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’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.

My project for this weekend has been to convert this blog from Blogger to WordPress.  It was not as easy as I had hoped.  The import tool made such a mess of the posts that I deleted them all and manually (copy and paste) imported each post.  Took about 4 hours to rebuild 211 posts.

I managed to keep all the URL’s the same.  I even kept the .html at the end.  All the posts were by the former owner of Impulse, Jonathan, who sold the business to us in December 2009.   More about that perhaps in another post.  I was able to set the author of all his post to his name.  I hope we can do as good of a job of updating this blog as he did.  That job will most likely fall on Zach, who is much better at keeping his social media sites updated than I am.

Now that I have the posts imported and the URL’s all the same as they were before I’m running our Sitemap Generator to check for broken links, duplicate H1 tags, etc.

Check out our fancy new badge; 70 out of a 100 aint’ bad heh?

Link: WebsiteGrader.com

Tiffany’s Rentals (www.tiffanysrentals.com) lists a nice selection of houses for rent on Bald Head Island, located off of the southeastern coast of North Carolina, between the Cape Fear River and the Atlantic ocean.

Graphic Moxie has done an excellent job redesigning the website and Impulse has been in charge of the PHP programming and MySQL database development. The rentals are stored in a database and the site admin has the ability to add, update and delete rental listings at their leisure.

The new design should be up very soon so be sure and check out the site in the near future.

Link: Tiffany’s Rentals on Bald Head Island, NC

We just launched the new website for Lifestyle Mobility and Med Supply of Wilmington NC.

They specialize in mobility devices for the elderly and disabled; a large segment of their business is dedicated to US Veterans.

We just launched the new website for Mann’s Creative Designs – they specialize in countertops, interior and exterior concrete and synthetic rocks. They are vary talented and have done projects all over the country. Be sure to check out their Project Gallery.

We just launched the brand new website for The Eshelman Foundation: