Typically July is a slow business month. The rush caused by the end of Q2 is now over and the businesses whose fiscal year ends on June 30th has passed. Everyone has summer vacations on their minds and summer holidays are capturing a good portion of everyone’s down time.

I am using the month of July to overhaul three websites and will take advantage of the parallel processes to provide insights and tips into good web design as well as the overhaul process. This posting is the first in a series that will hopefully prove helpful for those of you who are thinking of building a new website or redesigning an old one.

As this exercise is not a pre-planned process I don’t have a detailed roadmap to drive the blog postings but I will try to organize my activities into meaningful posts along the way. I do plan on talking about overall site design, content, keywords, design process, internet strategy, pay per click campaign, and Google Analytics and Optimization Tools. Maybe I will have enough time at the end to summarize my thoughts into more cohesive documents but for now they will have to be unorganized ramblings from a simple mind.

Like all good marketing exercises I have designed a way to track results before and after every change so I can measure the impact of each one. I have set up all three sites to run Google Analytics and have at least a week’s worth of data on the current situation for all three.

The three websites that I will be working on include one for a client of Ascend 6, one for my wife’s family therapy and invidividual counseling practice and creating an HTML version of the website for an amazing consulting group for startups called Ascend 6 (something that should have been done long before. Due to the privacy nature of my client I will refrain from mentioning the specific URL for that site but combined with the other two sites it should make for an interesting contrast as all three sites have different issues, serve different markets, and are in different states of use and disrepair.

The website for Acord Therapy is entirely HTML and is very small (only a half dozen pages) and very simple. It is mainly designed as an information site and will be used a little bit for lead generation. My client’s website is for a VAR who carries a dozen or so main products in the computer security industry. It currently has a flash main page with a dozen or so HTML pages to support it. This site has no search engine optimization (SEO) Work and only sees a few dozen visitors a day. The website for Ascend 6 is currently entirely flash and while I really like the look and functionality of the site, the complete lack of HTML makes it very difficult to find through organic search mechanisms. I hope that creating an HTML option for the entire site will boost it’s rankings in the search results page and make it more flexible moving forward.

I am looking forward to the opportunity of working on all three sites over the course of July but I am also taking a few days off to celebrate the 4th of July so will not post again until next week. Until then, have a great Independence Day and celebrate your many freedoms wherever you may be!