Softduit Media

Creating Interiors is the website of Francesca Tosolini. Francesca has done some amazing work in interior design and from a web developers perspective, she has some great pictures to showcase her work! We helped to migrate Francesca from a website that was not performing well for search engine purposes to a WordPress CMS site powered with a very popular StudioPress theme. This new theme and a few well positioned plugins helped bring this site to life. It is now very easy to navigate but more importantly much easier to manage. Images from Francesca's interior design portfolio are well leveraged through out the site emphasized by the sites gallery and re-enforced by the different services that Francesca provides.

A former client referral put us in contact with a great graphic designer in Iowa. Their site, Graphic Design 26, had lots of potential, especially for a designer with a rich portfolio to showcase. We helped to establish a WordPress content management system (CMS) worked through theme choices and helped to get the site ranked in the SERPs for strong keywords for this geographic region. Since then, the site has continued to grow, Graphic Design 26 has made a number of great changes to their logo and theme. It's very important to understand that once a website is powered by WordPress, changing the look and feel of a site by replacing the theme, some times referred to as a template or skin in other systems, is a relatively easy affair and for many businesses does not require the additional services of a web designer or any knowledge of html. There are thousands of free themes, which we do not necessarily recommend for businesses, but also many great 'premium' themes that cost less than $100! For companies that live or die by their 'look' and image, having the ability to change the look of their website easily is very important and we are happy to help companies get started and take over their own website's destiny (without a webdesigner or consultant constantly on contract with no end to the expenses in sight).

I have seen a lot of blogs launch over the years, but I have rarely seen one launch with so much immediate success as Las Vegas Legal Life, which was an almost instant hit. It's a new blog that helps bring the Las Vegas Legal community together to talk turkey about what is happening in their area. It serves up profiles of local law firms, judges, legal news, cases, and industry in Las Vegas from the perspective of the attorneys that help keep things running. At times it can be a wild site, but ultimately this blogging powerhouse is powered a WordPress configuration that we put together. (can't help being proud of the results on this site) We can't take much credit here however as the blogger behind the site has the energy of three law firms, and has an amazing knack for writing articles that start conversations. Blogs can be great sources of information for one time visitors, but the really good ones get people talking with each other and the community perspective and feedback make for an even better source of information and education. This is definitely a site to watch!

Occasionally, we get a call, typically a referral like this one. It usually starts off with a plea for help to fix something. All too often it happens after a different 'web developer' has gotten in way over their head and they give up and walk away.
Dr. Natalie needed this kind of help. She had a great site, but something went wrong with it along the way and we needed to get things straightened out so that she could get back to work helping people herself. We fixed up the theme and a number of other items. There were a couple plugins that needed to be replaced, and overall we needed to insure that visitors to the site could find the most important information they were looking for quickly. The end result turned out fantastic!

The Doubletree by Hilton in San Jose, California had more going for it in addition to a beautiful looking hotel in a great location. They also had an award winning blog, an early adopter in blogging and video blogging. they did such a great job with their initial wordpress and website setup that they didn't really need an upgrade for years. But eventually the time did come. In March 2011, it was time for a new look and an upgrade. Plus, as this corporate blog is an important representative on the web, it was time to boost security too. We upgraded the site with a clean and fresh installation after salvaging the content, links, and images. We helped establish an area to showcase their video blogging efforts, automatically tweet out their new blog articles and much more!

This year has been difficult for a lot of websites learning to operate in a Panda world. Google has changed the rules when it comes to search engine performance and many of the things that worked and were even acceptable in years past went right out the window. This site had an awesome design using a Headway theme (setup by a different company) but a couple things had gone wrong in the theme. Headway is super flexible for designers, but not simple at all for business owners that want to make changes that might impact layout or design. We quickly fixed some of the theme issues, then started looking deeper at the things that were dragging the site down in Google search engine ranking placments (the serps!). Among other things, there were old copies of the site present in old directories. Ergo, every iteration of the site still existed and this was creating a big nasty duplicate content issue! (can we say penalty) :( We got that cleared out, along with a sketchy plugin that might have caused some harm as well. Six weeks later the site was recovering ground in the SERPs. But the owners were doing even more to take their destiny in their own hands. They came out to visit me on my dock office on Lake Wylie for an in depth training session. Among other things we also set them up with a Scribe SEO account so that they could start writing blog articles and honing their writing to be more effective. That too is now moving them into better and better positions in the SERPs. They have a good way to go, but they are doing things within the rules, white hat on and shining and getting results too!