davidvanwert.com

Allied 1031 Exchange is a qualified intermediary for 1031 tax-deferred property exchanges. And this is their newly re-designed website. Woo-hoo! The Meridian Group recently acquired this company, and it’s likely to undergo a brand overhaul (especially that logo, I hope), but for the short-term this site is a heck of a lot nicer and more functional than what they had.

I recently rebuilt these two sites. They weren’t in any way redesigned — they look exactly as they did before.

So why rebuild them?

Well, the original versions were all made from images. Every single bit of every page was composed of images jammed in tables. There was no text (just pictures of some text) and therefore no content as far as Google and other search engines are concerned. This is a bad thing. And every page of each site had the exact same title as its fellows — also a bad thing. For Sightline Tours, Google searches for their keywords yielded not a single placement within the first ten pages.

Within a month of this rebuild, both sites have climbed from a page rank of 0 to 3 without any other marketing efforts whatsoever. And Sightline now has Google page one placement for some of its keywords, and no worse than page three for any of them.

And the new code is leaner (by 70%) & cleaner, which also helps with search engine optimization. </brag>

These guys distribute foodstuffs to restaurants nation-wide. And not just any foodstuffs — their foodstuffs are the coolest, most interesting foodstuffs around.

Though deadline and budget (but mostly Internet Explorer 6) necessitated a hack or two (or three or…), this is almost certainly the leanest, prettiest code I’ve ever produced for a project of this scale. Nobody except web-folk understand, but the code behind this site is, on average, only 20% of the weight of their previous incarnation while incorporating much more content per page.