A few months ago I received a message on Facebook from a high school friend Tim, who had seen some of Durkan Consulting Group’s work and was interested in a website redesign for his company. We caught up over the phone and brainstormed and I setup a time to visit his company, Crystal Signatures, in Bethlehem, PA. I was looking forward to the visit. I already knew that Tim’s father Peter Yenawine, has long been recognized as one of the world’s best Crystal Sculptors. Yes, literally, the world. His work includes a number of Crystal Presidential Inauguration bowls, crystal art commissioned for the Pope, crystal awards received by all sorts of people for all sorts of achievements including Tiger Woods. It was easy to get to, here are their digs:
Tim took me on a tour. First we looked at the end product, tons of crystal ranging from flutes, crystal slippers, various awards for Fortune 500 Companies to large one of a kind crystal pieces that someone has had Crystal Signatures design to be in a certain area of their home. The craftsmanship is really impressive, consider the detail on the following piece. How does one even begin to do that with crystal? I found the level of detail on the pieces to be amazing.
We then toured the rest of the facility which is 22,000 square feet. Very interesting and cool, a huge machine shop that has been tweaked out to work with crystal and glass. Machines never intended for working with crystal have been modified to do so. I asked Rob who runs most of the equipment how they figured out all this. “We went through a lot of crystal!” was the reply. The effort and patience has been well worth it as Tim explained the production capabilities. Almost all supplies are purchased locally in the state of Pennsylvania. They leverage their investments in machinery and technology to work smart. When it came to the website redesign the same idea applied. Make the website an arm of Crystal Signatures sales force. With that in mind the following were the key objectives of the new website:
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Create a website that really shows off the work and craftsmanship of Crystal Signatures. Plenty of galleries/pictures and the ability for site visitors to easily access and view this work as well as several online catalogs including a shopping cart for creating a “wishlist cart”. Site needs to be rich in content not only for search engine optimization but also to educate users.
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Create a
website that is optimized for search engines and will rank well in organic listings with
Google,
Yahoo and others.
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Create a site that can be easily managed by
Crystal Signatures internal staff including ability to easily
add galleries, products to the catalog, general content pages, news and more.
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Have solid statistics for the site so we know what traffic the site is getting and from where. If we are going to do all of this work we must be able to measure results.
The site just went live the other day so it will take a little time before we reap the rewards of the SEO work that was done but the 1st, 3rd and 4th objectives have been nailed. The site is CSS/XHTML (tableless design) running on an IBM Domino Server. The site itself is contained within a Domino/Notes database that has a robust web based content management system. Staff can easily manage all facets of the site including search engine optimization settings. CKEditor was used for the rich text editor in the content management system hence it is extremely easy for staff to maintain content. As you can see from the screen cap below adding and formatting content, adding pictures, links, etc. is very easy to do:
They now have complete control over their site and can add pages on the fly which will automatically be added to the site navigation. All Search Engine Optimization settings such as Window Titles, H1 Tags, Meta Description/Keywords, URL names and more are controlled via the Content Management System. Durkan Consulting Group is pleased to have Crystal Signatures on board as a client. This redesign is just the first step towards helping them leverage the web to increase sales and serve customers.
