Recently, we launched a website for a local PR firm - Gray Public Relations.
What makes this site important and unique for our firm is that it represents the culmination of a rapidly shifting way we approach website design and implementation.
From the very beginning, we chose to be deliberate about the way we laid out the site - keeping in mind the end result would need to be something that not only looked good but was easy to navigate, delivered up search engines a wealth of well-tagged content and allowed our clients to post their own news on the fly. At the end of the day, now that the site has launched, we can say with conviction that we achieved those goals.
Consider:
* The graphic design for Gray PR's site sits on a gray background with a nearly hidden flowery flourish. The size of the content area is fixed, and guarantees that just about any visitor will be spared from the side and bottom scroll.
* The coding infrastructure takes advantage of our ever-growing familiarity with strict CSS, XHTML markup, while at the same time allowing us to feature interactive elements (like the lightbox popup images on the home page, under the headline, "results").
* AND the tagging of content within the site is pretty darn good, if we say so ourselves. Although the home page is more or less images (client's strict decision), the rest of the site pages contain deliberate <h1> and <h2> coded text. We know how important it is for this PR firm to perform well in organic searches for sites of a similar nature (note to self: the world of PR and marketing is very competitive). So, we wanted our clients to have a foundation for the best possible start when this site launched.
But what makes me (maybe not our Creative Director, but me) most excited about this site is the seamless integration we created between the site pages and the site blog. This blog, or News section, is the coup de gras for the site's guaranteed SEO positioning. Not only does the blog look like the rest of the site, but its pages are programmed to output data in a way that is primed for search engine spider indexing.
So now, the more pages our clients create about their work, their clients or related events, the more successful their site will be in those all-important search engine battles. To be sure, it won't happen all at once... but give it time and our (sinister?) plan will start working. You might Google "public relations franklin, tn" someday in the not-too-distant future and find yourself staring squarely at two amiable (and very capable) public relations professionals who you're all-of-a-sudden interested in knowing.
The best part? It won't be coincidence that brought you there...