CASE STUDIES

Today, more and more people are interacting with the web on mobile devices. Because of this, your website must be responsive and designed with mobile users first in mind. Many people are still using HTML sites which can be a pain to update and are quite difficult to read on mobile devices.

Converting a site from HTML to a CMS is a daunting task. Especially if your website has a lot of content and downloadable offerings. Author Greg Stolze‘s old legacy site was one such site. Plus, it was two websites in one.

He had his main website, with multiple pages leading to different categories of downloadable books and RPGs, plus his REIGN RPG website. He also had different news sections for the different areas of content he provided, which was sorely neglected because updating them was a hassle.

The challenge was to not only import all of his legacy content but to also design and develop a WordPress website that has multiple blog sections dedicated to general news, all of the news in one area, fiction news, games news, plus the REIGN website without using WordPress MU so that is easier for a WordPress novice to update their site. There was also the challenge of creating category-based download sections filled with a lot of downloads. These download sections had to look nice and not look cluttered. Plus, redirecting all old legacy links to the new links. And of course, it had to be designed with mobile users first in mind.

Skookum Monkey also created custom documentation with step-by-step instructions on how to update each section of the website, how to format posts to keep the look consistent, and basic WordPress tips to help a WordPress novice to not be overwhelmed with a brand new system. Finally, the migration of hosting from his old provider to Skookum Monkey.

It was a really fun challenge. Helping customers bring their old HTML sites up to current standards is one of Skookum Monkey’s favourite projects.

Very helpful, very patient. Moving over my old legacy site and updating it to current-day functionality was a lot less painful than I’d feared it would be. Definitely pleased with this company.

Greg Stolze, Author

While Skookum Monkey would love to create new themes for everyone, of course that isn’t always what the client wants or can afford. Some customers need help with the day-to-day maintenance of their sites. Competitive Couture by Spirals Designs in one such customer.

When the owner Marsha Hickey approached Skookum Monkey, she made it clear that she was happy with her site’s theme and layout, plus she didn’t want to switch hosting, but needed some help with website optimization, SEO, social media, some very minor CSS changes, plus miscellaneous day-to-day managing of the website, including updating plugins and WordPress.

Spirals Designs is a Victoria, B.C.-based company that designs competitive dance and figure skating outfits, and cosplay outfits. We had to come up with a cost-effective strategy to increase the website’s search engine results page (SERP) rankings.

Our SEO strategy was simple:

1. Install a caching plugin so that Google wouldn’t penalize the website for being very slow to load;
2. Make full use of the Yoast SEO plugin, making all pages and posts have a green light;
3. Install Jetpack and automate sharing of new posts to Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus;
4. Turn on Photon within the Jetpack plugin to optimize images, decreasing page load time;
5. Set up Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools to help with SEO;
6. Create a “Tips” sections to be updated twice a month with articles designed to increase SERP based on specific keywords;
7. In 2016, create a daily “What’s Happening in the Shop” section to help drive traffic from social media to the website.

This is a a new (started November 2015) and on-going project, which is constantly reviewed for effectiveness and new strategies put in place as needed.

At the time of writing this case study (December 2015), with two articles created, ranking for the first selected keyword went from over 200 to 24.

Germana is a health and fitness instructor based in Nanaimo, B.C. She needed new content added to her website for an upcoming fitness challenge and had a very specific design created for this new section of the website. This design was different than the default design elements of the existing theme. This new content had to be created under very tight time constraints with the bulk developed while she was out of the country on holiday.

Skookum Monkey was given PDFs of the desired design of the fitness challenge pages. It was our responsibility to create the fitness challenge landing page and phase pages, complete with adding the content which included downloadable material and videos; password protect each phase of the fitness challenge; make each phase of the fitness challenge live on a monthly basis; make several CSS and PHP changes; add content to the header; and write necessary HTML, producing exact replicas of the delivered PDFs.

Because the existing theme is not response, Skookum Monkey had to make some design suggestions so that the new content could be read on mobile devices. Each suggestion was implemented.

There were a few challenges because the developer of the existing theme did not make it easy to simply make changes to layout and design elements, plus the theme is not mobile-friendly. We overcame each challenge and Germana was more than satisfied with the final results.

Testimonial coming soon!