Web Design and Development Blog - Rochester MN

The RDS Gallery has been a staple of our web utilities for a few years now, and after lots of good feedback we have decided to rebuild the gallery from the ground up. This gallery now allows for multiple image upload, larger thumbnails, better search engine capabilities and before / after photo galleries.

We have are looking forward to making some additional revisions to the gallery within the next couple of months to allow for more customization by the gallery owner.

~RDS

Reynolds Design Studio is proud to announce the website launch of Rochester Feed & Country Store. We decided to go a different route in the building of Rochester Feed and utilized a customized version of WordPress to allow the customer full update capabilities of their website. Rochester Feed was needing to add and remove various pages of content throughout the course of the year based on specials and other events going on at their location.

We felt that WordPress would give them the best solution to their needs while providing a highly search engine friendly platform to help them rank in Google, Yahoo and Bing.

We look forward to building a lasting relationship with the staff at Rochester Feed & Country Store and providing great quality work in the future.

Reynolds Design Studio is proud to launch the redesign of Bella Photography. We have been working with Bella Photography for 4 years and have been happy to help them grow as a company. We provided a customized version of our RDS Gallery solution, flash animation and a revised design.

We are actively pushing their site to the search engines to help them rank better for photography related terms throughout Minnesota.

We are excited to see how the new website we created will help their business.

Reynolds Design Studio will be participating in the 20th Annual Paws & Claws Charity Auction on Saturday, November 21st, 2009 at the Kahler Grand Hotel Ballroom.

We are donating our web site design and development services to one lucky bidder. A $2,500 value, so be sure to attend this great event to help dogs and cats in the Rochester, MN area.

More information can be found out about this event at www.pawsandclaws.org

Reynolds Design Studio is proud to annouce the launch of Quarry Hill Vet. We have a long standing relationship with Quarry Hill Vet of Rochester MN and are excited to see their new site go live. We made the site fun by giving a professional presentation with cute animal silhouettes and paw prints throughout the site.

The home page features an employee of Quarry Hill Vet along with some information about them. Quarry Hill Vet offers great small animal care in Rochester Minnesota and the surrounding areas. Their doctors have over 100 combined years experience so you can be sure your animal is well taken care of.

We are very pleased with the feedback so far on the site and look forward to seeing it grow with their business.

A website is a necessity in today’s business environment. It is your online opportunity to connect to the millions of potential customers for your product or service. Your website is also a very visual representation of your business, and as such it is vitally important to project a professional image.

There are a number of web site design programs that can be used to generate a basic web site. They use basic templates for pages and limit the customization that can be done. These web sites are usually created by end users for their personal needs and for that they do an adequate job. However, for your business the last thing you need or want is a cookie cutter web site created by one of your employees, or worse, someone you paid to create that kind of site for you.  A web development company or web design firm uses professional grade tools and programming languages to create a customizable, unique web site that will provide you with something a template designed site can’t give, pizazz!

Did you know that the average first time visitor spends only 30 seconds on your website? If your site doesn’t grab the viewers attention quickly they’re going to move on and probably not return. Even if you do keep them around you can still lose up to 45% of those visitors on their second visit if they don’t perceive that your site has something new to offer. By using professionally designed graphics a web design firm can help you keep those first time visitors at your site longer, retain your existing visitors and those same professionally designed images make your business look its best.

By using dynamic content, content that changes based on criteria you set up or based on user preferences, a web development company can help you retain more of your visitors after their second visit to your site. Interactive tools, only available through a web design firm can keep your visitors engaged so that they stay longer and want to come back. A clean, logical, easy to navigate site  structure makes it easier for your customers to find what they are looking for fast and with minimal effort, and that translates into money for your business.

Of course the biggest challenge any business faces is getting your web site found among the millions of web sites on the net, or even among the admittedly fewer sites of your competitors. Using a technique called Search Engine Optimization (SEO) a professional web development firm can raise your site’s rankings in search engines like Google, Yahoo, or MSN. By using specific keywords search engine friendly design and programming techniques a professional web design firm can have your site listed at or near the top of every category in which your business fits.

Web site design and development firms provide consultation services with design specialists who will work with you to get the most pleasing design for your business. Graphic designers will use their years of training and experience to assure that your site is not only visually pleasing and easy to navigate, but that has the added benefit of being a unique representation of your business, now and in the future. A web site is not a static entity. It must keep up with trends in design as well as project a fresh face to your customers. Periodic redesigns or more frequent minor face lifts will ensure that your business projects a professional, relevant and timely image.

A professional web design company, well versed in SEO and graphic design, is your best partner in the battle to drive visitors to, and keep visitors on, your site. Reynolds Design Studio is that company.

Reynolds Design Studio is proud to annouce the launch of go2wed.com. We have been working with Go2wed.com for the past few years and have seen them really take off. Go2wed.com offers great tools for the bride and advertiser allowing a wide range of functionality.

This time around we completely redesigned the site, front and back-end, to make the site more user friendly. We placed a focus on what a bride would be looking for and tailored the site to fit. We implemented a new feature called My Notebook, which gives the bride a place to store all of her information. The bride can find and keep vendors in her account, email the vendor from there, download planning tools and other wedding planning essentials.

The administrators of go2wed.com have a much more powerful administration tool that allows them to update virtually any portion of the site from the web, giving them greater flexibility on when updates are made and by who.

We built the database to be as search engine friendly as possible and helped with the seach engine optimization of the site, we are looking to see some great results from go2wed.com in the coming months.

We have been very pleased with the feedback from our test group on the new go2wed.com site and are excitied to see it brought out to the general public.

We are going to be rebuilding the popular website utility RDS Gallery, RDS Realtor and RDS Calendar using JQuery and PHP Objects. This will allow us to make updates to the base utility code (offering you better products as they become available) without having to rework the live utility.

We are always working on ways to improve our utilities, making them more stable, secure and easier for updates to be sent across to multiple clients easily.

Check back often as we routinely update our blog with new information about web design, website development and general industry news.

~RDS

In this day and age websites are an absolute necessity when marketing your business. No matter what business you are in, people are searching online for what you offer.

With that being said, when deciding on a web developer there are important things to look at before making that decision.

1. Reliability: Is my website developer available when I need them? As your business continues to grow, your website needs to grow with you. It is important to have a web developer to help you make those changes. Not having a web developer who can be there when you need them can cost business. Making timely updates to your website is important to providing new information to your potential clients. Website updates generally are fairly simple and can be completed rather quickly. Make sure your web developer is available when you need them and can make changes right away.

2. Customization: There a lot of web developers that offer templated website designs at a much lower cost, however what people don’t realize is that most template designs can hinder what you are trying to accomplish with your site. Most template websites do not offer the flexibility needed for a quality business website. For example if you want to add utilities to your site such as video flash animation or photo galleries, this can be a difficult and expensive process if you use a developer that does template websites. Many times the developers utilizing templates will not have the programming knowledge to do what you need. With a custom website the developer is building the site to your needs, not you trying to fit into the limitations of the design.

3. Experience: Experience is key when looking at a web developer. Generally more experienced website developers are going to be more expensive, but you will make it up in quality. When looking at building a custom website an experienced web developer will be able to give you an accurate price and time quote, rather than “learning on the job”, and this will likely save you time, money and frustration through the building process.

4. Versatility: Finding a web developer who, not only is skilled in the programming and development side of the web, but the design aspect is extremely important. There are a lot of extremely talented programmers who can build websites but lack design capabilities. Conversely, there are a lot of great designers who lack the knowledge of how to build or program a website. Finding a developer who is skilled in both aspects is important, they will not only be able to build you a website that has great functionality but will also be able to create a site that visually stunning. Both of these aspects are important to the visitors of your site. You want them to be able to easily navigate the site and not get frustrated and leave they can’t find what they are looking for. If your site doesn’t look professional, people will not look at your organization as a professional.

5. References: References are important in any business, but when it comes to a web developer there are must. Make sure you ask for links to sites they have done previously. Be specific, if you are looking for your site to do something in particular, make sure that developer can you show you samples of what they have done. Make sure to call some of their current clients as this is a great way to find out how easy a web developer is to work with, and what kind of response times they have when it comes to making changes.

Feel free to contact us for all of your web site design and developments needs.