Interior Design Detective

The Interior Design Detective is a collaborative project between myself and the owners of KJL Interior Design, a local business specializing in personal assistance with interior design projects throughout the area. I was originally hired by KJL to make some modifications to their website, but my role evolved into assisting with the creation of an entirely new website containing articles and advice on all aspects of interior design. This website became the Interior Design Detective.

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Creating a website from scratch is not a minor undertaking. There was a time when creating a website consisted of writing a few lines of HTML, sending a link to the Yahoo directory, sitting back and waiting. Those days are gone and creating a good-looking, competitive website is a much more complex and involved process.

When I write a website (including this one), I normally write it about 95% from scratch, typing my customary HTML, CSS, and PHP files manually in a text editor. I can do this because I have followed web development almost since its beginning and have always remained familiar with the languages and concepts involved. Steve LaMontagne, the person I was working with on the creation of the new website, wanted to be able to help build and maintain it himself, but without the daunting task of learning and writing all of the necessary code. He opted to use a website-building tool called Site Build It! to create the website, and I familiarized myself with the tool as well so that I could add my knowledge and skill to the process.

We found that Site Build It! is much more than a web design tool. It provides advice on designing a website that is friendly to search engines and directories and is therefore more likely to be highly-ranked. While I consider myself skilled at website programming, I will admit that I was not as familiar with all concepts of site design, and had almost no familiarity with what it takes to get search engines to decide a site is worthy of being listed. So just as Steve was being educated on how a site is built, I was being educated on how a site is ranked. Concepts such as choosing keywords and giving them the necessary prominence on a website are not always obvious even to the technically minded, as I discovered. But Kathy and Steve are wonderful to work with, and through a lot of learning and working together on the project, we have grown the traffic to over 100 unique visitors a day and counting!

The project is on-going and new articles are added every week, so if you ever find yourself in need of interior design advice, I recommend taking a peek at the Interior Design Detective.