Web Design and Development Blog - Rochester MN

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.

RDS Realtor 3.0 has been completely rebuilt from the ground up. It is still based off of the RDS Realtor 2.0 code however it now has a more robust admin allowing owners of their site to upload multiple photos at one, along with property disclosures and other related files. We have also completely reworked the page naming syntax to be more search engine friendly. We are seeing great results with realtors who are using RDS Realtor 3.0.

RDS Realtor 3.0 as with 2.0 automatically will resize photos or virtually any size to reduce bandwidth usage and speed up overall searching for end users. We are currently working on features that are in our RDS Gallery 6.0 such as dynamic image re-ordering, rss feeds, install wizard and more end user customization options.

As with all of our website utilities we are always eager to customize them to meet your specific needs. Keep reading our blog for further updates and patches to popular utilies and other developments from one of Rochester’s leading web development companies.

We have recently joined the Rochester Area Chamber of Commerce. We decided to take this important step in building our presence in the Rochester and area business community. We hope to meet many of you at local chamber events such as Business After Hours and AM Espresso. We hope to build long lasting relationships with business owners in the community that will be mutually beneficial.

See you there!

~RDS

For those of you who have worked with us for a while now realize that we are a growing company, and because of that we would like to offer more services to our clients. We are looking a discussion of what features / products you would like to see us implement in the future.

We look forward to your input.

~RDS

If you’ve ever worked with a large website and wanted to download a copy of it, FTP could drive you nuts (especially if you have a flaky internet connection). You probably assumed there is some way to zip (archive) a site into one large file for easy download. Now even if you don’t have shell access to your web server you can create a single file for download.

All of the steps below are assuming that you are running a Linux/Unix system with Apache and PHP installed. If your on IIS / Windows this may or may not work. You’ll also need to know the root path of your server, our demo will be set to /home/demouser/demodomain.com/

First off you need to make sure that the web site you want to back-up is not running in Safe Mode. If the site is, request from your hosting provider that it be turned off. Safe Mode doesn’t allow for system commands to be run.

Next you’d want to create a folder that has write permissions (chmod 0777) to place your archive into. We’ll call this folder “backup” for demo purposes.

Now comes the actual code to back-up your website folder.

<?php

system(“tar -zcf /home/demouser/demodomain.com/backup/mybackup.tar.gz /home/demouser/demodomain.com”);

?>

Don’t worry I’ll explain what this all means.

system
This command basically will replicate a shell prompt for you, however you can only run one command at a time (without some fancy coding)

tar
This is the code to create the actual archive file, on Linux/Unix they call it a “tarball” or “tar”

-zcf
this is creating a compressed tar file (z) means zip or .gz format (c) is create command (f) means file.

/home/demouser/demodomain.com/backup/mybackup.tar.gz
This is the file path that you want to create. You can name backup and mybackup.tar.gz whatever you’d like.

/home/demouser/demodomain.com
This is telling the system what folder on the system to backup. Depending on the size of your site you may see the page sit for a few seconds. When the page is done you can point your browser to www.demodomain.com/backup/mybackup.tar.gz and download your file.

Hope that helps those of you with large backup issues. Also this can be run from a cronjob to create regular backups that your clients can easily download.

~RDS

Reynolds Design Studio has started to focus their attention at the twin cities of Minneapolis, MN and St. Paul, Minnesota. We serve all of the Twin Cities metro area with our experienced team of web professionals and graphic designers to create an advertising project you will be proud of. Reynolds Design Studio provides web design services for logo design, graphic design, web site development and custom web design programming.

If you are from the Twin Cities and looking for affordable, creative web design or website development contact Reynolds Design Studio today!

We have made yet another major upgrade to our widely used photo gallery. We have retained all of the functionality from previous versions, but made our templating and installation process much easier. We have created a user friendly installation wizard, template files which are easier to upgrade for non-programmers and a reworked admin.

Keep reading our blog for further updates and patches to popular utilies and other developments from one of Rochester’s leading web development companies.