Recently I have been working together with a client coding and styling of the all-new website for SeaCart 26.

The SeaCart 26 boat is a 26-foot trimaran made by Oceanlake Marine. They client were in need of a website where potential visitors could learn more about the boat and make a pre-order. The client had the design ready and my mission was to code the website.

The website is built on WordPress with plugins like WP Super Cache, Page columnist, NextGen Gallery, jQuery Lightbox.

A gallery was very important for the client, since they based their sales on 3d rendered images of the boat. NextGen Gallery is one of the most popular photo plugin for WordPress and is very powerful. With a little customization you can also create your own templates for viewing photos in galleries and slideshows.

As with every WordPress site the best SEO plugin “All in one SEO” is used. The plugin provides the very basic needs when it comes to SEO and is a must-have with WordPress! To split up the content from the loop “Page Columnist” is used. A neat little tool that uses the page-wrap function in WordPress to split up content in several columns. For SeaCart 26 a 2-column layout was used.

Gränby Centrum is a shopping mall located in my hometown Uppsala. They have just released a new updated design/structure of their website. Unfortunately they have not really done the job quite as good as you would hope.

The website is a lot better than the previous one, that was based on Flash and not very intuitive when it came to giving the visitor a worthy experience. Gränby Centrum is a big shopping mall with about 60 stores and 5 restaurants so my guess is that the agency who created the website could charge a good sum of money. Of course I can’t  know what the client wanted in this case, but what I do know is that if you are a webdesign agency you optimize a website for search engines. This isn’t the case for Gränby Centrum!

The first thing that came to my attention was the use of weblinks. A good URL structure is very important for the search engine to index the content. Instead of using “/index?pageId=1″ it should be something similar to “/about-this-site”.

Unique titles and inline content headers is another part that is used for the making the life of search engines easier. Every page should have a unique title in the header, and preferably it should be the same as the h1-tag that is used as a header in the inline content. Unfortunately Gränby Centrum doesn’t have any of the titles.

Luckily some SEO has been done for Gränby Centrum someway down the road, because the Serp is quite good overall. I’m not saying I have the perfect solution always, but as a webdesigner i’m not proud when a work has been poorly done. I just think the responsible of Gränby Centrum should do the job that is expected in 2010. =)