industries with constant need for change. Those who benefit most:

  • Restaurants with constantly changing menus and promotions
  • Nightclubs with entertainment acts
  • Various foodservice with rotating liquor and appetizer specials, as well as featured Pay Per View events
  • Bands - Calendar updates, photo gallery from the last show, member bio updates and changes
  • Various brick and mortar organizations with online coupon offers
  • E-Commerce to reflect new items and items currently out of stock
...and the list goes on. Sure, you can spend a good portion of the day tracking your designer down and paying a small fee for the changes - or you can make them on your own as quickly as checking your email.

 

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saint louis web hosting

Web Hosting. Your Website's HOME

If you view your website as your home on the web, then consider your hosting to be the actual real estate that it resides on. Hosting is a much easier business these days and is way less itemized and confusing. The good news is even the most basic economy hosting plans can accommodate the size, traffic, and bandwidth of most websites today. In most cases, unless you're planing to launch the next Google or MTV.com you can find a hosting plan as low as $100 per year. Contact me and we can discuss the right hosting plan for you as well as domain (your www.address.com) options if you have not already obtained these services.

 

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email and newsletter campaigns

Email and Newsletter MARKETING

Let's talk about the 500-pound pink elephant in the room. The family cousin everyone says hi to but really doesn't want to claim. Email marketing. Unfairly nicknamed spam. And spam is real and truly does exist as we all know, but the first step in rendering its name useless is a good opt in campaign. In all truth 90% of what most people call spam was opt-in in the first place. At some point they asked to be subscribed. It is what you do from here with your privilege to send them mail that determines whether they look forward to your mail, or start thinking, "Why did I ever sign up for this? - UNSUBSCRIBED!"

There are steps you can take to make your campaign effective. I won't give away my recipe, but here are a few obvious yet major mistakes that make so many send your hard work to the bulk folder. If someone has placed trust with their email address in your hands for periodic updates, avoid the following 3:

  • Treating your newsletters as an afterthought. No engaging copy or graphics, misspellings, simple un-stylized text with blue and purple underlined links. If your email looks like a Nigerian Viagra scam, rest assured it will go ignored. Your newsletter should look like a mini-website. A teaser, if you will, to get them to click and read more, thus increasing site traffic and exposure.
  • The OPPOSITE. A giant, graphics heavy, Photoshop-sliced nightmare that, even worse in many cases, shows up as a paint-by-numbers mess of white red-x's. Make sure you are targeting your graphics from a source all can see. Keep them light and fast loading.
  • A Call To Action (CTA) is integral for any newsletter, especially in the subject line. But don't make an assault on their senses like a truck and tractor pull rally. I.E. - "SUNDAY-SUNDAY-SUNDAY - PET ROCKS ||| on SALE - LOWEST PRICES YOU'VE EVER SEEN!

 

Bottom line, view your newsletters as if they were contestants on "The Gong Show" (yes...I just dated myself!) They can engage and entertain, or they can bomb their way straight to the bulk folder for life. Get in touch with me and we will put together a STRONG newsletter campaign that will get you results.

Fun Fact! - The new and hugely popular email coupon marketing company GROUPON began, as many web upstarts do, as a small idea by a couple of friends who wanted to successfully market online newsletter campaigns offering coupons with great deals to popular businesses. A campaign that, from conception, was done as described above. Clean graphics, light, and fun to read copy text with just enough humor injected, paired with a good product. This past quarter, Google offered to buy them out for $6,000,000,000. That's Billion with a "B". They held out and were right to do so.

 

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social networking for saint louis websites

Why You Need It Too. Yes, even YOU.

In it's early days Social Networking seemed to target mainly a young audience and was widely snubbed by those over the age of 18. Especially the business world. First there was Friendster, targeted at the high school kiddies. Friendster was soon abandoned for Myspace, a cool new social application that gave the average user far more means to "express themselves". But this is where the reputation for social networks went badly. Soon, the load times of these pages were slowed down by the ability to add 2 billion megapixel backgrounds, as many graphics as you could add, as well as flash and video. It was all well and good to be able to let your personality SHINE on Myspace, but when 72 sparkly glitter .gifs of vampire fangs and 12 Evenescence videos all try to simultaneously load, you not only have users running to the hills, you have browser crashes galore.

Then along came two "one hand washes the other" applications in the form of Twitter and Facebook. The damage had been done to social networking in the form of people fearing it would make them look childish. But these two applications had one thing going for them that the priors didn't. Clean and simple usability. The ability to dress up you profile was harshly restricted and people actually seemed to prefer it. This started catching on with the older generations who as we've all heard muttered thought it was "just for kids and gossip hounds". People were starting to realize they could catch up with old friends who may have moved thousands of miles away for FREE, all while for years Classmates.com had been trying to charge you through the nose for it. Even lying to draw you in with taglines such as, "you have 3 connections from the past trying to find you. Join now to see who!". The older generations were starting to see that the "kids" were on the right path. Now the average Facebook user is in their 30's, and Twitter, in the 20's and rising. So WHY NOT use this for businesses? Take the friends and connections of others and have them "Like" you, or "Follow" you. Even better, Twitter and Facebook now have a means to bridge your accounts making updates instant on both and growing your exposure geometrically.

Now to the important stuff. If social media is so great, how will it help me? Fair enough...here is a list of unexpected small businesses experiencing serious growth largely due to the help of these networks!

  • Emerson Salon
  • Butter Lane Cupcakes
  • The Social Man
  • Liberty Bay Books
  • Feather Your Nest
Read The Proof HERE

 

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saint louis search engine optimization

What you might expect. What you Should DO.

Search engines have long been a mystery of tips, tricks, secrets, and algorithms that almost everyone who wanted a great site ranking have spent days to weeks to months trying to understand and duplicate. As disheartening as it sounds, the only solution is to "try your best with the tools at your disposal". It amazes me how many times I am asked the painfully obvious question "How can I get on the front page of Google when people search my product name?". It's no big secret and there is one answer that will get you there. Open a Pay Per Click (PPC) account, find the keywords that match your product, and outbid everyone in the competition on what you're willing to pay for a click. This includes Wal-Mart, Target, Sears, Bass Pro Shops, and whomever else sells your same item or like-item. It will cost you thousands if not millions, but hey, IT'S THE ANSWER. Now for some suggestions for those of us that can't wrestle with monopolies.

First things first, (and I specialize at this) organize your meta-data (keywords and descriptions that go into the head section of your website and pages) to include information about your product, search terms that will be used, and make them localized and specialized to yourself. When people (smart web users I should say) search out something they want to find, they usually find out quickly they have to use specific search terms or they will be lost in a sea of results too overwhelming or out of reach to pick from. They are forced to narrow down their search. This is what YOU should program your keywords and descriptions around. Whatever your niche (God hoping you have one!), is where you will pull your successful results from. Say someone in your county wants to try a new pizza joint and low and behold, that's your business, yet, they don't know you exist. If they search for "PIZZA" and you accordingly only program your search terms for "PIZZA", then inevitably neither of you will find each other. However, the user will get frustrated getting such general and bland search results, all most likely already taken up by the according business monsters (Pizza Hut, Domino's, Papa Johns...etc.) that they will instinctively narrow their search terms. Ex:

  • Pizza...WAY TO MANY RESULTS
  • Pizza Saint Louis...NARROWED DOWN TO 500 RESULTS - STILL TOO MANY
  • Pizza Saint Louis The Hill...50 RESULTS (if you're doing your job right you should be SOMEWHERE in there)
  • Pizza Saint Louis The Hill New York Style Crust (BINGO)
You have your niche and if your web designer has programmed your search terms accordingly, you should be near the top of the results - depending on your other online competition within the same niche. BUT....it get's you closer.

Keep in mind, this is NOT to say that PPC campaigns don't have their merit - but in my humble opinion, if it's going to pay off to go to war with the moguls, you'd better have a budget to warrant your defense strategy. Contact me to discuss an affordable SEO strategy if the one that I include with your design to begin with isn't garnering the results you desire.

 

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cool free add ons to make your site noticed

Cool Freebies That Make Your Site FUN and Stand OUT!

6 String Drawer Module

Title

  • Refreshing!
    ...and BLUE!

  • Everyone loves pizza!
    Grab a slice!

  • Clog your arteries
    TODAY!

  • Cheeseburger!
    Check it OUT!

  • These Fries Look TASTY!
    Check them OUT!

6 String Slider Menu

6 String Ajax Site Search

6 String Google Map Locator

Thanks for looking...WAY more to come!

This is just a sample of the extras that I offer FREE with any website. If there are any features you see on my site not featured above that you are interested in, ask me about them! More than likely they can be included at no additional charge as well.

Also keep in mind, all of the features above can be stylized to your liking. Pictures can be replaced with yours, horizontal stylings can be made vertical, small modules made the size of the entire page...the possibilities are endless.

Contact me today and we'll get some bells and whistles onto your site that make it pop from the others!

6 String jQuery Gallery

6 String Scroller Menu

Caramel Creme

Marshmallow

Raspberry Creme

Butter Nut

YOOaccordion

Pink Mushroom

This is some sample text. It is only here to show you how yours could looks, plus...check out that really cool looking mushroom! This is some sample text. It is only here to show you how yours could looks, plus...check out that really cool looking mushroom! This is some sample text. It is only here to show you how yours could looks, plus...check out that really cool looking mushroom! This is some sample text. It is only here to show you how yours could looks, plus...check out that really cool looking mushroom!
Blue Mushroom

This is some sample text. It is only here to show you how yours could looks, plus...check out that really cool looking mushroom! This is some sample text. It is only here to show you how yours could looks, plus...check out that really cool looking mushroom! This is some sample text. It is only here to show you how yours could looks, plus...check out that really cool looking mushroom! This is some sample text. It is only here to show you how yours could looks, plus...check out that really cool looking mushroom!
Purple Mushroom

This is some sample text. It is only here to show you how yours could looks, plus...check out that really cool looking mushroom! This is some sample text. It is only here to show you how yours could looks, plus...check out that really cool looking mushroom! This is some sample text. It is only here to show you how yours could looks, plus...check out that really cool looking mushroom! This is some sample text. It is only here to show you how yours could looks, plus...check out that really cool looking mushroom!
accordion4

There are no pretty pictures here. Just some blank text and possibly some imaginary links!!

There are no pretty pictures here. Just some blank text and possibly some imaginary links!!

There are no pretty pictures here. Just some blank text and possibly some imaginary links!!

There are no pretty pictures here. Just some blank text and possibly some imaginary links!!

6 String Carousel Display Menu

6 String Twitter Feed

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