Most all websites come with their own unique design challenges. This one however, seemed to come together like magic. I can honestly say as a designer that this was one of the best / most inspiring website design projects I have done I quite some time. There is a lot to be said for working with an established brand, especially one as well established and vibrant as the Moe's Southwest Grille brand.
The Back Story
The site owner originally had a site developed by ***City$earch - I won't use the name directly. Apparently whoever designed the site originally didn't think it was very important to have text on the page. In fact the entire page layout including text was on one .jpeg. Anyone who even has a basic understanding of how search engines work knows that this is SEO suicide.
The Development
Long story short, we talked at length with the customer to determine exactly what needed to be done. Once we got the green light on the project the fun started. We didn't have complete creative license on this site because we had to stay within the brand guidelines. However, I feel that we were able to produce something really clean, vibrant, and artistic anyway.
Once finished with the design we cutup and rebuilt the design in CSS / HTML. Honestly this is always my favorite part. It really is a mental challenge figuring out how you are going to get all of the design elements to translate fluidly to the web.
Once we input all of the content (SEO friendly) we cross browser test and go over the details with the client. We were happy to find out that the customer seemed to be even more impressed with the overall design and layout than we were.
The Results
We launched the brand new professionally designed and SEO friendly Moe's catering site... I think we were all shocked to come in the next week and find that Google had already crawled and re-ranked the site. This is the best part... within a week the site moved up 4 positions and had/has the number one organic ranking for the key phrase we were going after.
Another Happy Customer = Another Happy Developer.
