Archive for the ‘Web Design Tips’ Category

Search Engine Optimization Case Study: Bananacafe.com.my

Thursday, July 16th, 2009

Banana Cafe Catering is a catering service with more than 25 years of experience in their field and so have become a well known name among their regular customers.

From these customers they gain through word of mouth marketing and so people knew of them. However, they never had a website where people could find out more information about them.

Inside The Box recently created a website for their catering services at http://bananacafe.com.my and implemented our proven SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategies that we’ve regularly been using on our own sites.

Within just a short while, the site was being indexed by Google. Which in it’s own right may or may not be useful. For example, if Google has only indexed your site for the ‘About Us’ page and ‘Contact Us’ page, but not for all your pages, it may not help that much.

Within the first 2 months you can see the types of keywords that the Banana Cafe site was taking in from Google:

banana cafe case study2

With such targeted visitors, we know that the website is generating more leads for them than they had before.

And the SEO strategies used were extremely simple, by basing the Web Design on a Wordpress platform, using the All In One SEO plugin so that the page titles are rewritten from the default title.

Also, you have to keep in mind what people are looking for which your business can provide.

In this case, we knew through talking to the owners that they could offer table decorations and canopy designs. We made sure to mention this in both the subheading and the body content on their ‘services’ page – http://bananacafe.com.my/services/

As you can see, this was also picked up by Google:

banana cafe case study3

Although not many at first, there are other keywords that you could target, such as ‘floral arrangements’ (in the case of Banana Cafe) and even ‘Halal Catering’.

If you’d like to know more about our SEO capabilities and how to implement in your site, contact us online.

Restaurant Web Design

Friday, June 26th, 2009

The web design process for a restaurant is typically quite different and potentially alot simpler than that of a regular business website.

The reason being that a restaurant already has it’s own styling, photos (from their menu) and a brand direction that has already been established.

Although restaurants may opt for a full-flash based website, our suggestion would be to keep the site useable on all web browsers at all locations.

A lot of web traffic comes from employees at their offices and if they’re looking for a restaurant they typically go to a restaurant directory from where they will be directed to the restaurant’s website.

Remember: Javascript and Flash (used to run Facebook and similar sites) may not work in the office. So if your entire web page is flash based, albeit nicer looking, may not even load on their web browser.

Which would be pointless.

Restaurant owners, contact us for a fast and affordable solution for your restaurant’s web site.

What’s The Best Resolution For a Web Site?

Saturday, June 6th, 2009

The days of designing for 800 x 600, 15 inch monitors are long gone. The future is looking more and more like 1024 x 768 on 17 inch LCD monitors, AT LEAST.

But what can get designers to make mistakes is although they’re designing a website for a resolution of 1024 x 768, the computer screen that they are using is probably 1240 x 1028, on a 21 inch monitor or a wide screen laptop.

This can lead to mistakes when it comes to sizing the viewable webpage when they upload their design.

Designers can easily make the webpage too big to fit on a 1024 x 768 monitor, as this represents the total resolution (including web browser, taskbar etc.) and not the maximum viewable resolution.

If you’re using Dreamweaver however, you’re in luck… It has an option to view the maximum viewable area for different monitor sizes.

max view resolution drmwvr

Make sure you are in ‘Design View’, unmaximized and click the drop down list as show above.

max view resolution drmwvr2

From the list, select the size of the resolution you are targeting. For convenience, I’ve listed down the common ones below:

  1. 536 x 196 (640 x 480 resolution)
  2. 760 x 420 (800 x 600 resolution)
  3. 955 x 600 (1024 x 768 resolution)