Venuecom and Impulse Web Designs teamed up to redesign www.attydc.com, the website for Wilmington, NC Lawyer, Attorney David Collins.  The client’s original website was designed from a phone book ad from six or more years ago.  Obviously, styles have changed since then and our first mockup was much more modern; a little too modern for Mr. Collins, who wanted to update the look, but keep it familiar.

The challenge was this: the existing website already ranked at the top of Google for the search term Wilmington NC lawyer, but it was not converting, so one of the points we emphasized in preparing this project was that the look of the site needed to be modernized and more engaging in order to hold the attention of visitors and thereby convert more traffic into leads.

Collins was pleased with the second mockup by designer Travis Ray.  We feel he designer tasked with this challenge did a great job of meshing the old, outdated look with a more modern, pleasing style in the second mockup.

In addition to aesthetic updates, over 200 unique pages were added to the site to help search engines index key service areas and locations targeted by the client.  Links to the client’s Twitter and Facebook accounts were also added and a WordPress blog is slated to appear soon in order to increase the site’s social media presence.

I just now finished installing the WPtouch iPhone Theme plugin for this blog.

The plugins description is: “A plugin which formats your site with a mobile theme for the Apple iPhone/iPod touch, Google Android, Palm Pre and other touch-based smartphones.”

I highly recommend this now that so many mobile devices are being used for social and even business blogging.

I created a custom icon that will be used when bookmarking.  It creates a really nice icon for the home screen that with one click will open this blog.

So far I have only tested this on my iPhone, but the plugin documentation states it works with “popular touch-based smartphones like iPhoneTM, iPod touchTM, AndroidTM, PalmTM Pre/Pixi, and BlackBerry StormTM.”

Venuecom and Impulse Web Solutions have completed an overhaul of the website turning65nc.com.  Though the site looks almost exactly the same as it did before, major changes have been made on the back end.

The changes were initially brought about because the client wished to be able to track leads coming into the site.  A separate website, medicaresupplementsforless.com, was initially going to be built based off of the the original website, but after some discussion the decision was made to redirect turning65nc.com (which caused confusion for people already over the age of 65, since the website was for them as well) to the newer medicaresupplementsforless.com site.

In addition to adding a way to track leads, the code of the site was updated to be 100% W3C compliant and the design was widened to fit within a 1024 x 768 resolution monitor, which is now much more common than 800 x 600 resolution screens were when the site was initially built.

Since the site was undergoing a major coding overhaul, the opportunity was taken to also connect it to the Venue Editor, Venuecom’s content management system (CMS).  This will gives the client the ability to personally manage most of the content of their website going forward.

Longtime Venuecom client William Poole Designs will soon feature a redesigned splash page based on a mockup sent by the client.  The new splash page will make it quicker and easier for site visitors to reach the most popular pages of the website, as well as featuring an area for the client to add and edit important news  updates and announcements via Venuecom’s content management system.

Impulse Web Solutions and Venue Communications, Wilmington NC web design companies, are teaming up once again, this time to design a new website for the Myrtle Beach Golf Experience.

The original website was hastily thrown together and added on to as necessary.  The new website will feature a fresh design and focus on informing visitors about golf courses, hotels, resorts, dining and other things to do when visiting Myrtle Beach, SC.

The content of the newly designed Myrtle Beach Golf Experience website will be driven by Venuecom’s content management system and news feed plugin, giving the site owners freedom to update pages and articles on the site without having to go through their webmasters.

Venuecom, our partner web design company, will be redesigning the website for A Place to Bead, a Wilmington, NC bead store.  The site was recently scheduled for redesign, but the project was never completed and it was not what the owner of the store had in mind anyway.

The new website for A Place to Bead will be given a fun, more colorful design.  The owner also wanted to be able to easily handle minor updates herself in order to add dates for jewelry classes or post new pictures, which will easily be handled via the content management system that is included in all sites built by Venuecom and Impulse Web Solutions.  The site will also feature a blog and e-commerce, giving the store the ability to sell its wares online as well as take payments for class registrations.  She will also be switching her email newsletters from manually sending them via her personal email account to using Venuecom’s EMT (email marketing tools) system, which will allow people to sign up for the store’s newsletter online and gives better creative control to the newsletters that are sent.

This website redesign is made more affordable by taking advantage of Venuecom’s website leasing program.  Contact us for details on leasing a website.

Venuecom, a Wilmington, NC web design company and partner of Impulse Web Solutions, has just been given the green light to  redesign attydc.com.  The website has been in existence for roughly a decade and has seen no major design overhaul in that time, so Venuecom’s web design team will work on bringing the site up to date with fresh, new graphics and a bolder appearance.

The site already has terrific search engine placement for its main key term, Wilmington NC Lawyer:

Google: 1
Yahoo: 1
Bing: 2

However, the client wishes to have the site rank high for other areas around Wilmington as well as for specific areas of law.  To that end, the newly designed website will include many new pages of relevant content and feature a blog for the discussion of legal advice, law news and other legal matters.

It has been a busy week for Impulse Web Solutions and Venue Communications, partner Wilmington, NC web design firms.  Between the two companies we have sent out or are working on sending out proposals for the following web design jobs.

• Redesign and increase search engine optimization scope of an existing client’s website.  The site is at the top of search engines for its main key phrase, but the client would like to rank high for more search terms.  A secondary goal is to ensure a higher conversion rate by updating the design of the website, which was probably built close to a decade ago.
• Revamp a website that focuses on providing information about the Myrtle Beach area.  It was originally intended to be a one-page website with some basic information about the company, but they are now ready to flesh it out to make better use of their resources.
• Redesign a partially-completed website for a local Wilmington, NC shopkeeper.  A site was started for her, but it was never completed, did not accomplish what she wanted to accomplish and is not easy for her to update.  To top all of that off, the client is no longer able to get in contact with her former web designer.  (And that’s why it’s better to use an established web design company instead of the friend of a friend who happens to do  websites.)
• Copy an existing client’s website, update the code using CSS and make some minor modifications to help them better track leads generated from mass mailing campaigns.

In addition to these web design jobs, we have a few minor to major maintenance jobs lined up for some new and existing clients.  While we’ve been very busy since at least November, this is quite a bit to come all at once.  That fact makes me really glad that we recently expanded our team.  And who knows, maybe all this work is a sign that the economy is turning around.

I saw yesterday that WordPress 3.0 was out of beta and available via WordPress’s terrific automatic update feature.  I figured if they had it available through that, they must have worked out any auto install bugs, right?

Well, not quite.

I did the auto install on my personal blog and was told that it failed, then when I tried to go back and change some things in my admin, I got this error:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function set_current_screen() in /xxxxx/wordpress/wp-admin/admin.php  on line 129

I did a little digging around and discovered that I wasn’t the only one.  The suggestions were to disable all your plugins (if you don’t have admin access you can do this by simply renaming the plugins directory via FTP) and see if that works, which would mean one of your existing plugins was causing the issue, or do a manual upgrade.

Renaming my plugins directory didn’t fix it for me, so I decided to do the manual upgrade, and that did the trick.  My WordPress 3.0 blog is working peachy keen now.

There’s a lot going on in WordPress 3.0 and I was eager to play with it, but it was pretty late at that point so I messed with the new default WordPress theme, Twenty Ten, a little bit and called it a night.

While the manual install isn’t particularly difficult, I’m not going to suggest our clients upgrade to it yet unless they want to give it a go themselves.  I’m going to wait until whatever bugs there are in automatically upgrading from WordPress 2.9.2 to WordPress 3.0 are fixed before we go forward with that.

In case you want to know how to manually upgrade from WordPress 2.9.2 to WordPress 3.0, here are the steps:

• Download WordPress 3.0 and unzip the files into the WordPress folder on your computer.
• Back up your database.  This is optional, but it’s a good idea.
• Disable your plugins.  Sometimes a plugin will conflict with something in a newer version of WordPress.  You can reactivate them one at a time to make sure there’s no conflict.  I usually skip this step, personally, but I do remember once or twice where it caused me a problem.
• Delete the wp-admin and wp-includes directories on the server.
• Upload all the WordPress 3.0 files to your server except the wp-contents folder.  That folder contains your themes and plugins.
• Upload the wp-content/themes/twentyten folder.  This will give you the WordPress 3.0 default theme, Twenty Ten, which lets you use all of WordPress 3.0’s new features.  Uploading this folder separately from the rest will ensure that any other themes or plugins you have are not overwritten.
• You’ll be prompted to update your database, which takes under a minute, then you’re done and ready to explore the new features of WordPress 3.0!

I’ve worn many hats in this job, the most recent ones being sales, support and design.  Being pulled in so many directions kept us steady, but dividing time up between three distinct jobs meant less focus was given to one or another at any given time.  We decided that if we want the company to grow, the team would have to grow too.

We determined that the best place to expand was in the design department.  We were looking for someone skilled in creating fresh, contemporary designs who was also comfortable talking to clients.  After all, it’s more efficient in web design to have a designer who can also sell, otherwise you’re playing the telephone game and details might get lost or you waste time going back and forth (designer to sales to client then client to sales to designer and so on).  We’ve been around long enough to know that the less interference there is between the designer and the client, the better the whole process flows.

So after a weeks-long search, we would like to welcome Travis Ray to the team.  Travis has an impressive design background and the ability to listen to what a client needs then take it a step further to improve upon their ideas.  He will be taking over the majority of the design duties as well as following up with new and existing clients.  We look forward to showcasing his skills, and I, in particular, look forward to wearing fewer hats.