Our SEO Adventure; Part 1

Well…we finally decided it’s time to eat our own dog food; move our site under a CMS and vastly increase the effectivity of what little SEO we’ve had–which up until now was the very basics–with the intent of attempting to radically increase our inbound lead generation during the year.

This blog is going to follow our adventure from day one to day n, where we’ll see just how effective we have been. Feel free to leave questions, tips, or where you feel we’re totally on the wrong track!

There are a few challenges here; first, we’re a design company, so our site can’t look like a template in any way, it needs to be completely unique, great-looking, provide great functionality, and easy-to-use nav; second, we really like the design we have now (other than for some flash elements, like the home page banner, which we want to redesign and replace with a more generalized technology); third, we know that we need to update the content rather massively, which is my job; and, fourth, we have a bunch of new stuff that needs to go into our portfolio. But, overall, the changes we want to make to the brand–the look of the site–are quite minor.

The very first decision we need to make is to pick a CMS. There are a LOT of them out there now and just about everyone has their favorite. Some the developers we work with like simplicity, some like depth of functionality, and others like something in between. Opinions on the ‘net are, unsurprisingly, even more all over the map.

Our needs turn out to be pretty basic. We need  employees (especially myself and my partner) with varying levels of technical sophistication to be able to perform basic tasks; change content, add pages, review comments, and add functionality to specific pages, as needed.

So after much research, some debate, and discussions with our internal team and some outside resources, we make the decision to go with…tada!…WordPress. (if you’d like to hear our thinking on all of this, just post a question, and I’ll be glad to answer it) SquareSpace was a close contender (we have used that for some clients recently, and it worked really well), but the deciding factor was really that the WP community is a great asset.

Next step; on to designing, choosing a developer, coding the actual move, and choosing a partner for our SEO.

But that’s in Part 2.