Switch-a-Roos Consignment

The ladies that own Switch-A-Roos Consignment, the largest, semi-annual children clothing and toys consignment event in the upstate, desperately needed a total redesign and navigation system for their website.  We added quick link buttons on the site so consignors could quickly check the status of the money they are racking up at the consignment sales, all the sponsors and vendors are displayed properly, maps to the convention centers in Greenville and Spartanburg, and quick views of their new blog we set up, as well as their Facebook business page.

Mobile Web App for Switch-a-Roos

As if this was not enough, we then developed a web app by creating a QR code that when scanned from the website or some printed material with your smartphone, the link  to the mobile web app can be opened directly and then the viewer is prompted to open the mobile site or share it  for quick and  easy access to check those sale numbers!  Try it now!

Visit http://www.switcharoosconsignment.com for more information.

FountainInnHistoryCenter.org

The newly-formed Fountain Inn History Center website accommodates a growing interest in the area’s rich historical heritage by featuring the most  up-to-date information from their Facebook feed, ongoing projects, camps and events.  The Center wanted to also feature some of the historical photographs on the site which we used for backgrounds for the pages.  There is so much activity in Fountain Inn and a lot of ways to volunteer, donate and/or participate!  Visit http://www.fountaininnhistorycenter.org and sign up for their e-mail list!

PhotoWeavers: Photo Blankets, Photo Wall Hangings, Photo Pillows, Photo Totes, Photo Purses

PhotoWeavers:
PureCountry needed an online retail presence for its remarkable woven photo products.  This website was a redesign of the quick website that was created last year.  In conjunction with this website, a Facebook business page links to the site with incredible discounts and coupons direct to the consumer market.

Read the testimonials people have posted, and continue to post, about the wonderful uses for this product and how these photo products have so positively affected the recipients.

Mobley Law Firm
The Mobley’s needed a website but they wanted something that reflected their “fun” personalities.  They contracted with Getz Creative to take some great photos of themselves, aka, “Get Smart” style, and Eric Benjamin painted a whimsical depiction of their office in the Pettigru Historic District.  While these enhanced the look of their website, we were able to create a great layout to make these family court attorneys shine.   If you are in need of an attorney for any family court issues, the Mobley Law Firm is ready to help you navigate those muddy waters.

The Greenville County College Fair is held every year in Greenville. This is the first year the college fair has had its own website and Giraffe Web is excited to be involved in the new launch! The nonprofit organization wanted an easier way for colleges to register and view information about Greenville and the groups of students that will be attending the college fair. The site is set up so that the client can update the pages as colleges register, and also can post any other updated information. Brian Erkens of Reel Video and Stills provided the photography for the banner. Here’s what they had to say after the site was launched:
“…you did a wonderful exceptionally professional job on this website and our committee most especially appreciated the artwork on the website. ”

You can visit the college fair website at: http://www.greenvillecountycollegefair.com

” Hmm…  Looks like some deprecated code to me, “ I said quietly to my friends from Morrill Technology Group during a recent group meeting to determine pricing for reworking a prospective client’s site for organic search engine optimization.

You would have thought I’d have said something scandalous, obscene, or just plain funny with the snorts and chuckles I heard from Victor Morrill so I asked him what was so funny.

He thought I had said “defecated code” rather than “deprecated code”. Naturally I laughed…and laughed even more…  Well, with all of us in the meeting being parents from the Diaper Genie generation, the conversation digressed to the “diaper sausages” from the Diaper Genies.

Oops… Let me get back on track…  Hold that thought about defecated code and the Diaper Genie for later…

Deprecated code really could be viewed as “defecated” code, because with the onset of style sheets, there shouldn’t be any font or bgcolor tags in your site’s code. According to the widely-accepted html standards established by the world wide consortium (http://www.w3.org), deprecated code, such as font or bgcolor tags, should no longer be used in website page coding.

Giraffe Web only designs websites that conform to the w3c standards, because we want our sites–YOUR 24/7 marketing vehicle and business card to the WORLD–to have every chance of being viewing correctly across multiple browsers.  What this means is that we want your target audience to view your site in the way that it is intended, regardless of the browser used.  Additionally, we also review and run every line of code in your site through the validator tools available at the w3c’s site (http://validator.w3.org/) before uploading new code to your site’s server.  This is like another level of insurance for making your site as effective as possible.

Why do we check and recheck your site’s code for errors? In plain and simple terms, errors in the code of your website pages can cost you business.

Errors in your site’s code can cause the search engines to stop crawling your site, or not crawl it correctly.  If the search engines cannot or will not crawl your site, your site will not show up well in the search engine queries by your prospective clients or customers.

You should know that many web designers do NOT bother to review and validate your site’s code against the w3c codes. Many web designers simply don’t care enough to write code that allows sites to be viewed correctly across multiple browsers.

Here’s a case in point… I was in a recent advisory meeting at a local technical school, and we we were discussing the needs of Upstate businesses regarding website development. We wanted to make sure that the school could make certain they were focusing on teaching the correct classes to accommodate the community needs. One of the school advisors had the audacity to say, “We can get a web designer anywhere – a dime a dozen -  but we need JAVA and ASP.NET programmers. We have standards we have to meet.” This is a common misconception by most everyone because web designers have standards they have to meet, but most of them don’t bother.

In a perfect world in which all web designers write all of their html code to standards, all sites would be crawled regularly and correctly by all of the search engines, resulting in websites having good ranking with Google, Yahoo, et. al.

If current and prospective customers can always find your site in the search engines, you have a better chance of strengthening the profitability of existing customer relationships and building new relationships.

Giraffe Web is ready to help you develop a site for you that complies with standards.

We want to help you grow your business… Not throw away precious working capital on sites that don’t work.

If you are curious about whether your website is coded correctly, run your site’s pages through the validator at w3c: http://validator.w3.org/.

If you are a Giraffe Web client, rest assured that all of your pages will validate.  But hey, feel free to try out the validator anyway.

If you’re not a Giraffe Web client, you better get that Diaper Genie out of storage… just in case…

Cheers,

Judy

http://www.giraffeweb.net

Yes, I still have IE6 on this laptop because my server logs show it still very highly ranked as the browsers that are visiting my client’s websites, but I have IE7 on all the other systems we have, as well as the latest version of Firefox.

I also have an entirely different reason for wanting the browser to be upgraded. As web developers, we are constantly having to deal with client’s websites displaying properly in the various versions of browsers out there. Not only do we check the sites in IE7, but IE6, Firefox 3 and Safari. If we really want to torture ourselves, we also look at the site in Opera.

In a previous post I touted the great resource at http://www.tools4noobs.com/picasa/ that will convert the RSS feed for an album so that it displays better when embedded in your html pages.  However, I have a flyout menu on the site and it was flying out behind the Flash slideshow.  I was having to manually add the transparent parameter to the embed code which the client will not be able to do easily when they start to update the site.  So I e-mailed Tools 4 Noobs yesterday, and this morning I have a reply where this parameter was added to the generated code.

Thanks Tools 4 Noobs for being so responsive!