Articles, commentary, tips, and thoughts... relating to web design for small businesses and organizations.

Ensuring Website Performance

February 9, 2011 – 5:38 pm by tdolaskie

Posted in Commentary, Tips for Businesses

When your business website went live, you had a vision: you knew it was ready to enhance your business. Time has passed, economic conditions have changed, you’ve adapted your business but have you updated your web presence?

An updated Web Presence doesn’t mean a redesign.

With the Web Maestro’s recently added SEO & Web Performance Services, subtle enhancements can now be made to your website to increase Search Engine Ranking and make your site even easier for visitors to use.

If your businesses requires flexibility in its marketing efforts, we can work with you on Pay Per Click and Facebook Ad campaigns to specifically target your market. We work with you on the budget, making sure that you see a maximum R.O.I. and fully understand where your investment is being spent.

You know what SEO is. We know how SEO works.
Organically, a high ranking in Google, Bing, Yahoo, as well as multiple other Search Platforms, takes a while. The success of a website showing up organically requires constant focus on the performance of multiple elements within your website.

We can determine your best Keyword Data and structure the appropriate Keyword content without throwing off the reader. How many websites have you visited that have Keywords scattered everywhere, accomplishing nothing but to distract your attempt at understanding the website itself?

In 2011, we are seeing a large shift in focus from traditional marketing efforts to more web-based marketing. This shift has many contributing factors, but the advantage of Measurable Data gained in Online Marketing efforts has proven to be of great value.

We understand the data. We explain it all to you.

If you’re interested in learning how we can push your business to the next level online, just give us a call or shoot us an email. We’re excited to offer these services to you and look forward to helping your business grow!

A Few Web Design Myths

January 15, 2011 – 3:40 am by Nathan Lyle

Posted in Commentary, Maestro Articles

Like anything else in life, the art of creating websites enjoys some popular myths. Some ideas come from older ways of doing things, and are translated into the new technology. Other ides are born of the very common feeling that if we feel a certain way about something, chances are most other people do too. Here are some of the most common design related myths about how websites are put together and used. Read More »

Technology Equals Change

December 20, 2010 – 3:36 am by Nathan Lyle

Posted in Commentary, Maestro Articles, Tips for Businesses

Until electricity goes away, technology will continue to be a driving force in business. If you are afraid of change or otherwise unable to cope with the ever increasing pace of change in technology, you are almost guaranteed to be left behind. Rather than being doom and gloom, however, the very same technology changes can help you keep up and even get ahead.

Websites have been around for a little while, and most people have come to accept that to be in business you need to have a website. (Not everyone jumped on board immediately with this idea, and we see some holdouts even today.) However, the websites we’ve gotten used to are not an ending point. They are merely one stop along an always changing spectrum of ways that people interact with each other.

The research firm Gartner predicts that mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common way of accessing the Web by 2013, an even shorter time period than Morgan Stanley’s projection of four years. While the exact time period might be up for debate, the direction seems unarguable. So, if you’re one of those people who just got around to putting a website in place, there’s not much time for a breather. Read More »

HTML5 and Google pull off something new

October 23, 2010 – 10:07 pm by Nathan Lyle

Posted in Commentary, Neat Ideas, News

It’s rare that I’m really impressed by a new music video, or song. Or at least, that I feel like I’m seeing or hearing something new. The same can be said of the Web. Most websites share a majority of common factors in one way or another.

The band Arcade Fire, director Chris Milk, and Google have teamed up to create something that I really did feel was new, and I was genuinely impressed with. I can forgive it being targeted for working in only Google’s Chrome web browser, because it’s making use of HTML5 which is not supported across all browsers yet. This is a great proof of concept, and, I felt it had some new ideas in how to use the browser in displaying content. Read More »

Google’s “Instant” Changes

September 21, 2010 – 10:11 pm by Nathan Lyle

Posted in Commentary, News

Google has a history of being amazingly steadfast about not changing their search home page. While it’s all too easy to give in to the urge and constantly improve and alter one’s website (not that we’d know from personal experience or anything) they have done a good job of remaining easy to use and simple. To seemingly make up for this, their recent incorporation of “instant” searching has made some fundamental changes. (With mixed results, in my opinion.)

In Google’s words, their new instant search is “a new search enhancement that shows results as you type.” If you’ve been drinking too much coffee today, this might seem like a no-brainer of a good idea. And, in all honesty, it does have some neatness about it.

“Our key technical insight was that people type slowly, but read quickly, typically taking 300 milliseconds between keystrokes, but only 30 milliseconds (a tenth of the time!) to glance at another part of the page. This means that you can scan a results page while you type.”

The reasons behind the change sound all well and good, but to play the devil’s advocate, I’m not sold on it. My reaction seems far from alone. Read More »