"My website is ugly, ugly, ugly!" That's what Katie Anderson said when she asked us for help. She had hired SEO experts to optimize her website, and that gave her top ranking in search engines. Unfortunately for her, the SEO experts were not designers. They covered her site in keywords and eliminated the unsearchable Flash animation on her home page. The result: ugly.
Katie is an interior designer. Her site needed to represent her design aesthetic, especially now that she appeared in the top Google search results. She also wanted to preserve her signature color scheme and design elements.
WHAT WE DID
KatieWorld.com was running on an old version of WordPress with old extensions that needed upgrading before we could do anything. Because this was her production environment, we made a duplicate of the site where we could stage all the changes. As expected, upgrading WordPress and all the extensions broke many things, but we fixed them all, then got to work beautifying.
We returned the grace the site had lost by adding a slideshow of some of her best work on her landing page. We also replaced the default typeface to one with a designer feel, lending it more elegance.
We integrated all the work the SEO experts had done, and those keywords now contribute to the design in addition to helping her maintain her rank with search engines.