Goodin MacBride is a well established San Francisco law firm whose attorneys specialize in California Regulatory law, and also in Qui Tam and Civil Law. The new site contains well over 100 pages, with about 60 of them focusing on each of the niches of business that this firm addresses. We used slightly different color coding for the Regulatory Law, Civil Law and About sections of the site.
A huge goal in the project was SEO. We made the site as big as it is so that each niche of their law practice would have its own page and its own chance to get indexed. We are currently tweaking the code and contents of those pages to push them further up in the rankings.
Jerry Jacobs Design is a successful interior design business operating in San Francisco, London and Mexico. When I met Jerry last year, he already had a website, but it was getting on in years and he was looking for a complete refresh. He also already had great organic Search Engine Optimization so I was in the unusual position of needing to replace a site that ranked #1 on Google for ‘Interior Designer San Francisco’. Umm, do you know how many interior designers there are in San Francisco? So how hard that might be to maintain? Quite a challenge!
The original site is shown here. The concept of small photos used to navigate within a gallery work for some people and I have used it myself on other sites, but Jerry was ‘done, already!’ with it. He needed navigation to be clearer – to show where you were within a gallery, where the gallery was within the overall site and how to click around between and within galleries using large and small arrows.
So we mapped out a left side menu system and information architecture which did that. We had 2 big goals on this site – to make navigation within the galleries clearer and to maintain the SEO. There are two directory sites that appear above him but he is still the first individual designer to come up on Google.
Five Senses is a business that is relocating from a successful track record in London, England to the Bay Area. We designed and built the site from scratch. Our goal was to create a site that visually and emotionally validated Five Senses in a very upscale market.
“If the websites that you build were really cars, what type of cars would they be?”
This question came to me from a member of my local co-opetition. The lady beamed at me. “My company builds Cadillacs” she announced proudly. Like that was meant to be the end of it. I mean, how could I compete with that? Well, let’s not get into what Europeans like me think when they first see a real Caddy. Let alone a pink Mary Kay Caddy!
I was flailing for an answer… “Hybrids?” Because we are efficient and cost effective? VW Beetles or Mini Coopers because we are kind of friendly, funky, fast and a tiny bit alternative? Morgans because we have style, Baby, style? Maybe I’d better dig deep and come up with an American car.
Umm… No.
My final answer is that the question itself is wrong: Cars – at least those on the road – are an incredibly narrow subsection of the overall world of ‘Vehicles’. Vehicles range from broken down $5 skateboards up through kid bikes, performance bikes, motorbikes, family cars, sports cars, SUV’s, luxury cars, commercial trucks, HGV’s, earth movers, tunnel diggers, light aircraft, commercial jets, space rockets.
Cars tend to have a new / resale value somewhere between $2,000 for a used beater to $75,000 for new luxury. I know that there are a few up in the $200,000’s but they are a real rarity. Any running car has a certain real or donation value, if only for its parts.
Websites on the other hand? Not only is the sky the limit at the upper end with the big retail stores investing tens to hundreds of millions annually, but there is a lower end to the web world that not even wheel-less shells of old cars sitting on bricks in the front yard can lower themselves down to. You’ve seen some of these sites… yellow, purple and striped survivors from 1997 who are somehow out there still at the lower end and LandsEnd.com at the high end.
So back to the original question – what kind of vehicle do we build? Let’s just say we are more like the manufacturer than the vehicle. Volvo builds cars, trucks, buses, boat engines and aeronautical components. And that is what we will do for our customers: give them the vehicle they need for the journeys they plan to take.
Our focus here was SEO. This business did have an earlier website, but as is often the case, the words ‘Marin’ and ‘San Rafael’ were completely missing from the site as a whole, as well as from each page. When SEO is the focus, I believe it is critical that each modality or niche of a business receive its own page, and that page be fully cross-referenced for that modality (and that modality alone) against the geographic references that people tend to search on. Six pages, one for each modality will each do better on Google than one page that contains all the same text rolled up into one. This site also links to automated booking and gift certificate purchase, two services that I set up for a lot of my clients.
Julia Parker is an international photographer whose focus is capturing the essence of the relationship between two people. Julia’s photography is mainly black and white – I promise that you will love it if you click through. She is in the top ranks of portrait photographers, at $3,000 per shooting session. My main goal here was to capture the class of her work and build a site to reflect it. This is another business that is by referral, but all those people receiving referrals want to review the work on the website before they place a phone call.
I was also focusing on getting her found by Google. ‘Julia Parker’ is not the most unusual name and it drove me crazy that Google seems to equate ‘Julia, Julie and even Julian’. Which gave me a real challenge as there are great, international level photographers out there with both of those names as well. And a successful model called Julia Parker who has no end of… guess what?… Photographs! Just to make the task even harder, we were up against the release of the film (get it? film = photography) ‘Julie and Julia” Aiee Aiee Aiee! Enough to drive a web developer nuts.
With all of that said, a search for ‘Julia Parker Photography’ has had us holding steady on Google for first page, second place behind ‘Julie Parker Photography’ for a year. Pretty good for a Flash site (they say it can’t be done!). The site also gives Julia the option to upload private albums so her clients can review proofs and order pictures.
Vivian Kushner is a successful nutritionist. She uses a technology called BioSET and a technique called EFT. Our goal was to make her findable when people search for those names in Marin and San Francisco.
Be protected, be prepared, be responsible – leave no unfinished business
We built this site and now do occasional maintenance on it. This is an unusual niche business; Diane works with people who know their life expectancy is limited. Diane helps people to pull together the practical side of their paperwork, their gifting, their bequests and the general settling of their final affairs. Most of her business is by referral, so this focus of this site is to show who and what she is to individuals and families who are considering her services.
The challenges going in to the site design were images, imagery and emotionally conveying the right message. People who are still in control of their lives hire Diane to help them put everything in order before they lose that control. But there is not much positive stock photography that springs to mind to convey this. Diane said that she loved the ginkgo leaf, so we used this as our main image, but we stayed with vibrant green rather than wistful brown.
My favorite quote from Diane is “Your estate is not a mansion and a fleet of cars. It is your spouse, your children, your 7 year old coupe and the pet that will need to be cared for.”
When the client is a professional organizer, the site that represents her needs to be just right.
Organize for Joy is a a referrals-based business. But even after receiving a referral from a friend, clients want to check the organizer out before calling up to set an appointment. This site was built to showcase the organizer, her projects and her client type. We took the visual direction from her logo (clean, red and white) and built the images using some from the client and some that we purchased from stock.
This was a great site to work on and one for which I probably received more ‘Oh I love it can you do something like that for me?’ referrals than anything else we did. It is ‘just’ a static HTML site, but the look-and-feel came out great, and it totally conveyed the personality of the client.
Goodin MacBride is a well established San Francisco law firm whose attorneys specialize in California Regulatory law, and also in Qui Tam and Civil Law. The new site contains well over 100 pages, with about 60 of them focusing on each of the niches of business that this firm addresses. We used slightly different color coding for the Regulatory Law, Civil Law and About sections of the site.
