miriellografico.com

My previous employer, Miriello Grafico, was reluctant to redesign their website. After seven years, their previous site (built with Flash 5 and Macromedia Generator) was showing its age. Miriello had a bad experience with the web in 2000, when they hired an outside firm to build their site. Six months and tens of thousands of dollars later, they were still unhappy with the result. Like a red-headed stepchild, the site was ignored and maligned for seven years.

I started at MGI in 2002, and wanted to redesign their site straight away. It took five years of convincing, and (true) I finished it well after I left the company as a full-time employee, but the result is a powerful technical achievement for Miriello, far outstripping the capabilities of their old site.

Do you validate?
The site, first and foremost, is built to be standards-compliant, making it easier for Google and other search engines to index the site’s content. The challenge for me was describing the benefits of a standards-compliant approach to an audience that (initially) cared little about Google search results, and didn’t understand the value of accessibility for people with cognitive disabilities. Quoth the creative director, “I don’t think Google is very important — I mean, how many of our clients found us with Google?”

Once management’s mental clutches let out on the idea of search engine optimization, it became an attractive goal. The company’s mantra of “brand expression” became embedded everywhere, and is now climbing the charts of Google search results.

DIY CMS
The site is built on a WordPress Mu foundation. This allows for easy updating without having to know HTML. Nearly all the site’s content is controlled through WordPress, including homepage copy, news, work, and (of course) a blog. Miriello embraced the idea of subscribing to content, offering RSS feeds for not only news, but also for their portfolio too.

Bye-Bye Colo
Miriello now hosts their own site internally. Before, the need for Macromedia Generator necessitated off-site hosting (and probably the only host in the country to still offer Generator hosting). This results in a cost savings of over $3,000 annually for the company.

The Result?
Let the results speak for themselves:

Even the first week’s worth of traffic confims that the redesign was a good idea. Fully 20 percent of the site’s visitors came from search engines. People were exploring the site deeper — and spending more time — looking at what Miriello Grafico has to offer.

Combined with planned press releases, email blasts, and word-of-mouth, miriellografico.com has nowhere to go but up.

1 year ago