After many months of development, we’re proud to release our first consumer iPhone app, Spro! Spro combines two things- our love of coffee, and our love of design. Spro gives iPhone users step-by-step instructions for 14 of the most essential Espresso drinks, laid out beautifully with easy to follow directions. Whether one needs to quickly check the right proportion of ingredients or go review each step to crafting your drink, Spro quickly displays the instructions needed.

Spro also includes the history and pronunciation for each drink: reading material while sipping that delicious macchiato. Information on different brewing methods (such as the Chemex Pour Over and Siphon) is also illustrated in its full glory.

Spro is now available in the iOS App Store to download, and is compatible with the current generation iPod Touch, iPhone 3GS, and iPhone 4 (AT&T / Verizon).

OUR BACKGROUND WITH THE PWNA

The Power Washers of North America is a trade group representing the pressure washing and mobile cleaning industry. We began work with the PWNA in early 2010, starting with a cosmetic redesign. Our first goal was to make the site easier to navigate and more visually engaging to visitors. The scope of our work with the PWNA expanded to overhauling the PWNA storefront to a new on-site eCommerce solution based on Zen Cart, and a WordPress/Tidalpress based blog for logging board minutes.

The PWNA’s web site has been an excellent example as to how a well designed site sees an increase in search traffic naturally. Traffic to the PWNA’s web site has not only increased year-over-year since the redesign, but traffic to their contractor/supplier directory has increased by over 300% since redesigning the site.

CONTENT IS KING

SEO (search engine optimization) as it has been called in the past is an outdated term. Starting in the mid-90s, there have been a slew of snake-oil salesman promising a “#1 spot on Google in 60 days”. They used many tricks and dishonest methods to “pump SEO” into a site. These tactics are now not only ineffective, but also damaging to a site’s rankings. Where keyword stuffing was once popular, cramming a ton of keywords into your title tag is now penalized by Google. Evidence from Google themselves:

Google does not use keyword meta tag in rankings

Included in this list is link-farming, duplicate sites, and listing every service area at the bottom of the page. In fact, there are only a very few things you can do “in the code” to help your rankings. The single most important thing to help a site climb the rankings ladder is content; rich, targeted, dynamic, and engaging content. Google’s spiders (the program that “crawls” every site for information) have become increasingly sophisticated and need less clues to determine what your site is about. If a real person can understand your content, so can spiders. And that’s the whole goal in the first place: to get your potential customers relevant and interesting material to buy your service or product. If you focus on selling your product and providing for your customers, your site will rank highly.

As web designers, we are always asked if we can take a client’s website to the top of Google. The short answer is no, no one can guarantee something like that. However, we can help structure your site and its content to simultaneously optimize it for Google and your customers. We also know the little tricks left that isn’t directly based on your content like creating proper sitemaps, title tags, and using social media.

Elgin, Illinois based Rooftop Solutions is a company that manages rooftop grease containment, roof inspections and clean up, HVAC coil cleaning and filter changes, along with selling the Grease Guard™ and Clean Air Vortex™ grease containment systems.   They came to us earlier this year looking to build their brand and to build a website around their existing logo.

The Rooftop Solutions Web site (http://www.rooftopsolutions.com) is a medium-sized site static site, and a good example as to how we take a site that has to accommodate for a wide variety of products and services. It is also able to handle a wide variety of page content, be it filter sizes or product listings.

The McNeill Company is a nautical decor and gift shop in Oak Island, NC. They came to us asking for a product gallery that was reliable, easy to maintain, and could be quickly updated with their ever-changing product assortment.  Along with this, they wanted a site that reflected the relaxed spirit of the Carolina coast to draw in visitors.

We started with Plogger, an open source photo gallery and reworked its features to meet the needs of The McNeill company. We simplified the interface so that it could be easily maintained by anyone regardless of technological familiarity.  Since they maintain their website themselves, it’s important that this feature works reliably and does not require heavy maintenance. The end result was a straightforward, easy to use interface for managing products and product categories.

One of the advantages to having a web site done by Studio Tidal is we’re able to design a web site around your existing logo, as we did with Mobile Wash Pros. We were also able to  give the site a unique layout to not only distinguish it from the crowd, but to take advantage of the client’s desired organization for the site. Visitors are able to quickly view prices, examples of work relevant to their business, and request a quote.

One particularly neat feature on this site is the use of the “lightbox” for the photo gallery- this allows you to showcase your work to clients quickly without wasting their time waiting for pages to load.

Bluewater Nurse Consulting came to Studio Tidal looking to replace a template-based web site that wasn’t meeting the needs of the business. The template-based site was too rigid for its intended purpose, making things such as posting documents for visitors difficult. Additionally, such features as rollover definitions were desired with the redesign to help inform new visitors.

We started from scratch with a clean two-column layout site.  The range of colors were carefully chosen to reflect both the business and the field it operated in, and so  that visitors remembered the site and the business name.  Even a clean, simple site can make a strong impact with your visitors- usually for less than the cost of a template site.