Another day, another website at Blog Consulting. This time we are building a site for an ice cream shop. This site needs a simple start with a good SEO foundation that we can develop in the future. I wanted a look that would tie the site in well with the actual shop. The ice cream shop has yellow walls with splashes of primary colors all over the place and a floor with tiles that have the same yellow, red, green, blue look. I also wanted to use a banana split that would sit behind the website and just kind of poke out as a reminder of what the website is all about. I initially was going to use Thesis to lay the site out, but then decided it would work well with the Twenty Ten theme. That is the second time I have picked the Twenty Ten theme in the last three builds. Here is a screen shot of the front page (I had to use a wider screen shot than normal so you could get a good idea of the colors, so the fonts will be a little small):

I got pretty creative with the yellow polka dot background. I was hoping to find something that would work on Google Images but I couldn’t find a good match. I ended up using a logo creator and overlaying the dot patterns onto the background. If you look closely you can see that they are all a little bit different as far as position and spacing. It worked out fine, however, as you would really have to be looking to see it. The ice cream shop is called Shirleys Frozen Custard, but I decided to build the site on floridakeysicecreamshop.com to gain a little SEO value. I pointed the Shirleys Frozen Custard URL to the Florida Keys Ice Cream Shop site. Go and check it out if you get a chance. I still have to input the info for a couple of the menu pages but other than that it is close to finished.

When I am building a blog or website, I often want to incorporate all of the latest bells and whistles into the site. Flash and slide shows, picture galleries, videos, etc. all intended to maximize the experience of people visiting the site. There are occasions (a lot of occasions), when the best thing to do is keep it simple. I just finished a site at ww.floridakeyselectricalcontractors.com for my newest Business Blog Consulting client. At this time, what they wanted was a simple, professional looking website, that would represent their business well. They had come to me me after a bad experience with another web company. Besides a new website, they also needed me to start developing online marketing strategies to help bring some organic traffic from the search engines to their website. Like a lot of businesses, their existing domain name didn’t offer them any help as far as search engines go. We picked a new domain name to anchor our SEO strategy and then pointed their existing domain name to the site.

In building the site I decided to use the WordPress Twenty Ten theme. This is about as simple as it gets. I added a Contact page, a Services page, and a new Home page. I used the existing About page and added some content about the company. I set the site as a static website, and installed the new Home page. I did a Google search for images about electricians at found three that I thought would work nicely. I took one of them and designed a new header and uploaded it to the site. I took the second image and made a nice Contact widget for the sidebar. I took the third image and used it to fill out the home page and linked it to the Services page.

I spent more time than I should have tinkering with the code to make the nav bar appear to light up when you went to click on a page. I thought this would be a nice touch for an electricians website. This would have probably gone a lot faster if it hadn’t been really late at night while I was tinkering. So, here is the new site for Florida Keys Electrical Contractors: