One Of The Best Looking Sites We’ve Ever Created – DigitalProperties.ca

Our headline might be a little over the top, but not by much. The site we created for Digital Properties is one of the prettiest sites we’ve ever developed – and we have our client to thank for it.

SEO web design for Digital Properties, a Toronto virtual tour provider.

Here’s how it came together:

Our goal: Create a search engine friendly website design that mirrored the look and features of an existing flash-based website, yet do so without relying upon flash.

1. We started with a flash template. When we were contacted, Digital Properties was using a flash template for their website. While it looked very nice, the site wasn’t search engine optimized, and the flash wasn’t search engine friendly. We recommended rebuilding the site using HTML and CSS, partially in the interests of SEO, and partially in the interests of usability (pure flash websites have a few usability problems).

2. We added new features. The old flash template site was limited in it’s ability to show off the latest projects and a complete portfolio. The new site has many more portoflio items as well as a simple system for showing the very latest productions.

3. We worked hard to re-create flash elements using CSS and HTML. I tackled a lot of this stuff personally, and in the process I’m not embarrassed to say that I learned quite a bit. I’d like to think we did a good job of sprinkling flash and javascript on top of CSS and HTML to come up with a site that looks great but that’s also 100% usable.

4. Wordpress can do anything with a little work. The site is powered by Wordpress, a great system that’s easy for our clients to use yet powerful enough to do almost anything.

One of our technical (a.k.a. coding) challenges was creating slideshows on multiple pages, with each image linking out to a tour. This isn’t something Wordpress is currently designed to do, so we had to modify some plugins and play with some code to get it to work. After some time, we came up with a way to host multiple javascript slideshows on the homepage and portfolio pages, with each of the images on the portfolio pages linking out to samples of Digital Properties virtual 360 tours.

5. Client feedback was instrumental. Every project is different, but this particular project would not have turned out as nicely were it not for the specific feedback and direction from our client. We were blessed to work with someone who was able to help create mock-ups and offer very specific directions.

6. The site is search engine optimized. Often times websites with flash and javascript elements are difficult for search engines to understand. We often hesitate to heavily incorporate flash or javascript into web designs for this reason. However, we managed to accomplish all our design goals while still honoring our SEO requirements.

I’m quite proud to say that the existing site will work perfectly fine for users without flash, and users without javascript will be able to see all the important content. In other words, search engine bots will understand our new site much better than they would have understood the old flash-based site.

In any case, we’re proud of our work and we hope you like it. If you have any feedback, please don’t hesitate to comment below. We’re always interested in improving our work.