I’ve been working on a series of illustrations for the Biodiversity department at Fingal County Council. The 5 pieces form a series of illustrations to highlight the unique habitats found in Fingal County and will be featured on the new web site which we have also designed.
Custom illustrations are a great way to bring something unique to your web site and can really enhance content heavy websites.
I’ll upload the other illustrations later in the week and possibly a screen grab of the new website which is being designed by EdenWeb. The other illustrations in the series are for
- Coastal
- Wetlands & river corridors
- Gardens
- Woodlands, trees & hedgerows
- and Grasslands habitats.
Contact me directly for more information. All work is copyright EdenWeb>Peter Knight.
Below are examples of a series of web site banners designed for Meteor.ie. I maximised the amount of information that Meteor could display in this small space by creating a mini slide show with up to 3 or 4 screens. Thereby allowing them to promote several products. The ‘1′ and ‘2′ square in the top left corner would indicate to the user which promo they were on and they could toggle between the different slides.
I’ve seen this technique appear now across several web sites from DELL to RTE to CNET.
Some recent icons I developed for the My Meteor area of Meteor.ie
Here’s an animated eCard by EdenWeb that is currently being used by Dublin Financial Recruitment Firm, CFW.
Click the envelope below to lauch the Flash version of the eCard.
The original artwork was created in Adobe FireWorks and then animated in Flash to create the final piece. Most of the work was put into the intro animation with Mr.Claus gliding across the skies over to the big smoke.
Continue reading ‘Christmas eCard for Financial Recruitment Firm’
The EdenWeb homepage has been updated with a new top banner and an updated value proposition. I’ve also added a new Company and Design Services page which I’ll be updating over time (some services are not yet listed). Interestingly enough, the ‘holding page’ we had for several months (even a year) hasn’t really had a huge effect on new work coming in. My biggest regret to scrapping the old site is the obvious effect that removing all that content has had on certain Search Engine rankings.
In hindsight, if I was to do this again, I’d probably take the following approach instead of just replacing all content with a holding page…
- Keep outdated content online
The long term vaue of your search engine visbility may be more important than the relevance of your content!If your site has good Search Engine visibility, is ’spidered’ successfully by Google and Co. and is bringing in decent volumes of tracffic then keep it live until you’re ready to do an intelligent modular update or a complete redesign. Furthermore, if you’ve got a good Page Rank then you’ll want a miminum disruption to the value of a good PR.Obviously, if that content in question is pricing or product information then you have to make your own call. In my case, the content ‘missing’ was more a lack of a current gallery, outdated date design services info and a new logo design and strapline that were all in the works.
- Add newer design work in the form of an updated gallery/portfolio
If you don’t have time to update descriptions of your design services, then at least update the actual design examples. In our case, our design services are obviously visual. People come to the site looking for visuals. Even if the design services page doesn’t have any information on Presentation , Icon and Diagram design, they’ll get the idea once they see the updated gallery.
- Start blogging
Instead of culling the News, add a blog to your site and keep people informed of company developments. It’s the easiest way to add relevant industry and company news to your site and a few montly updates can keep the site fresh while the main content is static.There’s a good PDF on the subject at Tom Raferty’s post on Business Benefits of Blogging
- Ask permission!
Add a newletter signup and start building your contact list. If you’re concerened that your site is out of date, can see passing traffic through your stats and want to at least catch some details, you will find that interested parties are only too happy to add themselves to your contact database.
This way, you can keep people informed of the new launch even inform them of your updates along the way.
- Rewire the site
Turn the navigation into PHP includes (is your hosting plan supports this). Keep the same navigation and the same links but do some rewiring here in anticiaption of all links and navigation items changing with the new design. PHP includes will allow you to rapidly update the site with newer navigation later on as multiple pages can be updated instantly. Introduce CSS into the pages (yes, my site was really that old!) so the overall changes to the look and feel are again easier (and quicker) to roll out.
- Start updating the content gradually and pushing it out live
Obvious enough. Even one page at a time can make a big difference. In our own case, I introduced some simple content changes that made a massive difference to the overall feedback we were getting and a jump in enquiries from the contact page.
- Rework the overall template and introduce a new homepage
Thats a whole different can of worms. Talk to a design expert :O)
So thats basically what I would do now instead of replacing everything with a holding page.
Apart from suffering a slip in visibility on search engines for key services, we didn’t do too badly. Each company is a different case and we had the benefit of most of our work being word of mouth/referrals. You may want to try the above approach or even try a blended approach (holding page and link to old site).
Whichever method you choose, I can recommend the blog, newsletter signup and newsletter/blog updates as the best way to keep your site current until you launch your new site.
While we’re in the process of redesigning our site and bringing it up to date with our new Design and Marketing services, we’ve added some recent design work to our temp holding page.
Visit www.edenweb.ie and click on the Portfolio link on the top right of the page. Believe it or not, in the last 5/6 years we’ve never had our own design work on our site.
Anyway, please take a look and I’d love to hear your feedback.
P
It’s been a busy at EdenWeb.
This week we…
- Designed an email newsletter for a UK hi-tech company to be distibuted via the Vertical Response plugin for SalesForce.
- Consulted with a friend/marketing manager of a Mobile Communications company on their Google AdWord campaign and gave tips on how to increase potential traffic from approx 3,505 monthly searches to 1,734,159 potential customers per month!
- Put the finishing touches to a flash-based presentation for an Irish hi-tech company.
- Completed designs for the web site of an Irish County Enterprise Board, Innovation & Technology Centre.
- Started work on the design of a new web site for an Irish Landscape Architectural practice.
- Launched Phase2 of a new website for a Dublin metal fabrication company.
- Analysed the results of an SEO project for a UAE client. They’re now on pages 1-3 for several highly competitive and vital key phrases and site traffic has increased by over 30%.
- Launched a new homepage for above UAE client.
- Updated the site of a Recruitment firm to integrate with an Irish Jobs portal.
- Got the go ahead to develop a new homepage based upon 3 designs submitted to a UK hi-tech client.
- Created and submitted a XML sitemap to Google SItemaps for a client who is changing their site layout and doesn’t want to loose their high rankings for their 1st page positions.
Doesn’t anyone take holidays in July anymore :O)
Designing an email newsletter for a client at the moment. The campaign is essentially an invite to come meet the client at a US conference and exhibition in Las Vegas. Readers click on the email and are brought to a registration page which collects their data into their CRM app.
I really wanted to brighten up the campaign and introduce a lot of colour as the messaging is quite technical. Originally we planned on having a Flash animated sequence which would fade through several network message clouds but since most email clients won’t support Flash we knew the majority of recipients would have recieved text-only news.
The concept of Network Clouds were combined with each message and the reader will scroll down through several of these clouds until they eventually reach an illustration of an exhibition booth.
Will post full version when it’s completed.
It just went live just today. A relatively small site with a simple design for a company with a tight budget.
When we were initially approached by Skelly Opening Solutions it was difficult to visualise a colourful, clean site for a company that supplies industrial doors. We worked with the Marketing dept. to identify the most attractive, vibrant and colorful photographs to lift the site and help it appeal to Architects through the clean design and user-friendly navigation.
Introducing Skelly Opening Solutions
http://www.skellyopeningsolutions.ie/
Any thoughts?
Screengrab of recent designs for Tourism Ireland site.
Continue reading ‘Tourism Ireland design’
