Orange County Website Design
The branch office for simplelives.com
This time of year is usually slow in the web design business. People have a lot going on and the idea of a new site in the new year coming sounds appealing. So inquiries are down right now — down but not out.
Neverthelesss, under construction right now is a new and unique real estate site. And in the planning stages is a redesign for a local chiropractor. And of course, the online stores are nice and busy this time of year, meaning lots of care and maintenance on our part to keep things running smoothly.
This momentary lull is kind of nice, in fact. But we know we will need to revisit that come January when things start going crazy again.
One of our longtime clients is not the most internet savvy. But more than most, he is ready and willing to jump into social media.
It might be more appropriate to say that he is wading in rather than jumping in. Nevertheless, he is exploring and experimenting with Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube for now. He grasps the power of social media to enhance and promote his business. For now, we are managing these on his behalf but the plan is to get him feeling comfortable with tweeting and facebooking so he can take these on himself.
He already has four live, affiliated sites for various distressed real estate investment funds with another site in progress. And now he has added these social sites.
Got to hand it to him.
It has been a busy month. Our third new site in as many weeks is now up and running.
Distressed Realty Fund I, LLC is a managed investment fund for Californians based in Newport Beach, Orange County They purchase, renovate, rent, and sell foreclosed and REO houses for profit. This site has been up for a while and languishing. We gave it a new, bold look and added considerably more information for the benefit of site visitors.
Very short break before we start our next new site tomorrow!
We announce the launch of a website newly redesigned by Simple Lives Orange County Design — Desert Homes & Land, Inc. Desert Homes is a full service real estate company in the Coachella Valley, California, an area best known for Palm Springs.
Realtor Joy Tiz provides MLS Listing and FLX Foreclosure searches but her site is primarily a brochure for both her expertise in buying and selling properties and for the beautiful region itself. The website is bright and colorful with a melon scheme against a white background.
And the horses pictured in our previous post? Those are Joy’s friends.
We have two client sites in redesign at the moment with launches expected this week. And at least two more are in the pipeline with a few new sites to follow those. It is good being busy. Let us hope this is a sign of an uptick in the Orange County economy.
Soon to launch is a new marketing site for a California real estate investment fund including a big social media push. Concurrently, we are launching a whole new look for a prominent Palm Desert area realtor. The realty connection is purely coincidental.
We just launched our latest site last night. Valerie Gelb is a licensed Marriage Family Therapist in Laguna Hills, Orange County, California.
Her therapy practice is equally divided between working with individuals and couples seeking counseling for relationship, stress, and personal growth issues — and providing counseling, consultation and support groups for infertility and third party reproduction issues.
The objective was to create a bright and colorful environment while maintaining the site owner’s professionalism as well as the seriousness of the issues she deals with.
This was an interesting project, involving some creative wrangling.
I love my job.
One of our sites took a major nosedive on Google a couple of weeks ago. For months, we were riding high on the coveted first page of results for our top search terms. Then literally overnight, Google dropped us down to page 65, better known as Google hell. The chances of a business being seen on the web when about #650 out of 440,000 results are about as likely as being seen on a billboard on a closed road in the middle of the Mojave Desert.
So we panicked for a while, not having any idea why this might have happened. And we spent hours on Google’s site, studying the webmaster guidelines we thought we knew so well. And we asked about this on a forum set up just for these kinds of questions and monitored by Googlers themselves. And we wrote Google and requested reconsideration, basically asking them to rethink their decision since we did not think we had done something to warrant such an action.
And in the end, just a few days ago, our site was reinstated on page one.
To be honest, we never did learn exactly what had happened. And there are no guarantees that we will not be in violation again one day. Google’s aim is to provide a quality product to its customers, namely search results which are reliable. They have a right and an obligation to have some guidelines regarding sites they index.
We suspect that the problem was related to a previous site using our domain name that had some problems of its own, and that once this was pointed out, Google did reconsider. But we may never know.
Nevertheless, we learned a few things by this experience and that is always a plus. You can’t stand still in this business which moves at a speed appropriate for the world wide web.
We have been neglecting this page lately because of a bit of project overload. No complaints, though.
Our most recent site launch was for Jim Norman at Norman National Group, Inc.. Jim is a retired FBI agent who has assembled a network of former agents to provide investigative services nationwide from headquarters in Laguna Niguel, Orange County. His site aims for professional, experienced, and current.
Meanwhile, new sites are in the pipeline for at least three current clients and a few new ones including a Marriage and Family Therapist in Laguna Hills.
We are in the process of redesigning another site for one of our clients.
When this project began, the business owner wasn’t quite sure who his target audience was and what was the primary reason for having a website. In addition, the scope of his business has widened considerably and what we originally thought would be home page content has outgrown the home page and needs pages of its own with room to accommodate future changes.
And so we are going to start over in order to create a site that works best for his business and for his potential clients.
This is not uncommon. Often a business owner realizes they need a website but they are not entirely sure what to do with it. Our job as web designer is to help them focus so we can build the most effective site to achieve their goals. But that isn’t always possible and often business plans change.
So at times it best to start anew. Yes, that means spending more on the website than you had originally planned. And so it is always best to know what you want before your site is built — if possible. But things happen and you don’t always have much choice but to redesign.
Fortunately, redoing a current website often means re-using elements already constructed and so costs can be considerably held down.
As noted in a previous post , we took on the redesign of an existing site both to clean up the look — and to make the site more search engine-friendly.
Now, just two weeks after the site for Above Awnings launched, it ranks in the top 5 Google results for this site’s primary keywords.
Now that is what we call results!
Inbound links are vital to top search engine ranking but content is still king. Making sure that this was an authoritative site for awnings in Orange County was what made the difference. Building search engine optimization into a website as it is developed is key to its success.
Orange County family, ca.1905
