We are pleased to share the launch our most recent client site, The Teak Hut at theteakhut.com. This South Carolina company has been in operation for a number years as a brick-&-mortar business. Several months ago, Applied Web Vitals was consulted to explore the move to e-commerce. At the same time, The Teak Hut decided to go for a full site redesign to better reflect the quality of their product–indoor and outdoor teak furniture.

Through a close dialog with the client, the site was mapped and a design, modeled after select premier online retailers, was mocked up for review and an enthusiastic approval.

TheTeakHut.com was built on the Dreamweaver template structure to give the client full site management control with Adobe Contribute. With our developed template platform in place, The Teak Hut was able to take the reins right out of gates and begin adding and removing content, creating new pages and optimizing their keywords for search engine placement.

The shopping cart application of choice was Ecommerce Templates, a robust and versatile cart that could be customized to meet The Teak Hut’s needs. Integrated throughout the site, a smooth shopping experience was achieved by seamlessly weaving the dynamic shopping cart functionality into every page on the site.

With sixty unique product categories and a very large, and growing, list of products, the ability to integrate the online shopping cart with the company’s Quickbooks POS system was an absolute must. The project required several e-commerce customizations and third part integrator, and in the end a one-of-a-kind solution was tailored for The Teak Hut.

For additional information on e-commerce websites

For additional information on Adobe Contribute, 2

Applied Web Vitals is a web design and development company. Please feel free to contact us to explore your next design, redesign or site enhancement project.

Applied Web Vitals is planning to release a line of website templates for the Adobe Contribute CS3 platform. The line of fully developed templates will be designed for plug and play use, for quick installation and launch.

Contribute CS3 is a website editing software program for the PC and Mac, developed by Adobe Systems Incorporated. Contribute is designed to edit and “contribute” to sites originally built with Adobe Dreamweaver templates. The program allows users to update content, add pages, files and media without any technical expertise or HTML knowledge.

When built on a robust Dreamweaver template structure in conjunction with other select web technologies, Contribute enabled websites are given the legs of a full content management system (CMS). Based on clean HTML/XHTML, CSS and search engine optimized code, Contribute sites are offered some great advantages over other popular CMS platforms.  Notably, traditional content management systems rely on server side technology and database counterparts that make customization and ongoing system management time intensive, technically complex and costly. Contribute sites on the other hand, once put into place, get better mileage between maintenance and have the huge advantage of simply having less parts to break—1. a premium Adobe program that comes with support and 2. straight forward server files—it doesn’t get any more simple than that.

Read how Adobe Contribute CS3 has helped Hopalong Animal Rescue save time, keep their website up-to-date and ultimately save the lives of more animals.

Applied Web Vitals’ Contribute CS3 website templates will incorporate a host of common small business website features and will come SEO and cross-browser compatible.  Years of best practices, scripts and cutting edge techniques will make this line of Contribute CS3 website templates an exciting addition to the market.

By popular demand . . . the Wednesday web technology discussion group has been moved to 7PM each week. We will continue to meet in the same place, Barnes & Noble cafe at Myrtle Beach Market Common. If you haven’t been yet, attendance is free and open to everyone with discussions on topics such as: building and maintaining websites; search engine optimization; Internet marketing and measurement; business blogging; graphic design & do-it-yourself advertising; or wherever the discussion leads…. Bring your curiosity and any unanswered web design questions.

Barnes & Nobles in Market Commons (1063 Howard Pkwy, Myrtle Beach, SC 29577)

If you didn’t know, the accessibility of flash is (or has thus far been) significantly less than that of standard HTML. If you knew that, did you know that there have been some advancement in the ability for search engines (Google) to read and index flash?

Well, don’t take this news as the definitive green light to go 100% flash just yet. There are quite a few considerations before replacing your HTML with flash and the “advancements” are just that—steps in the right direction. We’re not there yet and I suspect in the end, there will always be some limitations.

Google recently reported on the progress that they’ve made in crawling flash files - “Now that we’ve launched our Flash indexing algorithm, web designers can expect improved visibility of their published Flash content, and you can expect to see better search results…” Continue Reading »

Assuming that my web guy died is actually giving him the benefit of the doubt; I have no idea where his is. Falling off the face of the earth is always a plausible explanation. Emails aren’t bouncing and voice mail isn’t full so it’s probably more likely that he’s made a conscious decision to hang me out to dry.

Situations like this call into question the professional ethics and reliability of the virtual web professional. Being a web designer and developer myself, I know that we shouldn’t all be painted with the same brush. Perhaps it’s my business background or the value that I place on my reputation that makes me push to please, complete, improve, excel . . . or to simply do what it is that I say I’m going to do.

The inspiration for this post came from a recent personal experience involving hiring and working with another web designer. The “incident” was painful, costly and (in retrospect) avoidable, or one where the damages could have at least been mitigated. Continue Reading »

What a great honor! A Webby Award nomination!!!

Applied Web Vitals has received a Webby Award Nominee letter for its participation in the development of the Eyes on Darfur website. Citizen Group, a premier branding and design company in San Francisco, CA, brought us on board to write the site code—HTML, CSS, Java Script—and bring their elegant design to life.

Working with this world-class team of professionals, and on such a profound project, was in itself an incredibly rewarding experience. We’re thankful to have been a part of this effort and hope to see the site make a tremendous impact.

As all projects go though, challenges and deadlines were par for the course. Already on a tight time line, the site launch date was moved forward to coincide with Amnesty International’s accelerated PR efforts. And with lives on the line, what could we do? Well, we took this opportunity to pour ourselves into the work and not only worked faster (around the clock), but improved the quality of work right up until the switch was flipped.

If you haven’t yet visited Eyes on Darfur - please do. Be prepared for an eye-opening experience though, one that hopefully puts you into motion.

“Eyes on Darfur” site uses satellite imagery to expose genocide

Amnesty International’s unprecedented Eyes On Darfur project leverages the power of high-resolution satellite imagery to provide unimpeachable evidence of the atrocities being committed in Darfur – enabling action by private citizens, policy makers and international courts. Eyes On Darfur also breaks new ground in protecting human rights by allowing people around the world to literally “watch over” and protect twelve intact, but highly vulnerable, villages using commercially available satellite imagery.

The project was led by the Crisis Prevention and Response Center (CPRC) – Amnesty International USA’s rapid response center for engaging members, policy-makers, and the public in preventing and responding to human rights crises around the world. The website was designed and developed by Citizen, and can be viewed at www.eyesondarfur.org.

The project was funded by the Save Darfur Coalition (SDC) which seeks to raise public awareness about the ongoing genocide in Darfur while mobilizing a unified response to the atrocities that threaten the lives of people throughout the Darfur region. It is an alliance of more than 180 faith-based, advocacy and humanitarian organizations. The coalition’s member organizations represent 130 million people of all ages, races, religions and political affiliations united together to help the people of Darfur. For more information on the coalition, visit www.SaveDarfur.org.
-description from Citizen Group

Nothing hits today’s web surfer over the head quite like a “page one” search listing. Despite the WOW! design that you may be envisioning for your website, consider that a majority of people navigate the world wide web via search engines—and search engines read HTML, not flash.

We’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating - what good is the slickest, most graphically appealing website if no one can find it?

Of course, this litmus isn’t the measure for everyone. If you don’t need to be found, then a pure or predominantly flash website may be a perfect platform for you. An example would be a site offering information or services to an existing client base. In this scenario, the source of visitors is set and new customers aren’t needed.

Otherwise, consider limiting the amount of flash on your site. And above all, DO NOT use an all flash splash page for your site. Search engines enter your site the way most visitors would, through your root domain (www.yourdomain.com) or homepage. If your site’s homepage consists of a flash file that presents the page content, then the search engine sees: _________________.

To be more precise, the meta infomation (keyword, description) will be seen, but may not account for anything. Search engine algorithms (the formula that calculates page relevance according to a search word or term) have long since stopped placing heavy value on meta data, given the higher likelihood that actual page content has more to do with page relevance than hidden fields.

So there you have it. Short and sweet. HTML provides a better impact on the site traffic bottom line than flash.

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Applied Web Vitals is a web design and development company. Please feel free to contact us to explore your next design, redesign or site enhancement project.

So in part 1 of this series, we discussed the design phase of a website. An exploratory interview with the client has already been had and a graphical mock-up of the site has been refined and approved for development. This brings us to actually building the site.

As mentioned earlier, the push-button web creation function, provided by graphics applications like Photoshop, will not produce an optimal page structure or take into consideration forward-looking steps that will allow for a versatile and scalable website. During the design process, the designer/developer will have already mapped out the solutions for various site features and layout configurations. Given the different requirements surrounding these features, the site structure will be created to accommodate them.

Take a simple two column site layout for example. As the height of these two columns changes with varying amounts of content over time, how do the the columns behave? Does the overall site design depend on these two column expanding and contracting together or is it better suited to have them expand independently? Furthermore, do the pros of a table structure in this scenario outweigh the cons and what impact will this decision have on cross browser compatibility?

At this point, the considerations of structure have been made, the developer knows which language will be employed (according to their own expertise or perhaps simply based on the hosting server being used), and the site’s ongoing maintenance and accessibility has been factored in.

By this I mean, who is going to update the site and how? Even if the site is being built by an in-house developer who will maintain their own code, it’s simply not time and cost effective to maintain and grow a site from code view. Which bring us to building the site on a CMS (content management system). A CMS allows the site to grow gracefully, protecting sensitive code and maintaining the site design, while giving non-developers edit access to the site. There is a vast field of CMS’ out there to choose from and the one that’s right one for you will depend on your need. The demands of an online news agency, for example, will differ greatly from that of a local book club. Either way—big or small, high volume or low—a content management system is an absolute must.

Consider that we, professional web developers, use a CMS on everything internal that we build. Believe it not, I still see ads being placed by cost-conscious small business owners seeking low cost developers available to make frequent and ongoing edits to their site. That’s crazy! Done right, on the right platform and by the right developer, the upfront cost of building a site on a CMS is negligible compared to keeping a professional developer on payroll. In fact, when done right, the cost of building on a CMS can often reduce the cost of a project by allowing for quick replication of pages and page features as well as allowing the developer to set aside a majority of the content entry task for the client.

To be continued… We’ll continue our discussion of the development process in part 3 of this series. To be covered are site features, functions and integrated applications.

The web creation process begins verbally, then takes shape graphically, and won’t move into the code or programming phase until the final stage. This process isn’t well understood by those outside of web design. And why should it be? A great deal of “designers” don’t actually get it either.

Web sites aren’t conceptualized in a web development tool like Dreamweaver. The business needs of the client are discovered through an interview to identify wants, needs, the audience, the message, functionality, look and feel, and so on.

This discovery (scoping) information collected from the client is interpreted into a graphical mock-up in a graphics application like Photoshop. The mock-up is a non-functioning image of what the future site will look like—a flat image.

Once the graphical mock-up has been refined and polished, the image is then taken to code. Based on a number of considerations, including the programming languages to be used, web applications employed, search engine optimization techniques and more, the image is dissected and interpreted during the site building process.

It’s worth noting that modern graphics tools like Adobe Photoshop have a push-button website creation function, whereby anyone can use the tool to dump out the code and files required to post a web page. No doubt these features are quite amazing, but this method should not be confused with proper website development. Proper development takes into consideration usability, the target audience, ongoing site maintenance and scalability . . . not to mention the integration of different technologies that give life through functionality.