New Website Designs

I have extensive experience in website design using FrontPage and HTML. As an artist, my design skills are finely tuned to create a visually appealing website that will capture the attention of your visitors and engage them quickly in your content. Using my skills as a writer and designer, I will improve your existing website, or create a new website designed especially for your business, products, or message. Branding your site with your logo, products, and company color scheme (if appropriate) is also included in the design phase. If you make your site easy to use and help your visitors succeed from the start, you'll improve your reputation and create repeat business!

I cater to small business and artists, allowing you to spend your time creating and working at what you love. It's a great thing when your passion is your business -- you should enjoy your work days and not fret over website woes.

Website Re-Designs

Knowing how to effectively build a website that is easy-to-follow and is visually appealing comes from studying and years of practice. I will work with you to preserve any elements that you like about your existing site, and then re-style the site, giving it a cohesive design, with a strong navigation structure and a custom branding that will pull it all together. Copy writing and editing are very important elements to a re-design project, and will be a large part of a re-design of your website.

Web Copywriting and Editing

I have over 20 years experience in writing and editing. As a technical writer, I created user manuals and screen text for computer-driven medical products. I use concise language that is easy to read, with proper grammar and construction. Your visitors will not be confused by your message or product descriptions, or think you're uneducated due to misspellings or poor grammar.

This is not the 'stuff' most of you want to worry about -- but if it's one of my projects, it is imperative! Writing for the web is different than writing for paper publications. There are different standards and ways to present the information visually that can make or break a website if not handled properly. I know the difference!

Optimizing Your Website (SEO) and Submitting to Search Engines (SES)

Even with a great design, if your site is not optimized for search engines, no one will be able to find you out here. If you build it, but they can't find it, they will not come. Usability studies tell us that people don't read Web pages nearly as much as we think or hope they will. How about you —do you read your way through the pages or do you hop through headings and subheads until you find the information you want?

But, the search engine  "spiders," the little applications that the search engines send out to crawl through your pages, do read every word of your pages. And they use all that text to index your site for web searches. The search engines look at your website, check for certain criteria, and then if all is well, place you in their indexes so you can be found when someone searches for your product or message. If the search engines don't find what they want to see, you won't get in the index and won't come up in potential customers' searches. There are some important aspects that must be understood and addressed when building a website.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one key element that must not be overlooked. I will spend approximately one quarter of the project time making sure that all the important elements of optimization are included in the code for each web page. Once the site is optimized, I do your Search Engine Submissions (SES), submitting your website to search engines, like Google, Alta Vista, Ask! and many others that offer free submissions. If you want immediate inclusion in the larger search engines, like Yahoo Search, I can do that for you as well; they charge a fee for "express  inclusion" which can be charged to your credit card.