January 30th, 2012
Sharp Communication's prior website
As of mid-December sharpthink.com has had a major redesign and totally new back end. The homepage is now a totally user-friendly way to access all things Sharp Communications. From the slider you can view clients, people or an image with an insight into our company culture. There is our blog and twitter feed for news and opinions along with the agency’s contact info. Below, we feature more of our stellar work spanning the many services that Sharp Communications has to offer. While the compliments we received on the design of our prior website were many, there were certain considerations that we needed to address when building the new website. Among them were:
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Establish a Social Media presence
- Have our content reflect the fact that we are a holistic agency
- Content Management System (CMS)
If you have a great website, but no one can find you in a Google search… well, what’s the sense? The prior website, which was done in flash, had a small amount of html text, heading tags and unique titles that it was hindering some keyword searches. Right off the bat we created a descriptive title and description for the index(home) page as well as all the in-pages. We used relevant heading tags and after narrowing down our keywords to 25-30, we made sure our text and content reflected them. Best practices were applied throughout the creation of the website. What also helps us greatly in SEO is the fact that our blog now reflects the content we feel is most important to come up in a search.
Which brings me to social media. Sure we have been running our own (as well as some clients) Twitter and Facebook pages, creating custom Facebook apps and pages as well as blogging on an outside WordPress site… We wanted our new website to include this info in order to not only increase our search visibility, but to give our opinion on the latest topics that are relevant to our industry and company culture.
The work done at Sharp Communications spans the gamut from Public Relations and Events to Social Media and Creative Services to Media Planning and Buying. For many of our Clients we take care of more than one need. We wanted the website to showcase that much of the work we do is holistic in nature. For example, our client, Sotheby’s. We handle their Social Media, Global Media Planning and Buying as well as select design projects. Our campaigns compliment and reflect across all of these disciplines.
The switch to WordPress for our CMS seemed the most logical. The dashboard is really simple for even for less than media savvy people (certainly not anyone at Sharp Communications). WordPress is fully customizable and has thousands of great plugins and widgets. It also features amazing support and is easily scalable. I created a custom theme using php and css.
So now after more than one hundred pages on the website(not including the blog), hundreds of files(php, javascript, css, swf, flv) to make the website run, well over ten thousand lines of code, 427 cups of coffee, as well as blood, sweat and tears… we have a WordPress website that is a lean, mean, SEO-friendly, social media-featuring, Client-showcasing machine.