Gabe Riggs: Web Design, Development, and Online Solutions

‘The Liberty’ music site

admin — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 20:57:19 +0000

New website for the band ‘The Liberty’

Norton Cancer Institute

admin — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 20:54:07 +0000

New website design for the Norton Cancer Institute.

SynapseManagement.com

admin — Wed, 25 May 2011 18:28:44 +0000

Synapse Management was a fun site to work on because they were essentially starting from scratch. I got to do logo development with them and an entire branding for their site. I think the site turned out very nicely and look forward to continuing to work with them on future projects.

Coupon sites (Groupon, LivingSocial) may not be great for business in the long run

admin — Tue, 24 May 2011 13:44:38 +0000

A 2007 HBS article about measuring brand equity made me start to consider what some of the social couponing websites might actually be doing for the companies that are making these offers. In the 2007 article it states that regular sales and discounted promotions lead to consumers stock piling goods and waiting for promotions to buy. In the short term profits spike, so often managers are enthusiastic to use these tactics. The long term is a much different story. Brand equity is ultimately diluted and in the mind of the consumer, they will no longer purchase items at their original price – the price needed for many companies to achieve successful profit margins. There also usually a competitive response when these types of discounts are offered which only creates lower prices and not an increase in sales.

This type of behavior is exactly what could happen with sites such as LivingSocial and Groupon that allow business to offer discounts to customers as long as a certain threshold of the discount is purchased. One Groupon I recently used was for a local restaurant that does not serve high volumes of food. I asked how many had purchased the coupon and over 800 people had. Makes you wonder if those 800 people are now willing to pay the full amount for a meal at this restaurant or if they are now only willing to pay the discounted amount. Especially for higher end brands, this could have a large impact in the long run if they continue to use these types of promotions to reach customers.

Here is a great article I found about this specific issue in even more detail: http://www.socialmediaexplorer.com/digital-marketing/why-groupon-may-not-make-strategic-sense-for-your-business/

Is the iPhone selfish?

admin — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 13:27:34 +0000

So has it ever occurred to you that that small rectangular electronic device that you love and cherish and feel you couldn’t live with out might have actually been designed to create this dependence. That feeling of a void when you realize in the car that you have left your phone on the kitchen counter or when you are on an airplane and can’t access email, or when, the most likely scenario, those five blue horizontal bars dwindle away.

Don’t get me wrong, I fall into this category often. A few weeks ago I started thinking about the purpose behind the iPhone. It is really to give you instant gratification and information wherever you are and whenever you want. It has created a world in which I can just focus on me, my interests, my desires, and my passions; and it all fits compactly into my pocket.

As I take inventory of my own apps, I have realized that almost all of them are simply for the convenience of my personal life. What if as developers, designers, and creative and innovative minds we began thinking about the social power that we could harness from this technology? I truly think we could find ways to equip and support the communities we live in and beyond. I will discuss this topic further in a soon to come writing and will add a link, but wanted to at least broach the topic.

Let me pose another question. Have you ever been at a party where the room is a bit awkward and you immediately break out your phone to avoid uncomfortable conversation with people you don’t know? I know I have. Has your phone become a security blanket and allowed you to escape from making new relationships and learning things about the people literally standing right next to you? I know that many say that mobile technology is the way of the future, and I also think it is going to amazing things, but at what costs? I challenge you and myself to not let these amazing devices become an isolation room. Try and make a conscious effort to engage with the wide world outside the web.

If you have ideas, comments, or experiences I’d love to hear them!

Intro to the Blogging World

admin — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 15:31:58 +0000

This section of the site is for one reason really – to share knowledge. Through these posts I hope to raise questions, challenge thoughts, and give examples of things I have experienced and learned. If you have any questions or disagree with anything that is posted feel free to comment and let me know. This should really be a place where we all give and learn from each other. Hopefully these articles are useful to you!

Hiding and removing content from Google crawl and search engine results

admin — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 19:35:09 +0000

So a few months ago a ran across an issue where some content was accessible via Google searches that was supposed to be private. It was extremely important that the information be pulled off of the site as soon as possible. As we all know, operating on Google-time can be a bit subjective. After a bunch of research and digging I was able to piece together a few solutions to get information removed from Google search engine in a pretty quick turn around. The only reason I publish this now is if for some reason you run into a similar issue.

The first Option and probably the quickest remedy

1. Log in into your sites Google webmaster tools account, https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools (If you don’t have an account, create one and follow the steps after the registration to Verify the account, it is FREE. Really you should have a Gmail account for some many other reasons, but that is grounds for an entirely different discussion)

2. Once logged into Webmaster Tools, click on Site Configuration – Crawler Access – Remove URL
3. Click on New Removal Request
4. Add URL you want to be removed from Google (screenshot is below)

Here is another guide to help you remove items from Yahoo! http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/search/siteexplorer/siteexplorer-46.html

Option #2

Open robots.txt file located in the root directory of the server. Check to see if you have one by typing www.yoursite.com/robots.txt

**If you don’t have a robots.txt file, create one by simply opening MS Notepad blank document and add the following text:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /some-directory/some-random-file-name-example.doc
Allow: /

If your want to block some specific file and a directory with files:

User-agent: *
Disallow: / some-directory/any-subdirectory/
Disallow: /directory/some-random-file-name-example.doc
Allow: /

Name this file robots.txt and upload to your site’s top-level directory (this will take care of all Search Engines, including Google, Yahoo, Bing… ) To check if it is LIVE type www.yoursite.com/robots.txt to see the contents of the file.

Option #3
Include on the page where they have these links to the documents (NOTE: the page with the links will also be removed from index)

If you do not want to remove the page with the links and only want to remove files

NOFOLLOW prevents the Googlebot from following links from this page. Things to consider: You need to place this tag on every page that links to the documents that you want to be removed.

Proper location for this tag is in the HEAD section of the HTML document (see example)

…

After these changes are made and Google has crawled the site again, the content should naturally drop out of the Google index. For the best and fastest results, you should try to do all three of these. Again, this doesn’t necessarily mean that your information is secure. My suggestion would be if you don’t want people to find it or if it is too sensitive, you should probably reconsider why it is being posted online in the first place.

Again, I do hope that this can be a resource to individuals that encounter a need or issue with web page removal. Let me know if you have any thoughts or suggestions.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tips and Cheat Sheet

admin — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 15:30:44 +0000

So I had recently remembered that last year in an effort to try and get a team organized and focused on SEO I had put together a quick SEO tip sheet. In thinking about this, the goal was to have a one page document that would enable content owners and website owners to optimize their sites and content with one sheet of guidelines. I thought this would be a nice addition to this blog – but after going through the sheet realize there are many things that I would now include and detail out further. I will attempt to do this eventually, but for now, here is the starting point. Hope this helps someone. Download SEO One Page of Tips

SEO: Search Engine Optimization Fact Sheet

Fact & Fiction

SEO is not FREE: requires time, education and resources
86% of clicks on Google are from organic search, 14% from paid search. **recently updated – trend changing according to http://www.seomad.com/SEOBlog/google-organic-click-through-rate-ctr.html ; Still the goal should remain organic
Google friendliness = friendly to other engines (Google #1… Google owned YouTube #2, Yahoo! #3)
When possible use CSS & HTML for drop menus / only rely on Javascript for interactivity
Use hyphens to separate words and file names instead of underscores
Meta descriptions are somewhat important; only for click through
Meta Keywords – no real value seen by Google, MSN/Live, Yahoo, and Ask.com
Try keeping CSS and Javascript in external folders to avoid more code than copy

Indexation:

Make sure your site has an XML sitemap
Make sure your ‘404 File Not Found’ page returns a hard 404 header
Make sure your robots.txt is not misconfigured
Canonicalization: One source – one destination
Keep duplicate pages out of the index by standardizing URLs, eliminating unnecessary variables, using 301 redirects when needed and CSS styling for printer friendly

Page Visibility

HTML Page title: the most important visible text. The first bolded line in a SE result.
Make sure page title is clear, compelling, accurate that summarizes the objective and content of the page. Try to include location in title if possible
Don’t include useless phrases – words you know you will win; Utilize terms that are strategic and competitive. Lead with the most important keywords
Don’t duplicate titles: Duplicate content cannibalizes pages. Use Google search query to find duplicates: site:____intitle:____
Incorporate keywords into title tags, hyperlink text, headings (H1 & H2), alt attributes, place high in content of a page where this is more weight given. Take out an useless wording
Check your Page Rank http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php
Check your site download speed: http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/
Use Google Webmaster Tools: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
Develop great content, submit to authoritative & topical site, local directories; use social bookmarking sites, syndicate RSS, use blogs, etc.

Tools and Resources

A lot of this information from these sites, speakers and conferences

NortonNeuroscience.com

admin — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 03:20:06 +0000

This was a challenging project because it really all boiled down to branding. This was a service line brand of a parent brand and I had to figure out a way to have the service line brand have characteristics and the style of the parent brand but still give it priority.

HealthConnect Prototype Design

admin — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 02:58:04 +0000

HealthConnect was a design for a health care aggregation platform that would allow the user to better manage and see how different areas of their lives affect health and also the clinician. While it would be a very costly undertaking, it was a blast to conceptualize and design.

Because this project had the potential to be so costly and complex, I had the opportunity to present the concept to a growth council. In doing so I designed some fun tools/images to help explain the idea in greater detail: