Welcome to Sankofa
It's the end of a busy week and it's nice to welcome our newest online store client Sankofa.
Sankofa is a mythical West African bird symbolising the importance of learning from the past in moving to the future. It's a great on-line shop selling ethically traded textiles and handcrafts and handicrafts that respect traditional techniques in creating designs for the future.
We're looking forward to working with Kym on producing a fantastic online presence.
David
Labels: Online-Stores, Web-Hosting
Posted on Friday, June 29, 2007
Online Store Tour
Making things really simple and elegant takes time and effort.
We've spent the last 4 years evolving our online store product so that it has all the features you and your customers need without getting in their way.
We've learned a lot about the process and know how to integrate marketing and search engine optimsation into the core of your store.
Let's face it, if it's to hard - you're going to frustrate customers.
Why not take a quick 3 minute guided tour of our some of our recent stores and see or yourself.
Labels: Online-Stores, Search-Engine-Optimisation, Web-Design-Melbourne
Posted on Thursday, June 28, 2007
Cleaning up My Space
Unfortunately things don't have to be well designed to be popular. Never has this been more the case (on the web) than with the social networking juggernaut that is MySpace. The most highly visited site on the web, 50 million and counting, commands respect purely through its' staggering number of unique visitors.
Being mostly Generation X staffers at Efront, we've tried to stay away from MySpace for some time now mostly because it makes us feel old....but really for two main reasons :
- It's ugly - "u-g-l-y you aint got no alibi you ugly" ugly
- It's ridiculously poor to use
Admittedly, our sensibilities to usability on the web are a little higher than the average joe's but come on, there are some shockers there...
...I mean who has the login button on the left hand side?? By default you hit the sign up when trying to log in!
All this aside though, MySpace has a place in the world. Where there's people, there's money. People go there to socialise and to make 'friends'. For artists, MySpace represents a unique opportunity to present your music and video for free to a whole bunch of people. Hence how we arrived at having to face our first re-skin of a MySpace site.
Fiona Burnett is an accomplished saxophonist who is currently getting her site rebuilt by Efront. Along with the new site, a MySpace page needed to be created to complement her online presence.
After some Googling, a lot of head scratching and much tweaking, I'm really happy with what we've been able to do with Fiona's MySpace. We created a clean, neat, profile for Fiona that allows her to be a part of the MySpace community on her terms. When her site launches there'll be nice consistencies between the two and visitors won't feel like they've jumped into a completely new thing.
www.myspace.com/fionaburnett
So....now on to Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, LastFm....
Mark
Labels: cleaning-up-myspace, MySpace, templates, Web-Design-Melbourne
Posted on Thursday, June 21, 2007
Pure Destiny Online Store Opens!
Pure Destiny have been an Efront client for almost 8 years and was one of our first clients to use our first online store product. A lot of things have changed over this time in terms of web technology and search engine optimisation.
We're pleased to announce that Pure Destiny have just consolidated their web site into a brand new online store. This online shop has really nice features from a customer and owner perspective. Using the latest AJAX technology, this store makes online shopping a real pleasure.
The built in search engine optimisation means that over time, Pure Destiny's products will rank higher in Google than they ever have before. Each page, is stacked with relevant keywords in meta tags, page titles, and urls to give it the best chance of success in Google.
A dynamic sitemap registered directly with Google means that as soon as a new product is created it's ready for Google to pickup through it regular crawl.
While they are still stacking the virtual shelves - why not visit Pure Destiny Aromatics and see for yourself.
This latest store offering has received a great response. We have a few more stores coming on line in the next 8 weeks - if you'd like to find out more, or get a demo, just drop us a line.
All the best,
David
Labels: AJAX, Online-Stores, Search-Engine-Optimisation
Posted on Thursday, June 14, 2007
Search engine optimisation confusion
There are a lot of web design companies out there that promote search engine optimisation (SEO) services. Many charge a few hundred dollars to optimise your web site for the major search engines.
When they say 'optimise', they mean give your site the best possible chance of being picked up for certain keywords or phrases. While that may sound like it makes sense, it's really only a small part of the search engine equation.
For most SEO services this means changing some code behind your sites web pages which give search engines clues about the content of the page (META tags). They may even go as far as changing page titles. After this they may use a service that resubmits your site a heap of search engines (most of which you would never have heard of) and then send you an invoice for weaving this magic on your website.
Now we don't pretend to know everything about SEO, and realise that a lot has changed since we started developing websites 8 years ago. We know however, there is a lot more that you should expect for your hard earned dollar.
Ranging from dynamic re-writing of your sites urls to be keyword rich, dynamic sitemap generation, search engine referral keyword tracking and how to avoid duplicate content from impacting your ranking.
Let's face it - the purpose of SEO is to increase traffic to your site. When we sit down with a new client, we don't just spend time talking about the design of their new site, we talk about ways in which they can use their website to save time, save money, make sales or improve quality of service.
Real search engine optimisation takes time, crafted content and a serious commitment.
When was the last time you looked closely at your website statistics?
For most people, the answer is "Statistics? I don't think we have them". Like anything in business, if it's not measured and monitored - you have no real control.
Search engine optimisation should be part of any well designed website, not something you add on later. Before you spend money on SEO see how the company you're considering ranks or if they rank at all...
All the best,
David
Labels: Search-Engine-Optimisation, SEO, Web-Design-Melbourne
Posted on Thursday, June 14, 2007
Nan & Pop Records
It's always ace when you get to blog about a new client, especially when you're excited about the concept and the company. Nan and Pop Records are all this and more. They've got some great acts coming and we're especially excited to be helping the old fellas get their gear online.
Efront is looking forward to working with Saskia and Justin on their new site. Watch this space!
All the best,
Mark
Labels: Online-Stores, Web-Design-Melbourne, Web-Hosting
Posted on Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Dedicated Web Hosting
If you're developing your first website or online store, one of the things you're going to need to consider is where to host your site.
Like anything there are plenty of really cheap options,, most of them however mean sharing space on a server with thousands of other web sites.
The downside is that your site and email can be impacted by other users of the server. If one site gets a large volume of traffic, your site will slow down or the server may even crash.
To ensure our clients get the service they deserve, we invest in exclusive hosting. This means we have dedicated web serving hardware that is reserved for Efront clients.
Our services are located within a state of the art data centre, featuring true 24x7 support, power and network redundancy, and Tier 1 Bandwidth. Backups of your website are performed automatically via nightly, weekly and monthly schedules.
Let's face it, it doesn't matter how great your site is if it isn't online.
David
Labels: Web-Design-Melbourne, Web-Hosting
Posted on Tuesday, June 05, 2007