As you know, we launched our new website and blog on December 15th.
Throughout our redesign and development process, we made a lot of changes to improve our branding and usability. As expected, there were internet marketing and SEO motives behind some of the changes.
The Motives
Call To Action
The Motive: Add a call to action for our visitors. Our previous home page was boring- there was no interaction and definitely no call to action. That needed to change! So what’s a girl to do?…
The Fix: Add a form, multiple forms. Now people don’t always choose to fill out a form because it takes time, gives personal information, etc. But we needed our visitors to know that we will help consult and guide your project, so if you send us the information and we’ll get started right away. Not only is there a form on our home page, but we have a form on the contact us page and a “request a free quote” button on the blog. We wanted it to be easy to contact us- which is how it should be!
Content Management System
The Motive: Have a back-end (administrative area) that is easy to manage. It was a pain ( so I was told) to upload and style articles due to the age of our site and management system. Plus, I had no control over the site. I had to rely on developers to make any changes.
The Fix: Build the website on our custom Content Management System. This is wonderful! I can easily manage all content, 301 redirects, SEO meta data per page, featured products, etc. And the best thing about working at a web design & development company? Any additional customization or access I want can be done!
Frequently Updated Content
The Motive: Have a source of frequently updated content. We had some articles published on the old site, but as I said before managing them was no simple task. It had been months (a year?) since the last article was published, and working as a web marketing specialist, that was not okay. Plus, we have so many ideas and tips to share with visitors and potential clients that we needed a better solution.
The Fix: A blog. You can tell from this post that I was so excited to blog for DKS. Regular, helpful and relevant posts? Yes, please! I don’t blog for SEO purposes, but it does help.
Fresh Portfolio
The Motive: Updated project list. Our old site only featured a few projects and clients, and most projects were out of date. We needed to freshen things up a little bit.
The Fix: Build an elaborate Our Work page. This is probably my favorite page on the website. The rollovers make me happy! 
The mini case studies (in progress) are going to be so helpful for our visitors to read and understand our work a little better. The clients and projects listed are all fresh and current, and now our portfolio can really display our capabilities and match our offerings.
List All of Our Services
The Motive: Clarify our service offerings. Because each project is custom to our client, the services listed on our old site didn’t display our services well. Visitors would look for a certain technology that they wanted, wouldn’t see it and leave. Every businesses’ worst nightmare!
The Fix: List all of our services adding additional pages, explaining all most of what we do. This required more content, well worth it! We’re planning on expanding this in the future.
Pretty, New Design
The Motive: An aesthetically pleasing design that visitors will love.
The Fix: A website redesign. People look to us to design websites, so we needed a design that wouldn’t turn visitors off. Kind of like
you’d be hesitant to take financial advice from someone who’s in a world of debt… Yeah, it was like that. It’s not that we couldn’t have a killer design, we were just too busy with other projects.
Consistent URLs
The Motive: “Pretty” URLs. Our old site was old, did you get that already? You could see the transition as far as “seo best practices” were concerned, especially on our articles. The early articles had underscores and capital letters, then came underscores and lowercase, then came dashes.
The Fix: Reconstruct our URLs to use all lowercase letters, dashes in between words, and eliminate the extensions to keep consistency. This fix required 301 redirects from the old URL to the new URL to carry over SEO value and help users navigate (all of which I can do myself in our admin! Perfect!).
Get Personal
The Motive: To display a more personal side of DKS Systems.
The Fix: Instead of having a generic “about” page- I liked the idea of an “our story” page. We added our core values and focus along with the story on how DKS Systems came to be about 11 years ago. Having the blog also allows us to get more personal, like this post.
Interested in a custom website design or redesign? Request a free quote and our experienced team will set to work!
About the Author: Courtney Petty
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