The client in this case is Courtney and Wise, Pty, an upscale painting and decorating outfit in Sydney, Australia. I'm calling this a slight redesign because we didn't start over. Michael and Joanne Peters, the kind and charming proprietors of Courtney and Wise, had an elegant website to begin with, and they liked its look. Here is the old one:
Unfortunately, while this website had its charms, it also had some real problems from the point of view of search and usability.
The first point is that it's just hard to read. Upscale painters naturally have older people in their client base. Older people find it more difficult to read text with low contrast. Chances are very good that their target customers, if they came to this page, would leave again immediately without attempting to read the page.
It also has little to catch the eye of the searcher at the top of the page -- which is what visitors will see before making the decision whether to stay and scroll down to read more. In fact, many of the most interesting parts of this site's content are actually hidden in obscure little links at the bottoms of pages.
There were also quite a few issues under the hood, as it were. The meta language had problems, the images are flash and therefore a closed book to the search engines, and there were a variety of technical imperfections that interfered with the best results from the point of view of SEO. SEOMoz has a cartoon showing Google wondering to itself, "Hmm... which page should I link to?" when faced with a choice between good design and content and "crummy" design and content, and we all know which way that decision goes.
Shan has a particular gift for search-friendly design, and I'm all about search-friendly content, so we were able to fix Courtney and Wise up with a well-optimized version of their website which maintains the original feeling but has a fresh, updated look.
As an early tester said, it now looks worth scrolling down to read.
This new look will launch soon, and traffic and conversions should rise. For this site, redesign wasn't as much about aesthetics as it was about SEO.
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