...not
how a site looks but rather
how the site works.
When businesses and people approach me about "doing a website" the first question I ask the person is, "What do you want you
website to do?"
Many time the answer to that question goes something like this, "I want my website to have images that move and when people
roller over a link it does thus and such." What I usually do not hear is, "I want to sell stuff from my website," or "I want
to use my website to educate my potential clients about the service I offer them whan they find us online."
Each of those two functionalities has different types of development associated with them. A retail site will need to have ecommerce
ability with high image capabilities, while a site that educates will need to be content rich and build to handle high content
with easy navigation and readability.
Listed below is a sampling of sites I have worked on or created with different functionality. As you look over these sites, begin
to ask yourself, "What do I want my site to do?"
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| -- Keyword/Content Rich Sites-- |
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Lj Performance Center
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A Simple Focus
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LJ Performance Center is a facility located in Milton-Freewater, OR and focused on
extending the performance life of horse beyond their accepted six or so years.
LJ Performance Center is also the home of LJ Quarter Horse breeding for some of the best
performance horses with a fine eye for extending the Cutting horse bloodline.
As a website, this site is keyword rich site with each page being named after a specific keyword in the
horse industry.
Lj Performance Center is also a image heavy site. When all know the saying, "A picture is worth a thousand words," and
while images and graphics help to make a website "pop" one must be very careful about size of the image. All images on
this site have a resolution of 72dpi.
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A Simple Focus is a static site and CMS (Content Management System) mix. While the frontend
of the site is static and not changeable by the client, the store page is completely updated by the client.
This site is a nice blend of content for SEO (Search Engine Optimizing) and retail.
Site design by client
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| -- CMS-- |
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Mad Mary and Company
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Site not live yet
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Mad Mary and Company is a large retail shop in Joseph Oregon. When we sat down to talk
about features for this client she said she was looking for a different look and for the ability to one
day run all her inventory online.
Running a retail store of this size takes foresight in development as one must always keep in mind the end result.
While there is not a retail section yet on this site, when Mad Mary is ready it will take little work to get her
up and going.
Since we need to keep scalability in mind when creating this site, the admin section for Mad Mary is custom programed
in CFM (Cold Fusion)
Lj Performance Center is also a image heavy site. When all know the saying, "A picture is worth a thousand words," and
while images and graphics help to make a website "pop" one must be very careful about size of the image. All images on
this site have a resolution of 72dpi.
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This website is a keyword and content rich site. Keywords and content are
the number one elements Google looks for when indexing a site.
There is also a very minimal amount of CSS, nested tables, and fancy things in the site. The simpler the site
the better Google likes it.
This site also does not use a lot of images. Since each image is used on every page, the load time is quicker
because the images have aready been cached so they do not need to be re-loaded for each page from scratch.
We also made this site CMS driven, meaning the client can change his content at will without having to come
back to me to make changes or finding someone who knows how to program a site.
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