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They say a doctor is his own worst patient and the saying holds true with most businesses as well. Our own internal projects are always the last to get attended to but we were finally able to squeeze in some design and development time to re-launch or own company website. Previously, we had a relatively thin site that showcased some of our portfolio by type of work, as well as a company blog. The two sites, however, had very different designs and layouts. As with most companies, when we launched our blog a few years ago, it came after our primary site was already done and it was put together without spending much time unifying the sites and their themes. Many companies end up taking this approach just because they are limited on time and resources and they really just want to get their blog up and running. They compromise on design and branding and the blog ends up being this orphaned website that does not match their overall corporate look and feel.

It’s important, however to constantly go back and refine and polish your brand and your look so that you are always presenting a unified and coherent look to your customers.

Even though we just redesigned our website last October, we wanted to keep things fresh. So a task that has long been on our own to-do list is now complete and we are very excited by the end result. Our main site, our portfolio and our blog are now all using the same global design theme and the navigation is unified and consistent across all pages.

For much of the site, we used Wordpress to manage the pages and content, as this is a superb content management system. We also separated our portfolio by type of work (website, photography, print and branding) and also by client and their industry. We think the presentation worked out well for us.

The lesson here, which is one that we also try to convey to our clients, is that your company website should not just be a “set and forget” one-time thing. It should grow with your company and be an ongoing project that is updated frequently and is part of your marketing plan that reflects your brand, products and services. Many companies just use their website as their online brochure that they create once but it can be so much more if you spend a little time building it right. It should be a tool that helps your business succeed, not just another to-do on your list weighing you down.

We invite you to browse through the refreshed presentation of our work, and as always, please let us know what you think… we love hearing your feedback.

Encinitas Foreign and Domestic Auto Repair (EFADAR), located right down the street from us in Encinitas, CA has been a Durrani Client since last summer. We recently re-designed and launched their website, converting an old constrained Flash site to a dynamic, graphic rich site where customers can make appointments instantly online.

In addition to website design, we often assist our clients with marketing and publicity throughout the year. When we work with a client, we become as knowledgeable and intimate with their products and services as possible, so naturally it becomes easy for us to promote and brag about them in an informed way when needed. Our staff can be called upon to draft press releases and send them out to media contacts and outlets nationwide.

We recently wrote and issued the following press release on behalf of EFADAR to announce their certification as one of the first environmentally “Green Stations” in California.

If you are in North County San Diego and need automotive repair services, EFADAR is your place to go.

Read the full press release below.

Read the rest of this entry »

Durrani Design is excited to announce the launch of the new website for Perfect Fit USA at www.perfectfitshop.com.

Perfect Fit USA is a new local personal training studio located in Carlsbad, CA. With their grand opening scheduled for May 2009, they are gearing up with a new website, new marketing materials and new promotional products.

The website is completely custom made from the design to the PHP programming. Our team designed the look and feel as well as all of the logos, artwork and branding. In addition to their websites, we has also created their entire business collateral package including business cards, brochures, mailers and even custom screen printed T-shirts (through our promotional tees division at www.teecompressed.com).

Along with the PerfectFitShop.com website, we are also in the process of designing several other online sites for them including an e-commerce storefront. Their future store, Kettlebells for Mommies (www.kettlebellsformommies.com) is currently under construction and is built using MIVA Merchant 5.5.

We’re excited to announce the launch of our latest web design project at ZENsei.com. ZENsei, a fellow local Encinitas business, joined Durrani as a client in the fall of 2008. At that time, they were struggling underneath the burden of an online store that was difficult to maintain and update, where months would go by before they were able get new product clothing lines posted on the site. They also wanted to create a fresh new Flash introduction to really showcase the rich details of their fashions. As we’ve said before, image is everything and online shoppers need to come as close to touching and feeling a product as possible or else you won’t get the sale. As an online retailer, you need to overcome the obstacle of your customers not being able to experience your product like they can in a retail store.

We started by creating a large expanding view flash runway for each of their seasonal collections to show each item in multiple full-size detailed views. This allows customers to really get in and experience the fashion. After launching the flash runway, we went right in to work on redesigning the website to match.

Part of the problem with the original ZENsei website was that it was built in osCommerce. Now, we’ve used osCommerce ourselves and it is a popular open-source shopping cart platform but, in our experience, for every benefit it has from being free and open source, there are equally as many negatives for maintaining it and trying to build a business with it. We’ll save the osCommerce versus other systems discussion for another day, but for ZENsei we put them into our favorite shopping cart of choice, MIVA Merchant 5.5. MIVA is an extremely extendable and expandable system will grow with any size company. The source design templates are simple to work with and maintaining the integrity of the core system files and maintaining security is much much more efficient.

So, after a few months of work, we have now launched the new website. At Durrani we are firm believers in rapid application development, which simply means getting the site up quickly so it is functional, operational and making money (or serving the other business goals you have set). You can always polish the look and tweak the fonts and colors and graphics once the site is live, but all to often, sites get delayed for too long to get things just perfect. Of course, we don’t ever want to merely launch buggy or poor quality work, but there is a right time to go live and we get there quickly. 

The economy is bad and continues to get worse. This is no time for businesses to roll into a ball and crawl under a rock. The marketing work you do now and plans you put in place will all be much stronger when the economy bounces back.

We invite you to sit back, relax and browse through the NEW ZENsei.com.

Sometime last year, I heard some rumblings on the web about a cool new online phone service called Grand Central (www.grandcentral.com). The lure was that you get your very own personal phone number and get to keep it for life. You could setup personal voicemail and have your calls forwarded to any other number. At the time, the rumblings I was hearing were complaints from the existing user base because Grand Central had reorganized and broken their prime directive – that you keep your number for life. They were arbitrarily reassigning new phone numbers to many of their loyal users. The dust settled and shortly thereafter a new story hit the wire that Google had acquired Grand Central. During this period I had signed up for my own account, not quite sure how I would use it, but needing it none-the-less because I am a sponge for the launch of anything new that is technology related. The other reason I thought I might find it useful was that I had moved to San Diego from Seattle and had kept my Seattle phone number. In a world where almost everyone is now on a cell phone and long distance calling is a non-issue, I didn’t see a reason to change, but occasionally have a local number can definitely be handy with business.

Now fast forward several months to this week when Google announced the re-launch of the Grand Central service as Google Voice. As an existing Grand Central user, I was happily surprised to receive an invite to upgrade my account. Google has kept everything that was good about Grand Central and turbo charged it with a few new features. Among my favorites are call routing – forwarding phones to different numbers based on who is calling; sending, receiving and storing SMS messages – independent of your cell phone provider; voicemail transcripts – Google translates your voicemails into emails; listen to voicemail, store and forward voicemail online; and several more very cool features.

Here is a run-down of the new service courtesy of the Google Voice website:

Google number – One number for all your calls and SMS

• Call screening – Announce and screen callers
• Listen in – Listen before taking a call
• Block calls – Keep unwanted callers at bay
• SMS – Send, receive, and store SMS
• Place calls – Call US numbers for free
• Taking calls – Answer on any of your phones
• Phone routing – Phones ring based on who calls
• Forwarding phones – Add phones and decide which ring

Google voicemail – Voicemail as easy as email, with transcripts

• Voicemail transcripts – Read what your voicemail says
• Listen to voicemail – Check online or from your phone
• Notifications – Receive voicemails via email or SMS
• Personalize greeting – Vary greetings by caller
• Share voicemail – Forward or download voicemails

Voice features – More cool things you can do with Google Voice

• Conference calling – Join people into a single call
• Call record – Record calls and store them online
• Call switch – Switch phones during a call
• Mobile site – View your inbox from your mobile
• GOOG-411 – Check directory assistance
• Manage groups – Set preferences by group

There are several other service providers out there that already provide some of these features but they require paid subscriptions and many don’t include all of the services in one nice package. I previously subscribed to services such as GotVoice to have my voicemails recorded as MP3 files and emailed to me, which I really liked, but I didn’t have enough call volume to really justify the monthly fees.

I’m excited about the possibilities of using Google Voice. Now the only thing I’m faced with is figuring out how to wedge the new Google Voice service into my existing workflow so I can take advantage of the cool upgrades. Visual voicemail with my iPhone is light years ahead of the old dialup voicemail, but it is very nice to just read the transcript via email or text while in or on your way to a meeting.

There’s no official word yet on when the service will open up for all new subscribers, but the Google website says “soon”.

Durrani is excited to announce the recent launch of the new Bumbleride.com website for 2009. Bumbleride is a leader in urban and stylish baby strollers for the young and modern family, and we have been proud to have them as a client for over a year.

For this latest redesign, we wanted to take advantage of the growing size of standard computer monitors and make the best use of this wider available space. A product website is the online showroom for a company and pictures are the most important feature. Customers aren’t visiting the website to write a research paper on baby strollers, they are there to view the product, compare specifications and buy. So we made sure to use big and bright images to showcase the features of the strollers along with their signature vibrant color lines. Making sure customers can navigate quickly to the information they are looking for is a top priority.

Also in the 2009 redesign is the expanded use of multimedia, both with flash video and image galleries. Although Durrani was not responsible for the actual creation of the videos or the product photography, we did ensure that the presentation of the videos and the theme of the flash players themselves seamlessly integrated into the new site design. Using the colorful and playful Bumbleride lifestyle photography, we also created a new short flash movie introduction to set the right tone and mood that is important to the Bumbleride brand.

For the technical aspect, the site was built entirely custom from the ground up using PHP, HTML, CSS, Javascript and Flash components. Certain content sections of the site are also being delivered from a MySQL database. A Wordpress blog is also integrated completely into the global design so visitors can pass seamlessly between the blog and main product pages.

As with any website, a business needs to first ask themselves, what is the purpose and goal of building the site and what is the call to action for the visitor? What is the intended result of having a customer visit the website? With Bumbleride the answer is to promote their brand and laser-focused image to their audience, showcase their baby strollers in the best possible and most attractive way and increase sales directly or indirectly through their distributors.

In a world where people’s attention span is growing smaller and smaller as we are bombarded with an overload of information, you have to be quick and concise in your message. Less is more and image is everything.

Visit the new Bumbleride.com

Restaurant Depot is one of the largest national restaurant equipment & supply wholesalers with over 70 retail locations across the United States. Their newly-established web sales division decided to re-launch their online e-commerce store and chose Durrani as their partner for this project. We gave the new web store a fresh new custom design and developed it using the MIVA Merchant 5.0 shopping cart system, which we heavily customized to support their growing store, already stocked with over 4,000 products.

Here are the before and after shots of the RD Store website (previously International Food Services Equipment). Their website can be found at www.theRDstore.com

We are excited to announce our new partnership with Estey & Bomberger, a leading California personal injury law firm headquartered in San Diego. Expanding into the legal field, Durrani was chosen to create their new logo, branding, print collateral, and website design. We are honored to be chosen from among several agencies to take on this project and are excited to show you the results in the coming months.

Encinitas Auto is a giant in the auto repair industry, certainly in Encinitas and also throughout North County San Diego. They have been in business in Encinitas since 1988 and are very active in the community here. They came to us for a redesign of their image and online presence, so we created a new logo and a dynamic website with an online booking form, as well as print advertisements. We’re happy to report that they love their new look and are seeing success and improved client satisfaction from their new website.

Here are the before and after shots of the Encinitas Auto website, completely designed and developed by Durrani Design. The site is built using HTML and PHP and can be found at www.runcarrun.com.

We’re excited to announce the launch of our newly designed Durrani website! Jump over to our main site at www.durranidesign.com and check it out.

It’s been almost a year and a half since launching our previous site and a lot has happened since then. Our client list has expanded and our talents and abilities have grown, so we’ve been long overdue for an upgrade.

The new site greatly improves the presentation of our client portfolio, organized by web design, print design and photography. The site is also built around a MySQL database for quick and efficient updating of information. As time went on, we found it more and more difficult to showcase the designs we are proud of to our perspective clients. Now we can post our latest and greatest works online immediately. Every business needs a showroom.

One of the biggest limitations many companies face is having a website that is out-of-date and hard to maintain. Their site doesn’t keep up with the growth and pace of their business. It’s important to make sure your company website is a tool for your marketing and sales departments, instead of overhead or just one more “to-do” obstacle for your staff to manage.

We invite you to browse through our updated portfolio and tell us what you think.