You’re not alone.  The rules are changing quickly;  social networking and mobile-friendliness are as, if not more, important to most businesses than the mighty search engine rank.

QwikCall.com is an example of a site that did the deed, and with a high degree of professionalism, I might add.  The site owner, Patricia, had two clear goals; she wanted to make the site easy to edit and also optimized for search engines.  I thought the static site’s design needed a bit of professional polish and Patricia wasn’t afraid to update her look.  We were able to make a plan with quick turnaround because Patricia had already gathered all the information needed to complete the project.

I re-created their static website using WordPress, using a pre-designed theme that just needed a little customizing to make it uniquely ‘QwikCall’.  Approaching a site build in this way is efficient, which translates to less expensive, and is a perfect match for clients who aren’t already heavily invested in a visual brand.

Using keywords within the text of the page, our team reworded much of the content to make it ’search-engine friendly’ and created a meta tag set using the same carefully chosen and researched key words.   Since QwikCall.com was an aged domain, we then just had to sit back and wait for Google and friends to re-index it so we could see the results of our efforts, which pleased us and, more importantly, Patricia.  Great project!  ~Karl

I had fun playing with the look and feel of this site build.  The management team wanted the site to reflect the relaxed personality of the lodge and incorporate the colors of their new logo.

Left and right-hand sidebars offer space for:

• webervations integration (online reservation service)
• Newsletter sign-up for emailed announcements of specials
• Weather info from 642weather.com
• rotating quotes from customers
• “banner ads” for the hotel itself: child friendly, pet friendly, restaurant on site

Slide shows on home, gallery, and rooms pages offer lots and lots of views of the lodge interior (each room type has its own slide show) & exterior, as well as plenty of beach sunsets.

Chautauqua Lodge is nestled in the dunes, a few steps from Discovery Trail.  They boast an indoor heated pool, hot tub and dry sauna, conference center, on-site restaurant, volleyball court and more.  Affordable, casual beach lodging for families, couples and groups.  ~Sabrina

Checkered Past Moving & Estate Sales specializes in estate sales on the Long Beach Peninsula. From organizing to displaying, advertising and selling households, Suzy Whittey eliminates the stress of liquidating your own personal items, or a loved one’s estate.

Suzy came to us with a clear idea of her site design, all the content (text and photos) needed to get the site off the ground, and with a clear vision of what she wanted: Her on-paper design turned into a functioning site that she could update herself.

As Sabrina said, “a little bing, bang, boom and Suzy was in the driver’s seat”. Sabrina set up the site using WordPress, customizing a theme to Suzy’s specifications and converting the text and photos into pages. She then walked Suzy through a brief training session (just under an hour) and whoosh! she was editing up a storm.

Kathy and Sabrina worked behind the scenes on some basic search engine optimization, which took longer than any of had hoped to take effect but, once the search engines finally took notice of our changes, the results have remained solid for some time.

Watch CheckeredSales.com for news of upcoming sales, or sign up for the email notifications.  Oooh!  There’s a great sale coming this weekend with two generations of railroad collectibles!  Gotta run!

Recently Karl Plato from Pacific Bow Butts contacted us to become his new webmaster.  During the course of  Karl (Plato)’s discussion with Karl (techdog) Johnson, beachdog.com was introduced to Randy and Rachel Soleta from Edgerton, MN.  Randy and Rachel are distributors for the Pacific Bow Butts line of archery targets in the Northern Plains States of MN, IA, IL, NE,  ND, SD and  WI.

Beginning with only a simple logo and a desire to have a clean, professional, and easy to use web site, beachdog began design ideas.  Keleigh took the simple design and evolved it into a wonderful header logo that the client simply loves.  The rest of the site was designed with simple color blocks which reflect the traditional target incorporated into the logo.

The site structure was relatively simple with 4 archery target products offered. along with a quotation form, available for Parks or Ranges who are requesting a price quote for larger quantities of targets.  We were even able to provide the ability for Northern Plains States Distributors to take online payments for custom quoted orders through the use of a specialized PayPal payment plugin.

During the course of the training process Randy remarked that he would benefit with a simplified tutorial in some kind of document.  This made sense to Karl (techdog) as well; too often clients understand things during the training session but do not use their new skills quickly or often enough and so forget how to do things.  So Karl (techdog) created a very simplified Word Press Tutorial/Instruction Sheet.  As time permits, Karl (techdog) will expand on the Tutorial.  Sabrina created a video Tutorial series for another client which is now available on YouTube.

It was a pleasure to work with Randy and, while he will be the first to profess he is not much of a computer person, he asked questions and understood the answers and wasn’t afraid to learn about something new.  That’s really all we ask of our clients.

Take AIM at your future and expand your web presence in 2010.

Harney County Save A Stray Rescue [HCSASR] has been working to find homes for pets in Eastern Oregon for some time and recently filed paperwork to become a legal non-profit entity to further their work.  Planning a “Santa Paws” event, including pet photos with the big guy, founders came to us in need of business cards to distribute at the event.  They had settled on a color palette and a couple of tag lines, and they knew they wanted paw prints in the design.  Keleigh came up with a number of design concepts and this one was chosen to refine and print:

The cards weren’t even off the press when a dog hoarding situation near Burns, Ore. turned into one of the largest case of animal neglect in Oregon’s history:

Eastern Oregon dog hoarding situation with over 100 dogs in minus 15 degree weather with no shelter.  Over 70 rescued with another 50 still looking to be saved.

Of course, HCSASR was on-site, working with the authorities and the dogs’ owners, to get the dogs fed and out of the horrific conditions. They needed a way to streamline getting information to the media and to the public.  So, we kicked into high gear and www.harneycountysaveastray.com was born:

It is still in need of some paw prints and a few other details, but this fast launch does what it needs to do:  It allows multiple people to update information and add photos as well as gives the media access to the information needed to spread the word and get help for the dogs.