I helped Be More Not Less work with another website to get a great logo for them. While I can do the work myself, I do like to save time and money for my clients. So we setup an account using another service and got them a lovely unique and flexible logo at a great price, $150 if I recall.

Once we had the logo I went through a couple different website layout ideas before coming up with our final draft. We set out to have a wide range of colors through out the entire site. Each section of the site though would keep with a similar colored theme to let users know they are still in the right place. This was a task by itself as most sites have 1 template to base all future pages off.

We all wanted something a little more and talked about some ideas for turning the logo into an animation for the header. We went back and forth over several meetings tossing around ideas. I thought of the idea of the outer portion of the logo to be spinning. I did a few quick mock-ups and there was 1 that was stood out. I spent some more time tweaking and modifying the animation to get it just right. We ended up with a wonderful animated logo that was in the spirit of the website.

bemorenotless.com

So once I finished getting the new website design for them operational for a few months I moved my efforts to marketing. I read everything I could find on many different websites, forums, blogs.. you name it I was reading it.

First thing I read that was very important was clean urls. Welp, I did that all wrong with the new shopping cart. =( Since it was still new and not indexed much by Google I wrote some custom functions in the code and database so we can do clean urls. Ok, so that problem was fixed and solved; easier said than done.

Next on my list was link building and getting other sites to link to his. I setup some more custom software to help me manage this for him and off I went. I used several different techniques based on my research and implemented each and every one of them. This was a lot of tedious work but it had to be done.

We started seeing results about 6-8 months later. After the first year of all these changes was the biggest difference. The site was being listed for many top keywords in the top 3 places. music gifts, dance gifts, music apparel and with the clean urls it was ranking for all kings of long tail keywords that we would have never though about.

They were originally using a very old and free coldfusion shopping cart software. It was buggy and didn’t do a lot of things they needed. The design wasn’t very appealing either.

I used a free open source ASP shopping cart as the base for a new site. I can up with a newer more user friendly navigation and page layout. Everything was looking good and then came time for the customizations. The ASP cart I chose needed a lot of work done to it.

Music Treasures needed many different kinds of shipping options for a wide range of different products. For example, going from memory maybe 6-7 years ago, ordering certain T-Shirts is $6 for all shirts ordered. However, if they ordered a toy with their shirt it’s now $6 for the shirts and $4 for the toy. Then came freight and custom quote items that have their own custom shipping options. Items too heavy needed custom quotes for shipping so they weren’t calculated in the order or shipping. There were many of these special rules on top of the regular price based shipping. You can imagine the intricacies if someone ordered 10 things and each had special shipping rules!

The shipping options where the only part I had real difficult with. The rest of the customizations, multiple product images, product options (size, color, etc) and product engraving to name a few were pretty straight forward customizations.

Several years later I redid the website design again to what it is now as of this article.

musictreasures.com

The first one was exactly like my Henrico schools website design, the original started here, just with a different color scheme. They used this design for many years, rough guess would be 4-5 years. I kept wanted to change it after a year or 2 of use but either other work came up or I would run into road blocks with what the owner wanted. My own feeling is you should re-evaluate your website design after 2 years at least. Standards change, the business could have changed focus or just needs a new facelift.

I finally got a new website up and we incorporated much more content into it. Made it easier on the eyes but not to fancy as most users of the company had this as their homepage. The new design had a nice option to promote different specials or promotions on the right hand side. The menu and navigation was all handled by an Access database so adding new pages was a snap. We didn’t have to worry about making sure the proper navigation was on every single page, we’re talking about 100+ pages.

This was also one of my first fully CSS designs as well. This brought very clean code that was easy to update and modify. Reduced the file sizes of each page so they would load much faster then the previous site.

i-c.net or accesstechnology.net

I looked over all his current marketing and promotional material to get some ideas. I noticed he also did not have a logo either. So what I did was come up with a nice, clean website design and integrated a logo that he could use for other stuff as well.

I setup different area for his site so he can promote the different aspects of his site. He wanted to promote homes that were currently under construction and ready to be sold. We included construction pictures, design plans and other photos to give potential buyers a lot of different images. This was the focus of the website.

I also added a sinple newletter sign-up form that saved e-mail addressed to an Access database using ASP programming. I coded a simple backend page that listed all the sign-ups that he could copy/paste into other software for mailing a newsletter.

I originally did this website in 2003. It seems they’ve taken a downward spiral and had somone redo the site.    walterbuilders.com