#1 of about 51,500,000

[gerisullivan]

Whoohoo!

Ladies and gentlemen, faans and fen, I invite you to Google PROmote Communications. Use whatever capitalization (or lack thereof) that you care to.

Yes, that's me in the #1 spot! Go ahead and click away.

The first time I did it today, I was #1 of about 51,500,000 hits, with the search taking 0.46 seconds. Now I'm #1 of 27,900,000 hits, in a search taking 0.15 seconds. The ways of Google are mysterious, but I'm delighted they've found my website and bounced me into the prime position within a week of it being launched.

It's something I've needed to do for 10 years and more. Thanks to help, support, and useful pokes from benveniste, debgeisler, benyalow, and Mr. Improbable himself, I've started at long last.

The site is currently barebones, utterly so. I expect to develop it into a site with significantly more depth (with a navigation bar, subpages, and portfolio examples you can actually see) in the weeks and months ahead.

The basic purpose of the PROmote Communications website (as I currently envision it) is to serve as a credibility check and further introduction to prospective clients. It needs to look professional and up to date (or timeless). It needs to reflect my design sensibilities, which are best summed up as "See it. Read it."

While I may start a PROmote Communications blog, that's not high on my list of perceived needs. Hmmm...maybe if I were to team up with the agency I do most of my employee communications projects with? We could talk about trends and hot topics in wellness newsletters, and maybe generate some more business that way. For now, I'm more likely to just work on featuring some content about that to help highlight my employee benefits communication experience. It's a specialized area most designers know little or nothing about.

I've been using Dreamweaver while generating the html for the Annals of Improbable Research since early last year. I've just begun to learn how to build websites with it. I look forward to knowing a lot more a month from now, then a year and a decade. I expect to do something real with the toad-hall.com website, too, but PROmote Communications is the driving need for now.

Comments, suggestions, and pointers welcome. I especially like Jeanne Gomoll's portfolio pages for Union Street Design. They're much more interesting to look at than the way I see most other graphic designers structure their online portfolios.

What do you like to see in a business website? And what sorts of things do you find annoying? I'm thinking content as well as navigation ease.

Comments

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

Well, number one tip for a website is to have one, so well done. Websites are particularly important for design professionals, because it's the front window to your work.

As you develop it:

Obviously you need a portfolio. I like portfolios that link back to the places where clients have used the work where this is publicly available, and which include fairly examples at fairly large size.

Although I'm not normally in the market for the sort of thing you are selling, in general I want a website to really explain why the company will deliver the thing that I need. I don't like telephoning people and I am much more likely to use companies where it is pretty clear from the website that what they've got is pretty much exactly what I want. So with your business, a certain amount of 'phone me to discuss your exact requirements' is necessary; but I'd still like the sort of thing you do (or rather, the parameters of what you *can* do, which is different) to be very clear.

Hope that's useful.

[gerisullivan.livejournal.com]

Excellent. That's very useful, indeed.

I'll be revising and expanding on the copy in the coming weeks, and will include considerably more information about what I do and what I bring to the table.

Almost all of my corporate work is for internal use only, so that's likely to be something of a challenge, but I believe I can get permission to showcase at least some of it.