• November 24th, 2008

Just a quick note to let you know that the redesign for the new Branson Arts Council website is complete. One of the adjustments that was made during the transition was the switch from the .org ending to the .com extension.

As a result, the official site can now be found at: http://www.bransonartscouncil.com. The change affected the email address as well. it is now info@bransonartscouncil.com

• September 6th, 2008

It seems like every post I make nowadays is a new site announcement. I really will be posting interesting information in the future. I have intentions of creating articles, and perhaps even posts that talk about various HTML, CSS, Actionscript 3.0, and PHP techniques. The problem however, is that I have been extremely busy lately. Hence, this site launch announcement is being posted on a Saturday even though it was launched about 3-5 days ago.

The new site is called Commrecial One Brokers. The site owners had an existing website, but wanted something different from what they had. After meeting with them and their marketing specialist, I determined that they were looking for a design with a corporate, professional feel and that would match their logo colors.

The site is now live and has been checked in all the major browsers for consistent rendering.

• August 25th, 2008

The site overhaul for the Sunset Nightly Rentals website is complete. This redesign wasn’t too bad. Some minor changes to color, added a Flash slideshow and some new button and tab graphics to soften the color scheme a touch. The previous design had more contrast and the site owner felt it was a little too harsh.

The functionality was not changed too much, other than the fact that we converted it from ASP over to PHP. The challenge though was that the owner did not want to sacrifice authority or rankings during the switch. I’ll take this time to state that it is critical that you choose a designer/developer that understands search engines before you have a site redesigned.

There are potential pitfalls that go along with redesigns and if you have a productive site that needs freshened-up, you don’t want to lose the productivity just to make it look a little better.

• August 25th, 2008

While I’ve been very busy this year with new sites. It seems as though I haven’t made many new site launches. That’s primarily because the clients wanted to be sure everything was all set before giving the go ahead to launch. Which is a benefit to working with a local designer. Often times, large design firms do not always give you as much “tweaking time” as you might like.

Anyway, enough about that. I have two new sites to announce but I’ll only announce one in this post.

Are you looking for a spa to visit while on your trip to Branson? If so, you might want to checkout Aspire Medical Spa, adjacent to the Branson Landing, this Branson spa is very convenient for visitors staying or touring the downtown area.

This project was basically a redesign, but since the owners of the spa want to change the colors and add a Flash intro to the site, I figured I would just do a complete rebuild.

The site got a new Flash introduction that tells what the business is all about, tranformations. The design got transformed to a deeper, richer color pallet with more vibrance.

An admin area was added to give the Aspire staff the ability to not only edit their own website pages, but also to create and schedule newsletters to be sent via email to all client that choose to opt in to the program.

The entire site custom built to the specifications of the business owners!

• February 19th, 2008

Tonight’s post is in regard to a new site launch. This client had marketing material with a specific color scheme and feel. My goal was to transfer the look and feel from the printed material to a website layout and make the site take up the whole screen. It went pretty well and the image to the left is the new and improved Lakeside Storage design.

• December 7th, 2007

While I have been busy working on websites and graphic design projects, I haven’t taken time to post announcements about new sites or other projects. This project though, I wanted to be sure to post about. Why?

Well, this particular website project was a redesign of an existing site and I wanted to give an example of the impact a redesign can make. The site is BriarwoodBranson.com. You guessed it, it is for Briarwood Condominiums, a new condo development on Lake Taneycomo.

Briarwood Website Before
First lets look at the before. To the right you’ll see a screenshot of the site before the redesign. There is nothing “wrong” with the site but here are some points I thought I would like to bring out.

This design is nice and simple. The logo is centered at the top, the background color is bright blue and the main area has a white background. The images you see just to the right of the text form a slideshow that repeats cycling through various photos chosen to be displayed. At the bottom of the page you’ll notice buttons indicating the different areas of the site. There are three. 1) Photos, 2) Floor Plans, and 3) Contact. The photos page consisted of a simple list of around 8-10 images presented in two columns. The visitor could browse them by scrolling the page and looking through the images. Floor plans page had images of the floor plans with the amenities and features listed in the lower left hand corner of the page. The contact page was some centered text representing the contact information for the property.

That is the summary of what the site featured before the redesign. I am not going to elaborate on what I felt could be improved or the reasons because I want to keep this post relatively brief. I’ll save the details for the case studies section of my site. With that description of the before site, we are now ready to delve into the features of the remodeled, or redesigned site.

Condo Site After the Redesign
Now for the part of the post I particularly enjoy. The features of the redesigned website.
To the right you’ll notice a “screenshot” or a “screengrab” of the new Branson Condominiums website. The background is no longer a bright blue. I chaged it to a beige color. I changed the shade of blue to a deeper color and used it for the content backing.
As you can see, the site now has more content as indicated by the larger navigation menu. I did not write any of the content. Rather, it was provided by the realty firm handling the condos. They know how better to write the content since they specialize in Branson lake homes and vacation condos whereas I do not. This added content also called for restructuring the content.
Anyway, I added a contact form to the contact page so visitors can now send an email right from the contact page without the use of a mail client installed on their computer.
Another adjustment I made to the site took place on the photos page. The gallery is now a simple yet effective way to browse over forty images in a smaller area than before. Again, I won’t go into details on the why or how it was done.

In summary, the client is happy with the redesign of the website and so am I. I enjoy doing redesigns when it benefits the client and the site visitors. If you are looking for someone to spruce up your simple site design, drop me a note and I’ll take a look at the possibilities.