St. Petersburg Web Design Blog

Archive for the ‘Latest Work’ Category

View the new version of the Florida Photo Gallery

Florida Photo Gallery gets a long needed makeover.

by Texx Smith

The oldest of my oldest websites that still live is Florida Photo Gallery.  Photography has long been a passion of mine and this website used to be a source of pride for me.  The photos there were always nice, and the web site itself used to be  a thing of beauty and a showcase of cutting edge HTML and CSS technology.  It was one of the first websites in thew world to used CSS to create “rollover buttons” that used CSS instead of images to create the rollover effect and it also had an ingenious script that detected your monitor size and served a background image of a size based on the size of your monitor.  The latter was the forefathers of our much imitated,  Responsive Design technology in fact.

The new version of the website isn’t groundbreaking in any way, but it does use several cutting edge technologies which provides several features for us and the user:

• AJAX and CSS animated page transitions

• We’re talking subtle ones that work in any modern web browser, not the old school Internet Explorer only stuff.

• In an instantly (no loading time) appearing lightbox that automatically scaled to the screen size
• In a full blown article, for those who like to know the story behind the photo.

• Including a search feature, of course

We recently been hired to pursue a group of professionals that is notoriously hard to connect with. Dentists. The client wants to keep the marketing strategy under wraps for now but here’s a screen shot of the web site.

For this web site, Texx mostly just put presented the right things to the right people, asked the right questions and pulled everything together. Others did the images, wrote the text and even decided what pages there would be. Texx had influence every step of the way however.

Texx says the only thing he did 100% by himself was the form and the strip of logos on the front page.  Soemtimes one of us will do a complete web site from end to end all by themselves, but usually it’s a team effort here.  Even if the collaboration is limited, there is collaboration.

You should loo for more work for his client in the future.  We’ve been hired to do a wide range of internet marketing, web design and technology work for this company.

A new Internet Marketing Division for an established Atlanta Web Development Company.

[This post is by Texx Smith himself, often posts here are created by our content department]

One of the marketing web sites made for this client

Sometimes we are hired to do work for other Web Design or internet marketing firms. Often they just me, sometimes they want my whole staff. In this case, I’ve been hired on as a sub-contractor to start up the brand new Internet Marketing Division of a well established and successful Web Development company in the Atlanta GA area.

I worked with the business owner and revamped the companies web site to a “you based” conversion driving sales tool with a conservative, professional yet colorful web presence. I also created a new web site that specifically speaks to one of the new services. That’s the part anyone could have done. What I was brought in for was helping creating this new division at this established company. Specifically I helped to define or created: Continue reading “Subcontract – Atlanta Area” »

You may think WordPress is just for blogs.  It may be true that WordPress was first created with blogging in mind.  It may also be true that WordPress is most commonly used for blogs versus traditional web sites.  However, we’ve always been innovators here at Dream Designs, after all we have the Einstein of Web Design leading us.  We frequently, but not always use WordPress to create a “traditional” appearing web site.

WordPress sites don't have to behave like a blog . . .

Why would we do this?  We’ll talk about that later in the article but first we’d like to announce a new member in the Dream Designs family of clients:

Atlanta Computer Repair:
We’ve created a WordPress web site for them using our Cheap WordPress Design package.  This means the client gets a great looking web site and is able to update, add and manage the content of  the web site, including each picture on the each article or page themselves.

How is it different than a traditional WordPress Blog?
There are non traditional adjustments to this implementation of WordPress:

• Custom jQuery Slider at the top of the home page
• Custom home page
• It has no articles (yet)
  • A new page which will list all the blog posts (articles) is ready to go, but won’t be implemented until there are actually some posts.
• A custom “bottom section”
• Automated Database backups
• SEO features

We’ve just created an mobile theme for this blog.  We hope you enjoy it.  We like it because it’s “responsive”  which means it automatically adjusts for any size screen.  It even has some server side programming to resize images!  It can be used as a full screen desktop theme as well but we like the full sized theme we have.

We’ve combined our new mobile theme, which we are tentatively calling Flxi, with a a “sniffer” script which detects the device being used.  If it’s a tablet or phone then it gives them the same content but with the Flxi theme. It also includes a link in the footer to bypass this script and view the mobile version.  Once in the mobile version, the link in the footer will switch you back to the desktop version.  We did this because our main theme looks great and is highly readable in all but the smallest of devices.

Here’s a link to bypass the preview it.  Remember, it will look different depending on the size of the device.  For instance if you are on a desktop PC or a laptop it will have three columns.  If it’s a much smaller device, then it will only have one column so please try it on a couple devices…

Mobile theme

One of our web sites,  the Florida Fishing Blog,  has made it to #1 on Google for the key phrase “Florida Fishing Blog“.  Not a lot of people search for this term but it is the targeted niche key phrase for this web site and not much effort has been placed into the search engine marketing for this website either. This target was chosen as part of a grander plan campaign focus on Florida Fishing and even grander, Florida.

Obviously the Florida Fishing Blog is related to the phrase  Florida fishing and thus related to the search term Florida.  Now when ever I need another related link to a clients web site that is in some way related to Florida (almost all of them are).  It’s nice to have an ever expanding stable of web sites that are all related to a phrase and or word that are ready to be used at any moment.

Another search engine success!