Thursday, January 29, 2009

A few more SEO experiments...

We are trying a few more SEO experiments to see how the difference between "wide" and "deep" plays out in Google Analytics...

The three new contenders are:

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

SEO Experiment: "Warriors Book"

While our code for all our websites is standards compliant and very SEO friendly, having all that in place is only half the battle. The other half is having good content, keywords, and position in the marketplace. Now, there is a lot, I mean a LOT of information out there regarding how to increase search rankings for websites. The only way to really truly understand the difference between what works and what is hype, we are launching a series of SEO experiments to learn for ourselves.

Our first experimental blog is called "Warriors Book Review", a blog dedicated to the children's fiction series "Warriors" about cat clans and their lives. We'll post back results over time. Hopefully we'll learn something usefull!

The blog lives at warriors-book-review.blogspot.com.

Sunday, January 18, 2009

Graphic Design Poetry, con't again...

From one happy customer...

"Doug Bonneville, as recently shown
into quite a designer, has grown.
making sites for the others,
(and even their brothers)
has finally fixed one of his own."

Check out www.watkinscabinet.com to visit the happy customer!

Thursday, January 15, 2009

Watkins Cabinet website launched...

Well, it launched in December but I forgot to post it! Watkins Cabinet, at www.watkinscabinet.com, was an excercise in design restraint, use of grid, use of ajax, sifr, and a few other design processes to boring to post about. The result is a very clean, minimalist design. We are trending towards all things Swiss these days, having grown very bored with drop shadows, rounded corners, gratuitous CSS, grunge textures, and Photoshop filters.

On that note, we even find a strange appreciation for the ugliness (if you can call it that) of www.drudgereport.com, which has never really changed it's "design" since getting on the web 10 years ago. It's an eminently readable and usable site, according to many experts, but it's backed up by the fact that, love him or leave him, drudgereport.com has over 500 million hits a month. 

I think of drudgreport.com like a jeep with no doors, top, or maybe even muffler. Just raw news-moving power. The main content of the page is only 11k for HTML, and one graphic header of a few K. Other images are slurped in but they don't affect the HTML load time. We have two SEO and design experiments live, which will be filling up with content over the next few days. Bon Report, at www.bonreport.com, and E-Ink Report, at www.einkreport.com. Both are "drudge clones" in a very strong sense. We'll see how the experiment goes!

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

New BonFX website in the works

It's just a matter of days...Phase 1 of our new website will be up. What's interesting is our "all-in-one" homepage. Everything you really need will be right there on the front page! The only secondary page will be the new "Bon Blog" which is Phase 2. The new site will incorporate a list of services, portfolio, brief "about us". There really isn't much to say, so why make extra page clicks? We'll toss in a tad of JQuery for good measure to handle some eye-candy.

In the meantime, take a gander at the Bon Report, a new site for Catholic headlines.