Patrick Ortman, Inc.

A Web Design Company Promo

Written By: Patrick on March 30th, 2009

We’re finishing up some greenscreen tests, and getting ready to go into the soundstage on Friday. The RED One is performing flawlessly, and our previz looks really good. Most importantly, we have some very cool actors lined up. 

Things are looking up!

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Web Design Tips: Structure Matters!

Written By: Patrick on March 26th, 2009

It’s tough to choose a web design company. And most articles about web design and search engine optimization concentrate on content. After all, everyone knows ‘content is king’, and there’s no denying that having unique, well-written content on your website will draw customers and improve your Google PageRank. But if you’re looking for happier customers and even higher traffic to your company website, there’s another part of the equation you need to address. It’s the actual structure of your website and of your web pages.

I’m talking xHTML and information architecture, web standards and semantic markup. 

It may seem a little bit less exciting than writing amazing content, but if you don’t devote the time and energy to a well-structured website you’ll find that your amazing content isn’t getting the exposure it deserves. 

Sometimes, this can make the difference between your company being successful or failing miserably. (more…)

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Business Web Design Project: Luvasil

Written By: Patrick on March 19th, 2009

Luvasil Web Design

Our new web design project

is a “phase one” website for Luvasil, a vaginal moisturizer and lubricant.  We like that the product is 100% natural, which is a huge change for these types of products.

Another huge change is in how we built the site. We’ll be adding features and a lot more content to the site over the next few months, but even this temporary site has a lot going on.

Social Networking

We implemented an easy-to-use “Tell A Friend” feature in the footer that lets people share the website with their friends on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and through Email.

Web Standards

The site is 100% web standards based. This means it’s accessible, easy to use, and a lot more search engine friendly than the typical website.

We’ve been standards advocates for a long time, but for this project we took a lot of tips from Andy Clarke, and his most excellent book on creating CSS-based websites “Transcending CSS“. Andy codified a lot of the newest techniques that a modern web design company should be using in their work. Thanks, Andy!

CSS3 and Graceful Degradation

We’re starting to implement CSS3 into our websites, where possible. If you view the site through modern browsers like Firefox, Chrome, or Safari, you’ll get rounded corners and other CSS3 goodies. If you’re on IE8 or IE7, you still get a pretty site that takes advantage of transparent PNGs for visual effect.

And while the site works just fine in IE6, it doesn’t look as pretty as it does in modern web browsers. The client agreed with us that we could finally not worry so much about perfection from a web browser that’s circa 2001. Just like Facebook and other sites.

We’re very pleased, and can’t wait to show you the forthcoming “version 2.0″.

By the way, the “version 2.0″ of the Luvasil website will be powered by ModX.

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PATRICKORTMAN, INC.

We're the Los Angeles, California interactive and digital agency led by Internet pioneer Patrick Ortman.

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