SFC Design Group

We had the pleasure of working with Bryan on one of his tournaments “Watercraft Challenge”. The main goal was to bring the website online in a cutting edge and functional manner within a reasonable timeline as the tournament date approaches. With websites like this, our graphic design team likes to feature black backgrounds that really make the website stand out from the competition. The website features online registration and secure payment processing.

The site also featured custom logo design.

Check out the live site:
http://www.watercraftchallenge.com

Often times a website will start with a logo design. The logo design process is the similar of the website, where we bring our ideas along with clients to pump out a highly professional graphic. Our professional graphic design team is ready and usually can get you a set of drafts within one week.

In a recent case, we spoke with Brandon of Fisheye Fishing Charters about his upcoming web project. While he had a logo already, it was lacking the cutting edge look he was looking to portray in his business. He supplied us with a couple pictures of his shirts and hats, along with a hand drawing of the logo.

While we loved the base of the idea, the logo needed to be redrawn from scratch to give it the look we had in mind. In this case we give the client a slight break on pricing since much of the logo idea was already done and we didn’t have to come up with several drafts and ideas.

Take a look at the images below that clearly display the before and after. Stay tuned for the website launch shortly.

This logo is 100% vector format and can be used in high resolution printing such as business cards and apparel.

In our business, we do logos and corporate identity almost daily for our clients. We only offer custom logo design in one form, and that is Vector format done in Adobe Illustrator.Vector graphics use geometrical lines, points, and curves to draw images and artwork. The advantage of a vector graphic versus raster graphics is that you can expand the image or graphic as large as you want without losing resolution. This is highly important when printing business cards, brochures, and other forms of print marketing in 300 DPI.

For web purposes we use 72 DPI and a vector graphic may not be needed, however it is always helpful to provide your designer with the vector form of your logo.

Converting a logo from .gif or raster format to vector format can be quite the task depending on the detail in the art. While Adobe Illustrator now how a trace program, we don’t use it nor recommend it. It is best to redraw the logo from scratch to capture the detail perfectly. Often times a designer will charge just as much as a new logo, as the time involved is quite significant.

Once the logo is completed, your designer will be able to provide your logo in vector and raster formats.

Here is an example of a vector conversion recent project of ours:

As you can see, a non vector image can get quite blurry and look unprofessional when blown up for print or even web use. By converting it to vector format, we never lose resolution and looks crisp at any size.

Our experience with SFC Design Group was great. Our charter business, www.strikezonefishing.com, needed a new website. Michael was great about asking the right questions in order to build the site the way we needed. He was professional and quick. He was always looking out for our best interest. Asking Questions and answering ours. Any delays on building the site were on our end, not SFC Design Group. Thank you to Michael and SFC.

Capt. Todd Sheltra
Strike Zone Charters
www.strikezonefishing.com

I was referred to Mike and SFC Design by a friend. I was looking to create a website for my soon-to-be-released book, but I am a computer novice - with my knowledge limited to e-mail and Word programs. Mike talked me through what he could do with a website and I told him what I was looking for. That was it!  A day later, I had a Home Page design - and within a week, we had a fully functioning website. The website is amazing - extremely user friendly and aesthetically brilliant. Better than I could have imagined. Most importantly, Mike has been more than helpful and generous with his time, updates and changes I wanted to make. Not only do I have a great marketing piece for my book release, but I am learning how to updates pictures, and my blog, which will only increase traffic to - and interest in - my product. Thank you!!

http://www.haleybook.com 

We have worked with many of our clients to achieve top search engine rankings for many competitive keywords.  In many niche markets this often is enough to dominate the market, however your competitors may pump away at great ROI’s (return on investment) by paying to be on top of you via pay-per-click advertising.

When doing a simple search in a major search engine, you may find one to three ads that are sponsored that appear above the number 1 ranked site.   These websites are paying to be in these spots in the various PPC (pay-per-click) advertising programs.  While the cost may be great, the return may be even greater.  You will also see the PPC advertisers on the right side of the page, all of which are bidding to be ranked on top of each other.

While your competitors would love to have your natural rankings, they definitely are not out of the game.   In establishing a search engine optimization plan and goal, your competitors have the ability to appear on the page they want for any keywords while going after natural rankings.  While the exposure is highly related to the amount of budget, PPC advertising can be extremely effective when in the right control.

Well, why do we recommend that our clients with good natural rankings use PPC in combination?  It is simple, to cover your bases and maximize online exposure.  You may be surprised to know that many users are trained to look to the PPC ads on the right side of the page for more relevant website pertaining to their search.   Where does this leave the hard working natural ranked sites?   We’ll just say that we are working with many of our clients to keep quality sites, hence strong natural rankings.  And once we added PPC to the marketing formula, a whole new sea of visitors and business flooded in.

It many cases, some sites just can’t get good rankings for all the keywords that they are targeting.  There may even be keywords that produce business for you that your site is no where to be found on.  This is where a good keyword tool and research comes in for your PPC campaign.

When we put up brand new sites for clients, they are all built around the major search engines and main targeted keywords.   However, nothing is going to happen overnight and instead of hiring an SEO company to go after the natural rankings, we would prefer to see you have a PPC professional working a highly optimized campaign for you.

You see we are in the business to help you gain business, and a professionally PPC marketing plan can give you results faster than any SEO plan.  We can generally get you started in a few days and have the potential customer on your site just as fast.  This will allow you to truly put your new website to the test, while going after natural rankings at the same time.

While we would like to be able to maintain this blog with the work we do each day, there just isn’t enough time to do it lately. Some projects we just enjoy doing so much that we have to take the time to speak about it.

Haley was referred to us by one of our good friends and colleagues. Looking for an appealing website to help promote her recent written book “What Though The Odds”, we knew the recipe needed. Most of our clients are just a true pleasure to work with and Haley was no exception!

The site features a custom design using our ideas along with her photographs and mentions. For functionality she has complete control of the website. With a blog/content management system and photo gallery, she can keep the web page up to date and fresh on her own.

Check out the live site:

http://www.haleybook.com