Web Site Re-Launch:
FloridasStorageSolution.com

South Island Design recently re-launched FloridasStorageSolution.com, the web site for Accountable Management & Realty. Accountable Management is a Tampa Bay area based company that provides consulting and management services to self storage facilities throughout Florida. The project involved a web site redesign and development of new features.

FloridasStorageSolution.com's site design was about 3 years old and starting to look stale and dated. It needed to look much fresher and feel like Florida. Many of the pages were also starting to look like a patchwork quilt as new content had been added wherever it fit best at the time.

To avoid the cost of creating a site from scratch, South Island Design designed the new site within the old site's template. So the basic framework of the programming was able to mostly stay the same, while colors, typefaces, graphics and backgrounds were swapped out. Designing this way was a little constraining, but there was no need to start over when the foundation was sound.

We went with an all white background and got rid of a lot of the heavy colors and textures from the old site. This cleaned up the design immensely and allows site visitors to concentrate more on the content. The site is also home to numerous storage facilities throughout Florida. So an all while background is more compatible with the different logos and colors that appear on the facility pages.

The home page was updated to improve site usability. Most people coming to the site are looking for a specific storage facility. The pulldown menus in the upper right allow them to go directly to the information they're looking for. And the three areas underneath allow easy access to other feature areas of the site.

New site features include drop down navigation, scrolling testimonials in the sidebar and lightbox pop up windows. To better serve site visitors "Request a Quote" and "Feedback" forms were added. A payment and prelease option (provided by a 3rd party) is also new.

On the programming side of things, all of the pages were changed from HTML to PHP. PHP was an easy way to accommodate the scrolling testimonials on most of the pages. It also provides a better platform for future upgrades to the web site. The conversion would need to happen eventually and now was the best time to do it.

What often gets overlooked in renaming URLs is the search engines. Google and the rest have already indexed an entire site of HTML pages and would need time to recognize all of the new PHP pages. To avoid a decline in rankings, we updated the htaccess file pointing the old HTML pages to the new PHP pages where appropriate. The search engines should experience no period of adjustment and FloridasStorageSolution.com can continue its climb to the top.

08/03/09