Background:

As the name implies, this site is for Troy Lindner who is an tournament fisherman and professional athlete.  Over the past few years, Troy has developed a workout program to reduce injury for avid fisherman.  Here’s a little bit about Troy:

“Troy graduated with a small business degree and moved to Los Angeles and in 2002 started California Complete Fitness. During this time he trained and worked with many great people, including stars from the entertainment and music industry as well as producers, directors and film personalities. In 2008, he worked and trained with gold medalist and superstar athlete Amanda Beard as she prepared for the Beijing Olympics. The exercises, programs, nutritional approach and fitness lessons learned over these years are the foundation for his Fit 4 Fishing program. ”

Request:

The previous iteration of this website was dark and red…showing very little relationship to the outdoors or fishing at all.  The logo was of poor quality and the load time was very slow.  

Solution:

The first step in our solution was to abandon all the red and black attributes of the site.  Adding an underwater background and mixing in greens and blue really brought everything together.  The logo as cleaned up and adjusted for readability. 

 We worked hard to pull in high quality images of Troy doing what he does best.  Luckily, Troy had devoted time and effort into producing instructional videos and loading them directing into his YouTube page.  We simply make various calls into YouTube to place them into his site.

Background:

ALL BAY REALTY, INC was born from a position of struggle from a woman who has vision, passion for the default real estate industry and just sheer determination to stay in business.  ALL BAY REALTY, INC is an organization that understands that, to be successful in this NEW and forever changed industry that we must be commits to: being students of our work, being valuation experts, being preservation experts, being a TRUE real estate expert that can bring much more to the industry than the previously accepted standard.

Request:

All-Bay had taken a very good first step in migrating all of their email and storage to the Google Apps platform.  Now, they needed a strong website to showcase their team of professionals and have a medium to frequently share industry news and event.

Solution:

After a brief discovery session with the client, we were able together enough information to begin our design process.  This process begins with three initial design mockups using the information attained during Discovery.  After a set of iterative updates, a final design was agreed upon with the client.

As with most of our sites, we decided to implement the new design into a WordPress architecture.  This allowed for the syndication of news requested by the client and allows for frequent updates with a minimal amount of effort.

1. Credibility in your industry 
Assuming you take the time to publish quality information, a well-written blog post demonstrates to readers that you have a level of expertise in your industry. Supplying readers with industry trends, tips, or techniques is a great way to capture an audience and keep them wanting more. In essence, with each blog post, you garner a certain amount of trust…which could lead to additional customers in the future.

2. The People Behind the Brand
Far too often, organizations are seen as entities with no personality. Customer support agents answer questions from pre-determined scripts and there is little-to-no connection with a prospective client. By writing a blog, you are afforded the ability to publish useful information and give readers some insight as to who you really are. Mixing in the occasional corporate outing, community involvement, or sharing images about your employees can humanize the perception of your organization.

3. SEO Implications
Most websites have a fairly limited number of pages, and a limited number of words per page. Adding a blog means you can regularly create rich content, and include the keywords which just don’t seem to work on your static pages. You’ll be supplying search engine crawlers more content to crawl on your site, and more opportunity to catalog and index your important keywords.

4. Google Loves the Freshness
When Google crawls, indexes, and ranks pages, it examines a large number of criteria to determine the importance of a website. A large portion of the criteria is directly related to how often the website is updated…in essence, how fresh is the content. Websites with content that changes frequently typically notice increased spider activity as Google attempts to make sure all the latest stories are indexed quickly. Having a blog on your site is a fairly easy way to create these frequent updates that Google is looking for.

5. Customer Relationships
Once in place, your blog can serve as a great tool to attract new customers while offering new and updated services to existing customers. Adding posts that answer common questions about a product, announcing news products, or offering specials are the most common methods to building customer loyalty.

Keep In Mind
Now, it should be noted that the power of the five items above can only be exploited by spending the time to write meaningful blog posts.  Simply throwing some quick ideas together and publishing to the web will likely see far less bang for your buck.