One of our clients is an assisted living facility here in Salt Lake City, Utah. Our primary contact, Virginia Echevarria, has written a book on caregiving called Caregivers and Would-Be Caregivers. You can download the book for free in PDF format or by a hard copy for $10.95 through her website. I’ve only read portions of it myself, but much of it appears to be a collection of stories about experiences various caregivers have had and some of the difficult choices they’ve had to make about caring for their loved ones. If you’re a caregiver yourself or likely to become one soon, or if you know someone in those circumstances, check out the book and pass it along. It’s pretty short, so there’s not a lot in the way of tough reading.

Since 1999 we’ve done a lot of web development and online marketing work for a lot of different clients, and we’ve become more experienced in certain industries than others, namely; self storage, venture capital, and law firms. While we can certainly design a great site or provide SEO for any type of company (although there are some types of companies we won’t do work for…), we have some special expertise when it comes to these three industries. We just launched a website for Price Self Storage in San Diego which is a good example. There’s not much we haven’t done for this company. We reworked their brand just slightly, designed a new website, built a content management system, integrated the site with Centershift’s self-storage management software, and we’re providing ongoing PPC management and SEO services. Oh, and we designed and built an awesome Flash piece that allows users to choose the right size storage unit.

When it comes to venture capital, we’ve worked with almost every venture capital firm in Utah, and some outside the state as well. Plus I’ve had plenty of dealings as an entrepreneur with VC firms and angel investors and when I was a college student at BYU I won the business plan competition there, so I know a bit about the industry.

In the legal industry we’ve worked with several law firms providing everything from website design to SEO to content management. We’ve created micro-sites to bring in leads for a specific class-action lawsuit, and we’ve done overall marketing for firms like Strong & Hanni and Siegfried & Jensen.

Due to our experience in these three areas, we’ve created three new pages on our site to promote our experience and show off our work in those industries.

• Self Storage
• Venture Capital
• Law Firms

Once again, this doesn’t mean we’re only focusing on these industries and don’t want clients from other industries, it just means we have something additional we can offer these niches beyond the normal and phenomenal services we provide everyone else.

We’re proud to announce the addition of the Utah assisted living facility Highland Cove to the roster of MWI’s SEO clients. We’re starting out providing search engine optimization services but will likely expand into providing search engine marketing as well, and perhaps we’ll be providing a new website design in a few months. To start out, we’re doing the standard SEO stuff, including an overhaul of the site to get it into standards-based XHTML/CSS, switch graphics out for text, and modify the directory structure.

About Highland Cove

Highland Cove, based in Salt Lake City, Utah, boasts 14 acres offering complete seclusion from the busy streets. The beautiful apartments look out on ponds, trees, shrubs, lawn and a putting green. South-facing apartments have a full view of the Wasatch Range and Oquirrh Mountains. Highland Cove offers a continuum of senior care, from completely independent living with housekeeping, meals, and activities, to assisted living with medication, bathing, dressing, grooming and incontinence assistance along with meal escorts. In 2008 they were awarded the 2008 Best of State Medal for independent senior living.

I’m not sure the last time I was so emotionally invested in the launch of a website, so I’m quite proud to unveil the new Price Self-Storage website. This site has got it all. A slight re-work of the brand, a new website design, Flash size chooser (check it out from the graphic link on the homepage, it’s pretty neat), content management system (still being finished up, actually), and integration with Centershift’s software for managing self-storage facilities. Price Self Storage has several locations in Southern California and one in the Bay Area, and now that the site’s launched we’ll be doing ongoing search engine optimization and marketing work to drive traffic and get as many customers signed up as possible.

Although we’re still ironing out a few kinks, it’s probably done enough that we can announce the launch of a new ecommerce site for one of our clients, TIW Jewelry, who is selling tungsten rings online under the simple brand “Tungsten”. We developed the branding elements, the website design, and coordinated the ecommerce integration for the website. The website, at TungstenRingsforMen.com, uses Magento for ecommerce.

I’m not 100% sold on Magento, but I have to admit I’m fairly impressed with it so far, especially since we’ve had some horrible experiences with other ecommerce platforms in the past. Magento was relatively inexpensive to implement, and is fairly simple to administer. It also includes a decent set of features to aid with SEO efforts, which is critical for this client.

We’ll also be doing ongoing SEO work for this client. Of course it doesn’t hurt to have a domain with some good keywords in it. We just barely started and their site is already #9 in Google for “tungsten rings for men”. Of course we really want to get the rankings for “tungsten rings” which they only rank at #85 for, but give it a month or two and we’ll see where things are at.

This is very likely the first, although not necessarily the last, time we’ll ever use the word “colon” on this site, so I feel we have to take advantage of it and go for the gusto. Dr. Christopher was an herbalist and invented all sorts of  capsules, powders, extracts, oils, ointments, and such. He’s since passed away, but his family still runs the business of distributing his products worldwide, and now MWI is helping them spread the word through a new SEO campaign. Like Marketstar who I mentioned yesterday, this isn’t the first time Dr. Christopher has been a client of ours. They were a client a few years ago when we worked on their Life Balm website, then they paused their campaign, and now they’re back with us as we optimize several of their sites.

Apparently this is the month for old clients to come back to MWI. Here’s to more of that.

Marketstar is back on board as an SEO client. Not that they really left, per se, they just paused things for a little while, which turned into a year, but now everything’s approved and they’re back with us for all 2009, and hopefully beyond that. If you happen to own a $100M computer hardware company and need help marketing your wares, check them out. If you’re smaller than that, I’m not sure if you fit their target market, but check them out anyway.

Many, if not most of our clients are using blogs these days to help them communicate with their customers but also to boost the results of their search engine optimization efforts. Search engines love blogs, and it’s one of the easiest ways clients can boost their SEO visibility.

We recently launched a blog for an eating disorder treatment center called Avalon Hills. The blog uses Wordpress, and we installed and configured several Wordpress plugins including the All-in-One SEO plugin and the Post Notification plugin.

We’ve been managing search engine optimization and search engine marketing efforts for Workforce Solutions for a number of years now and we just recently launched a new blog focused on the HR outsourcing market for them.

The blog uses Wordpress, and we took advantage of several Wordpress plugins including the All-in-One SEO plugin and the Post Notification plugin.

More important than anything we did is the fact that our client is actually using the blog and posting on it regularly. While we can build a great blog, if our clients don’t use it then it’s like having a nice car that stays in your garage. Or what’s that quote? “Ships in a harbor are safe but that is not what ships are for.” I suppose that applies somewhat.

Some new web design case studies have been added to the site. Most of these have been done for some time, but it’s hard to get around to updating your own website, you know? We’ve added case studies for Unishippers, Poems Art, Price Self Storage, AEEC, and Artscape.

Price Self Storage is the most recent work and in fact the new site hasn’t launched yet, although the design phase is complete. We hope to launch the new site within a few days. If you think Artscape and Poems Art are curiously similar, there’s no mistake to that. We completed Poems Art and acquired Artscape as a client as a result of the Poems Art site.