Journal: News & Comment

Recent website work

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Pacific Basin Shipping: A few weeks ago, Hong Kong–based Pacific Basin Shipping launched a new website. It was a group effort between some of the people at PacBasin—which has just started offering shares to the public—a few of us at Navarik (the company I work for), and Jeff Croft, a talented U.S.-based designer to whom we subcontracted much of the design and layout work.

Collaborating between four different time zones was challenging. Navarik's president Bill Dobie was a key part of the process, and he was in England and Norway for much of the time. Dave Shea and I were in Vancouver. Jeff lives in Kansas. To top it off, one of the PacBasin staffers was traveling, and was in Hong Kong, New York, and a few other places in between. There were very small time windows when people in Hong Kong/New York, Vancouver, Topeka, and London/Oslo were all awake and in the office simultaneously enough to make decisions on a single day. Never mind figuring out who was where on what day. Oh, and before the site launched, I took off on a pre-arranged holiday (without any Internet access at all), and Bill returned to Vancouver.

Yet somehow the result is a standards-compliant site that is attractive and easy to use, providing a good base for more complex development for Pacific Basin the future.

Siegel Entertainment: In a very different vein, Siegel Entertainment is a booking agents for entertainment acts (including my band) here in Vancouver. Their site is far from cutting-edge, but it is a great improvement over the previous version. Why? Because until quite recently, their entire site was a massive Flash animation, which meant that Google and other search sites couldn't see it at all. So when you searched for Siegel Entertainment Vancouver, you couldn't even find their site, even though they had one.

My contribution was, first of all, to point out the problem to them a couple of summers ago. Then they contracted me to convert the appearance of their print brochure into some basic templates, give them some instructions on HTML, and provide recommendations on how to structure the site. They built the rest themselves. So while it isn't what a whizbang web designer would create, it has taken the strong step of being visible to search engines, navigable on a variety of web browsers without requiring the Macromedia Flash plugin, and capable of having individual pages bookmarked, instead of just the home page.

Search Engine Submissions: I've helped a number of sites get themselves indexed by search sites more quickly or more effectively than they otherwise might have. Those include:

• The Candy Aisle
• Jolly Goods Candy
• Charnwood House B&B
• Beckett House B&B
• Canvey Equipment
• Prospera Metals

Some of them have had better results than others, depending more on the content of their sites and what kind of competition they face than on my efforts. At least, I hope that's why.

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