9/11 Artifacts

The Atomic Testing Museum added two new permanent exhibits to their collection last week. Two pieces from of the World Trade Center are displayed in such a way that allows you to touch and be photographed next to them.

ACME Home Elevator launched

ACME Home Elevator, a long time client, originally hired AdEmphasis to redesign their website over 7 years ago and an update was certainly overdue. Their competition had finally caught up and had redesigned and optimized their website and had over time gradually displaced ACME in the top search categories for this industry.

The new design featured not only the great elevators they sell and install, it now also featured the stairlifts, hillside lifts and chairlifts that were someone lost in the previous website. We also wanted in improve the overall content as the previous website had very basis content on each product and as a result may have led to the decrease in traffic over time as their competitors featured richer content.

The new site now clearly shows their key products and services. We removed all of the previous Flash navigation and replaced it with search engine friendly HTML. It site now has better quality images and detailed descriptions of their products and services. Their locations are clearly identified and each and every page is properly optimized.

Already we are seeing traffic improvements and better placement on Google.

Do middle aged women read blogs?

I'm working with the American Heart Association with a web content migration for their new website.

They are using a CMS Content Management System to help deploy their new site. To help their end-users with training I prepared an email blast with tips ranging from how to search for content, shared examples of good graphic examples, pages and widget others in the company had created in the hopes of getting them motivated by sharing and learning from others.

I felt that an email blast would best target those creating the content and using their CMS to migrate the content.
However I'm not the boss of this job by any means and can only make suggestions as I'm considered simply an outsider on this.
So it was decided to upload this tips to the design teams blog. Easy enough I guess but my lingering though is will it reach the intended audience? Do middle aged women read blogs? Do they read technical blogs?

Look for the new American Heart Association website in early June 2010.

The Brain Institute

Our most recent work was the redesign of the website for The Brain Institute. We create a very organic navigation for the website using an image of brain neurons. Using just a dash of Flash for the neurons and keeping all of the navigation as roll-over behaviours allowed us to create the same feel of Flash animation but with the added benefit of Search Engines being able to crawl the entire site.

This site also features an data capture form for clients to ask for additional information.

One thing that seemed like a good idea at the time was to have audio playing with the Flash. The original version had a type of electric charge audio effect that faded in and out as the neurons passed by. However, it was quickly removed after receiving calls from customers freaked out when they heard it because they thought there was something wrong with their computer speakers or that a computer chip had just fried inside their PC.

Check out The Brain Institute

The shoemaker's son always goes barefoot, and our website content is out of date.

My company Ademphasis has been open for over 9 years now and although we design and develop websites for our clients it always seems that our own website gets the least attention. Just like the expression: "The shoemaker's son always goes barefoot" so goes our website.

I encourage our clients to have content rich websites, help them with search engine optimization, and keep them up to date. Yet when it comes to our website it is rarely up to date, has little text content and practically no metadata for search engines.

This is the reason I've decided to blog about our move towards updating our site, sharing the work we do for our clients and the results we've seen.