We are pleased to announce the launch of our latest makeover!

Southview Design came to us several years ago (through our friend Kristin Kowler at Genius to Go) in search of a clean, professional site that reflected the caliber of work which they were producing in landscapes. The new site not only improved their image, but made their team proud to share it. That was the site design “version 1″

Just yesterday we launched the all new Southview Design, while the previous site was plenty good they sought a more interactive and engaging user experience – and to continue to their already strong search engine presence. The new site features a striking new look, continually updated project slideshow on the home page, and intuitive navigation scheme. The project gallery allows visitors to explore by image – or quickly filter the list of landscaping projects by Service or by Price.

With this new site Kristin has again provided powerful and effective search engine friendly content, which will continue to build upon the already strong search engine presence Southview Design enjoys. Coupled with the ultra-clean site code and site optimization techniques employed in this go-around we wish them much happiness and success with the new site.

And just in time for Spring!

It wasn’t long ago that web developers obsessed about page weight (the total file size of a web page’s HTML, images, scripts, CSS, etc..). The “lighter” a page, the faster it would download, and presumably offer the user a more enjoyable browsing experience.

With everyone on lighting-fast Internet connections, optimizing page weight has fallen by the wayside. When I was developing content heavy sites for publishers in 1999 we would typically keep pages at 50k or less. At that size even modems users would find the site usable.

Today I did a quick survey to find that many popular sites are over 300k (3x the size recommended by HCI).
www.cnn.com: 631k
www.abcnews.com: 331k
www.cnet.com: 533k

This, of course, is no problem for users on dual-core machines connected to DSL. But many people now surf the web from mobile devices, with much slower processors and Internet connections. With the popularity of these devices, it’s almost as if we have been hurled back in time to the days of modems.

The solution may be to re-visit these optimization techniques from days of old, or to operative twin sites, one being specific to mobile devices. Whatever the answer may be, I beg you, as a mobile surfer, please put your sites on a diet.