Joe Steffen Attorney
Challenges:
Joe was in need of a new site to advertise his legal skills online. His old site was dated and filled with information from past elections, so it was a real priority to add some relevant and recent content to the site to send out the accurate message.

Solutions:

We […]

Most everyone has seen some pretty flashy websites in their day. They fly around the page, usually have all sorts of nifty animations when switching between pages, and generally look pretty impressive. Some of our favorites include 2Advanced and Web Agent 007. While sites like that are incredibly impressive, their main drawback (in our eyes) was that they were effectively invisible to search engines, an enormous drawback that really limited their appeal to companies who understood that while eye candy is great, the main thing that a website needs to do is rank highly.

Search Engines like Google and Yahoo are effectively blind. The only thing they can see is text like in this blog post. Now web technology has advanced to provide us a solution that has long been overdue. “Searchable” Flash Web Sites, powered by a full content management system like this blog. It’s called fCMS and really will open a new chapter in web site design. With the confluence of incredible animation and the ability to search everything in the site means that we’re going to see some pretty impressive sites in the coming years using tools such as these.

This is simply the beginning. The bright lads at Google have long known that while a lot of the information people are looking for online is text-heavy, the majority (in terms of file size) is in images, video, PDF’s, Flash, and downloadable files. Google and the other search engines are rapidly making progress in these areas. The one people are most familiar with is with PDF’s. If you do a search on Google for IRS Form 1099 the first result isn’t the proper IRS website, but the PDF form. As the years go on, we can expect more and more of the content that was previously available only by manually search on multiple sites. This will allow future websites to be increasingly content-rich and be rewarded appropriately with good rankings by Google.

The future is indeed bright for flashy, fun web sites.

The more we work in this industry the more we realize that some very common problems are shared by a lot of companies.

A lot of people have been burned.

To quote a favorite movie “Every time you screw up, it makes us look like rockstars baby” (bad boys 2…hey I like it).

And its true…

Every bad site that gets produced makes our good sites look even better.

Some say that bad web companies hurt the industry, contributing to higher prices and lower standards. While that may be true, we look at it as job security. There are so many companies who have a website but the company, or the dude in his basement that built it for them didn’t put it together correctly at all and it isn’t making them any money.

Isn’t that what business is about? Well not entirely, but thats a good bit of it. We have expenses, you have expenses and we all need to pay them with a little leftover for some fun on the weekends. So its with regret and, paradoxically with joy, that I am writing this in the hopes that you are recovered enough from your full body web burn and are ready to fix your site.

I am here to tell you that it isn’t hard (its not easy but you get what I mean), we can most likely do it within your budget (yes you should have a budget for a website), and its not going to take 6 months. We try to have our sites done in 30 to 60 days depending on how long it takes to communicate back and forth.

So please, feel free to at least talk with us, let us know what you think! If you have been burned then tell us about it. Leave a comment below. Maybe we can help and maybe we can’t but its still worth a try. Who knows, maybe we’ll get some interesting stories out of this and we can all have a good laugh.

For now, we’ll just keep doing what we do and hopefully people will catch on to the fact that quality products are still offered in the industry of web design and development.

**web burn cream not available in stores**

We are happy to report that we have just launched www.pciginc.com It was great to work with Rob to help him develop a new site which will work as an investment and not an expense. …read more

The traditional view of most companies is that a website is a “loss-leader”, necessary for being considered a serious business, but not anything that could significantly boost sales or generate a significant ROI. This great article at SEOmoz shows that getting in the mindset of seeing your website as a investment and profit center as opposed to a money-pit is a good idea for your companies continued financial health.

Some interesting stats from the article:

* 43% of retail sales are to either be influenced by or made on the Internet by 2012

* 83% of business use the Internet to research and find potential vendors

* 75% of users admit to making judgments about the a company’s credibility based on their website’s design

The 75% of users admitting to making judgments on a companies credibility based on the website design is an incredible number. Think about your own website: if you don’t like the design of it currently, chances are your customers don’t either and it’s costing you a significant amount of business.

All right fellow designers, developers, and anyone who likes to watch 2 skinny, geeky kids duke it out over the design and code of their websites; get ready for the XHTML Challenge!

Click to view the site

The Idea is to pit two sites against each-other in an all out coded duel to see who reigns supreme over the fiber optic lines of the world. The sites are compared, judged on their code, then the public votes to choose the best of the two. Its an all out brawl ya’ll. I love the idea of having websites compete, the winner picked because of quality. Design AND code is taken into consideration. Its like going to buy a home and always taking a bunch of really good builders with you so you can see exactly how well the home was built. I think in today’s world anything which helps us to reward good, efficient and well thought work needs as much support as we can give. So check it out and maybe vote on a few sites you really like. Do your good deed for the day and reward someone’s hard work.

Check out the prestigious Savannah River Landing Project! We developed a custom interface to be used on a 42 inch touch screen plasma screen television.

We are pleased to launch our new website! We have been working hard on it, and hopefully it will be a great way for people to learn about us and our services. Read the rest of this entry »

Gauge Interactive is one of Savannah, GA’s most cutting edge Web Design & Development firms. We offer enterprise level web design, web hosting, corporate branding, search engine optimization, and Interactive kiosk design.

We built them a brand new site from the ground up. It allows them to log in so they can edit, create, or delete listings with ease whenever they have a need. Our goal was to make it easy for the user looking at the listing to see and learn as much about the home without having to visit the home itself.