Updated Portfolio!

Posted on August 28, 2012 by admin

We just updated our portfolio with a new sliding filter feature! This will allow you to browse our work and look at examples that are similar to what you are looking for in your own website. Additionally, the filtering allows us to display more of our work on the site, so pop on over to the portfolio page and have a look at some of our latest designs.

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Youtube? Yes!

Posted on May 22, 2012 by admin

A lot of our clients want to include video on their web sites. Some companies like to feature their promotional videos, bands like to show samples of live performances, we even have a few videographer clients who have entire video portfolio’s on their sites.

Needless to say, the most often question asked is: “How do I get my videos to you to put on the website?”. Of course the answer is slightly more complex than the question…

There are two ways to display video on a website:

Option 1 – Self Hosting

You can upload videos to your own hosting server and show them either with flash or link to the file for in-browser play.

The benefit of uploading it to your own server is that this keeps your file self-contained within your website hosting environment, and you can display your video on your website however you want.

In my opinion the benefit ends there. Videos can be large and take up a lot of server space, which can end up costing you in the long run both in capacity and bandwidth. A lot of clients who go this route end up having to buy a more expensive hosting plan to accommodate their videos. Additionally, displaying the video usually involves a flash player (if you want the video to be cross platform compatible) which is not mobile device friendly. Alternately, you can link to the video file as-is in its original format, which works but is not ideal as it usually requires a good portion of users to install additional software on their computers (QuickTime, Windows Media Player, etc.).

Option 2 – Video Hosting Services

You can also upload your videos to a video hosting service and embed the file into your website using their supplied code. These services include YouTube, Vimeo, and Viddler to name a few.

The down side of this option is that each video hosting platform has its own skin and often labeling on each video, so your viewers will know where the video is hosted. This is really more of a personal preference matter and shouldn’t be a worry unless you are dead-set on keeping your videos self-contained on your website.

On the other hand, the benefits of using a video hosting service are pretty great with YouTube being the optimal choice for several reasons.

First, YouTube is free. You can host your videos for no additional cost and share them not only on your web site, but also on Facebook and other social platforms. This saves you hosting space and bandwidth, and therefore money.

Second, YouTube videos will play in some fashion on most mobile devices such as Apple (iOS) devices, Android Devices, Blackberry, Windows Mobile etc. Web trends are going mobile more and more, so if your videos aren’t viewable on mobile devices you might as well leave it off of your website altogether.

Thirdly, YouTube has become a social network in and of itself. It can’t hurt you or your brand to have a YouTube channel featuring all of your videos. You’ll reach a larger audience and cover both your website and social networking bases all in one.

So the answer to the question?

Set up a YouTube account and upload all of your videos there! YouTube converts the video files for you and takes care of all of the hard stuff, so it makes it easier on your website developer, easier on you, and easier on your wallet!

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WBK Now Accepting Online Payments

Posted on April 24, 2012 by admin

We often get requests from our clients to pay their invoices online via credit card or bank transfer. Up until recently, we never accepted online payments as the monthly payments and credit card transaction fees were far too high. We would have had to raise our prices in order to cover these extra fees, and we never like to raise our prices when there are other options… and then there was WePay.

Finally, an online payment gateway that gives us the option to accept bank transfers with low fees!

With all future invoices, we will now be offering the option for our clients to pay via check OR online bank transfer through WePay at no additional charge. No extra effort required, our clients will simply receive an online payment link with their invoice.

Additionally, for those clients who wish to pay via credit card, we can now offer credit card processing through WePay as well with an additional service fee of 3% of the invoice total. Simply request a credit card payment link and we will send one over for your convenience.

PayPal, watch out! WePay is on its way up!

 

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New Search Engine Friendly Website Live

Posted on February 29, 2012 by admin

This week we have just taken a lawyer website we developed from start to finished live. The interesting thing about this website is that our client was particularly concerned with the search engine friendliness of his website, so we made several design decisions based on this fact.

For starters, we made the main navigation, the page headings, and pretty much whatever text we needed to add, “real text”. There are only a handful of fonts that can be used for website text which is why most of the time any special fonts on websites you see are created with images embedded into the page and not actual text. This can make for a lovely looking website and in some cases this is a perfectly acceptable way to build and design a website. In our client’s case though, we were more concerned with the search engine visibility of the site’s keywords which is why we gave google as much text to read as possible.

Additionally, we optimized our client’s page titles which is something we do for all of our clients. These aren’t the titles you see written directly on the website page, but rather the title of the page that your website browser sees. The line of text that is written in the tabs of your browser window is something that is customizable through the website code and is one of the things that google looks for most when scanning a website for keywords. In this case, we set the homepage title tag to “Joel G. Deutch | Cincinnati Family Law, Criminal Defense, and Personal Injury Lawyer”. This title states the location of our client and the most likely terms a person would search for when looking for his services.

Finally, we linked up certain portions of descriptive text throughout the website. The “Featured Services” box on the right side of this website has a list of services our client performs. This list of keywords is linked up to other pages on the website so that google and other search engines think, “oh, this page must be about criminal law because that’s what the link said that pointed me there”. This is another easy and simple way to make a website search engine friendly.

A lot of times our clients are not willing to sacrifice good design for search engine friendliness, which we can completely understand. However, looking at this website it is pretty clear that good design does not necessarily have to suffer in order to achieve a search engine friendly website. Our client wanted a clean and simple design, and wanted it search engine friendly. Now that we have laid the groundwork, our client can now hire a search engine marketing company to take our work a step further to really get his website out there without having to start over, or work with a website that has limited potential for search engine success.

Have a look around our client’s new website at www.joeldeutchlaw.com.

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Welcome to the New WBK Site

Posted on February 21, 2012 by admin

You always hear that its good to keep your website design and content fresh. Well this goes for website design companies too! We’ve just launched our new website design and we hope you like the new fresh look.

We have added a couple of new features that we think are important for everyone to think about for their websites.

For one, we have completely redone our portfolio using only JavaScript and CSS. Our old portfolio was nifty and had some cool effects, but it was not very mobile device friendly, so we scrapped that! Its amazing how quickly mobile devices have moved up the totem pole of important factors consider when building a new site.

We have also added a couple of nifty features that might be a good option for your company, including a fixed “quote” button on the right of every page which follows you wherever you go. This is a great way to keep an important page on your website accessible to your website viewer’s no matter where they are on your site.

Also, because our new website is full of new content and we have abandoned the concept of keeping the design and content all “above the fold”, we have added a transparent button which appears at the bottom of every page after you begin to scroll down which takes you back to the top in a nice smooth fashion. A nicely placed useful tool such as this can go a long way!

We hope you enjoy our new site and we look forward to hearing from you when its time to build a new website for you or your company!

 

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