This week's client focus features one of our international clients, "All Save Energy Solutions" located in Ireland.

Here in America, we are only slowly starting to embrace the green in our lives, but in Ireland, this has been a standard in daily lives for many, many years. A small example of this, is that Irish households do not continually waste energy to keep water heated throughout the day. In Ireland, they have what are called "immersions", where water is heated when the immersion is turned on. This means that they only use energy needed to heat the water when they are actually going to use the heated water. One negative involved in this is that you have to turn the immersion on 30 minutes before you need the water. Most come equipped with a timer so that you can schedule that morning shower!

"All Save Energy Solutions", is a consultancy based firm located in Ireland. Since the BER legislation was passed, each house is now required to pass an energy rating. All Save Energy Solution provides certified professional BER rating assessors to rate your property and to provide energy saving solutions.

Brian Joseph Studios designed a striking logo and web design for All Save Energy Solutions in December 2007. In addition, a strong search engine optimization campaign was added to the strategy and since then, the website has enjoyed much success. All Save Energy Solutions now receives over 80% of all contracts from their website, and most of their website's traffic comes from search engines.

We look forward to growing the website for this client in the coming months, and we will also be meeting with them in Ireland in one weeks' time.

Does your web design company agree to meet with you often? Brian Joseph Studios regularly meets with our clients, whether they are in Fort Myers, or Dublin, Ireland!

Labels: client focus, green, web design

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Now that Barack Obama has won the Democratic vote for President, it seems like a good time to review both Presidential candidate's websites.

BarackObama.com and JohnMcCain.com

First off, here are the details of these sites:

BarackObama.com

• Server Type: PWS/1.2.29 (Personal Web Server)
• Width: 960 pixels
• Code: CSS and PHP
• Color Scheme: White, Shades of Blues, Grey
• Design: Light feel, Use of Gradients, Modern, Crisp, Comfortable
• Cross-Browser Compatible: Yes
• Estimated US Visitors Per Month: 1,568,981
• Valid HTML?: Failed validation, 8 Errors (XHTML 1.0 Transitional)

JohnMcCain.com

• Server Type: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
• Width: 999 pixels
• Code: Mostly Tables and ASP / ASP.net
• Color Scheme: White, Shades of Blues, Grey
• Design: Light feel, Use of Gradients, Modern, Crisp, Comfortable
• Cross-Browser Compatible: Two notable IE6 problems on homepage
• Estimated US Visitors Per Month: 350,340
• Valid HTML?: Failed validation, 85 Errors (HTML 4.01 Transitional)

Screenshots from June 9th 2008

BarackObama.com is immediately a striking yet calming website, designed with organization and cleanliness in mind. The main website navigation is clearly defined and the overall usability of the website is excellent. The format of each page begins with a nice page heading graphic, well-designed and interesting. Each page is organized clearly, and a perfect amount of white space and padding is added to each section.

Features on BarackObama.com are:

• User Accounts / MySpace style : Yes (My.BarackObama.com)
• Newsletter Sign Up: Yes
  
• Website Blog: Yes
• TV Channel and Videos: Yes
• Events Search Engine: Yes
• Local Grassroots Group Area Search Engine: Yes
• State Specific Pages: Yes
• People Group Pages: Yes
• Issues Pages: Yes
• Downloadable Logos, Wallpapers, Print Materials, Buddy Icons etc. Yes
• Social Networking Links: Yes
• Register To Vote Link: Yes (off site)

JohnMcCain.com's design lacks real organization and a friendly user interface look and feel. The overall design looks contrived and forced together, without any flow or consistency evident throughout. The color scheme....well...there doesn't appear to be a standard organized color scheme at all with different colors, and tones all over the website; Prominent blues, orange/yellow, red, bright green, turquoise blue and dull blue/grey. Font sizes throughout the website differ, as well spacing and padding. An example of this is if you venture between the Campaign Calendar page and the Blog page. The difference in padding and margin at the top left is a terrible lack of real professionalism in user interface standards, especially for such an important website like this.

Features on JohnMcCain.com are

• User Accounts / MySpace style : Yes (McCainSpace)
• Newsletter Sign Up: Yes
  
• Website Blog: Yes
• TV Channel and Videos: Yes
• Events Search Engine: No (only events calendar)
• Local Grassroots Group Area Search Engine: No
• State Specific Pages: Yes
• People Group Pages:No
• Issues Pages: Yes
• Downloadable Logos, Wallpapers, Print Materials, Buddy Icons etc.No
• Social Networking Links:No
• Register To Vote Link: Yes (on site)

So, after studying both websites, it is clear which one is of a higher quality of web and graphic design standards. BarackObama.com is a modern, web 2.0 website, utilizing the latest in XHTML and CSS capabilities, along with capturing the interests of all ages.

JohnMcCain.com lacks a comfortable and appealing design, and is also extremely narrow in its reach. The only user that will enjoy JohnMcCain.com is a wealthy 70 year old man looking for some new golf gear (4th tab in dark blue in center of page)!

BarackObama.com seems to be reaching out to all ages, all ethnicities, all groups of society. His website has something for everybody, and it is interesting to note that this seems to tie in perfectly with his overall campaign promise; To unite everyone. His website certainly achieves that.

What do you think about the two websites? Do you think they achieve what they need to? Which one keeps you interested to click through to other pages and which one turns you away right off that bat?

Labels: political web design, web design

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Labels: client focus

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Last week we discussed "Symmetry" as Part 2 of our seven part series on Logo Design Composition.

This week:

Part 3: Proportions

The relative size of the elements

Differences in size between the individual elements are often used to create a contrast. However, you should pay attention to not force the smaller element into the background.

All elements combined should result in a harmonical image.

It is often helpful to use a grid. For example, an element's width in the logo could be used as the base of such a grid. To achieve a harmonical image, you could use half the width of the first element as the appropriate spacing from other objects or a scripture.

Another example is the logo's "safety clearance", or the space around a logo that should always be left blank. Considering a logo that consists of a figure part and a text part you could use the width of the figure part to define the safety clearance around the entire logo.

Take care when you design a logo with different proportions of the elements: The smaller part must be easily recognizable or legible also when the logo is used at a small size! Logos should still work down to a size of 2 cm

Next week: Part 4 : Combination

Labels: logo design

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Rssday.org are trying to build awareness of RSS technology and I am adding my support to the project. Many of us in the web design, graphic design and internet marketing business use RSS technology every day. It is important that our industries try to promote it and get it in front of all general internet users.



Q: What is RSS, and what are RSS feeds I keep hearing about?A. Wikipedia explains RSS feeds as:"RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines, and podcasts.[2] An RSS document (which is called a "feed" or "web feed"[3] or "channel") contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with web sites in an automated manner that can be piped into special programs or filtered displays.[3]RSS content can be read using software called an "RSS reader", "feed reader" or an "aggregator", which can be web-based or desktop-based. The user subscribes to a feed by entering the feed's link into the reader or by clicking an RSS icon in a browser that initiates the subscription process. The RSS reader checks the user's subscribed feeds regularly for new content, downloading any updates that it finds and provides a user interface to monitor and read the feeds.

The initials "RSS" are used to refer to the following formats:

Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0) RDF Site Summary (RSS 1.0 and RSS 0.90) Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91). RSS formats are specified using XML, a generic specification for the creation of data formats. Although RSS formats have evolved since March 1999,[4] the RSS icon ("") first gained widespread use in 2005/2006. "

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(file_format)

Labels: rss day

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Labels: optimization, seo

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Well....the Big G (Google for those that are not internet nerds!), came by our old website, Awebtech.com, and found a whole bunch of 301 redirects all over the site sending users to our new website, BrianJosephStudios.com.

Awebtech.com has ranked firmly in the top 3 for all of our targetted keyword phrases, and we receive a large amount of traffic from search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN (Live).

So, for a while we had both websites up and finally we decided to make the full switch over to Brian Joseph Studios as our main company name. Here's where it gets messy!

On all pages on awebtech.com, we had to add a server side redirect to the corresponding pages on brianjosephstudios.com. For example, if we had a page : http://awebtech.com/web-design/ we had to add a redirect to a similar page on our new site...like this http://brianjosephstudios.com/web-design/ .

So, with every page on awebtech.com re-directing the user to brianjosephstudios.com, Google gets a little worried (temporarily) about both websites. This is due to the fact that spam websites, and black hat seo's will use re-directs of all kinds to spam the search engines, showing users something else.

301 re-directs are the correct way to transfer your site over to a new domain name. They are also widely acknowledged as the favored redirect method for all search engines.

The problem with it is though that Google knocks your new site down quite a bit for a short period of time, until it figures out what exactly is going on. So, right now, our website is not ranking as high as it did before all of this was implemented. However, we expect our rankings to come back within a week or two , and when they do, they will come back even stronger.

Labels: google, optimization, search engine marketing

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