TravelingWebGuy

Not your usual headline, especially for a web designers blog. But it’s more to intrigue you and get you to ask yourself just “what the hell am I talking about“. We’ve all heard a similar saying, “[something long and tedious]… is like watching water boil”. That’s how I’ve been feeling the past month or two, and more so now than ever. Since I put my notice in at work 3 weeks ago, time has been slugging on. Work days are long and boring which I will get into a little more later, evenings are slow and relaxing, and the nights are filled with thoughts and dreams of what my future plans are.

But what’s killing me… What’s making the 18 or so hours a day I’m up and working, is that I know in 6 weeks I’m flying out of the Country. I feel like I’m watching water boil every day, and even though I have the heat on high, the damn water just isn’t bubbling yet! (continue reading…)

RSV Home Page

So after a month in the review process and quite a few changes, I finally got the approval for the RSV Consumer website. You can check it out here: www.rsvtesting.com We are beginning to launch more and more consumer websites as way to reach out to the people are actually in need of the test, or they are looking for general information on RSV and possible symptoms. We currently also have FluTest.com, Colorectal-Test.com, FeelingSickFindOutQuick.com, and YKL40.com. These are all consumer facing sites meant as a source of information and guidance in these areas. Our corporate site is Quidel.com.

During the Design phase of this project, I worked on three separate home page templates each with their own look and feel. I do this because it helps give marketing a good look on what can be done, and how the placement of home page elements can drastically increase overall awareness of what the site is actually about. I always to try design my sites with an eye catching design as well informational and useful to the end user. Typically, a user makes their decision to stay on a site or not within the first 10 seconds of the page loading. Because of this, our home pages need to have the right information, above the fold, with a pleasing feeling to the eyes. If an end user reaches the site and doesn’t recognize any relevant information at first glance, they hit that back button and sub-consciously remember that the site wasn’t useful. I try to avoid this at all costs. And that word, relevance, is VERY important when it comes to Google SERPs ranking and ADWord quality score. I could dive into all kinds of technical data on Google keyword relevancy and quality scores, but the point of this isn’t to put you to sleep.

But back to RSV Testing. I started this project in September, I had it planned to be launched in early November. The hold that happened during November was the content. The PMM had originally sent the content through our normal approval process. It took about 3 weeks for that to happen. So by the time the site was ready for content integration, we were pretty on track. I got all the content, copied and pasted it into the sub-page templates, adjusted styles and images as needed, and was all said and done with that in a week. We had about two weeks left until the scheduled launch date so we were in good shape. Without getting into to much detail, there was some back and forth on the content that was being used, so Regulatory, Legal, and the Marketing department spent some time adjusting and fixing those concerns. And by this morning, all the changes were made and the site was lunched!