The latest news, projects and interesting information from the world of Van Zant Design!
It is estimated that more than 100,000 new websites go live each day. More and more small businesses are getting an online presence. Why? What do the owners of these sites hope to accomplish? What are they trying to gain?
The harsh truth is that a lot of them don’t know, they simply feel like they have to have a website because everybody else has one.
I was asked today to take a look at a site for a local engineering company, they wanted to know why their site was getting very little traffic from the main search engines (Google, MSN and Yahoo). A quick look revealed that, even though the site had been live for 3 years, there had been very little optimisation done in all that time.
I gave them a detailed report into the reasons why I felt they were struggling to rank in search engines. Here are 5 quick tips to help make sure your site is ready for search engines, bear in mind these are basic steps and there are a lot more things you can do to improve your search engine rankings.
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Van Zant Design were recently used to design, launch and manage a Middlesbrough Football Club fansite called Boro Mania. The site is set up to allow the editor and contributors to easily publish news stories and articles and also to allow site visitors the opportunity to comment on each story. To acheive the desired goals we utilised the power of Wordpress, which is usually a blogging platform, with a few modifications to give a “magazine” style theme.
We have also recently began some Search Engine Optimisation on the site and have managed to get it onto the first page of Google for the search term “middlesbrough football” (it is currently, 13/10/08, fluctuating from 4th positon overall to the top of the 2nd page but it will settle down eventually as we continue to promote it.)
The site is only 3 months old and is already getting 10,000+ visitors per month and with Van Zant Design continually working on improving the site it’s rankings will go from strength to strength.
Van Zant Design will be working on a brand new design and layout for The Biker Place, a motorcycle racing news site. The site is currently set up to display the latest news posts in a “traditional” blog style, with additional features located down the left and right hand sides.
The site has outgrown the current design and requires a more professional, easy to navigate layout with additional features to make the site “stickier” (i.e. to keep web visitors on the site for longer, looking at more pages).
Van Zant Design have finished the re-design for The Biker Place’s social community site. Built on the popular and powerful Ning network Van Zant Design took the standard design template and edited the CSS and images to create a sleek looking theme for The Biker Place.
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The new Van Zant Design website has been launched, with fully valid HTML and CSS. As any web designer we had to work out a few bugs that were showing up in Internet Explorer 6.0 (is anyone actually still using ths ancient relic of a browser?!).
From this site we will be offering web design services, web consultation, print design services and web marketing. If you are interested in any of these please contact us and we will be happy help.
There a couple of sections to add including a portfolio section, but for now enjoy the site and do let us know if you spot any bugs or errors.
