1. User's First Glance
Users generally look at the top left corner of your website first.  We make sure your company's essential information is there.  Your logo and tagline, as well as your offerings and a clear path for potential customers to follow.

2. Site Navigation
Keeping your site navigation easy to find and well organized allows visitors to stay on your site and explore further.  We put navigation in the usual places and make it obvious.  Our creativity will show your uniqueness in other ways, but we always follow the rules when it comes to navigation.  And, good navigation comes from careful planning first.

3. Company Contact Information
We ensure customers can find you when they need you.  Your contact information will be clear, accurate and easy to find.  Why make it hard for someone to contact you..?

4. A Call to Action
We identify the goals of your website and determine what it is you want visitors to do.  We make it easy to complete an online order or get more information about your company, services, or products.  Regardless of what content is on the page, we make sure to include a clear call to action.

5. Important Content Above the Fold
To keep visitors on your site and engage them immediately, we make sure important aspect are kept above the fold.  Why scroll if you don't have to, and many visitors won't scroll unless you convince them that it is worth their while.

6. Inviting Content
In order to attract visitors and develop relationships with your customers, you need to have them revisit your site often and get them to commit to you.  By offering something of value, a Blog, frequently updated products, tips, or useful information, your customers will return.  We have several recommendations for you to achieve this.

7. Well Organized Content Pages
Your visitors should not need to search for information.  We ensure your page layout is clear, concise and offers visitors exactly what they want without having to search for it.  By using fonts and colors to break up text, we are able to create a flow and position information so it gets read as you intended.  It all starts with planning and organizing your content before anything is written.

8. Visually Appealing
Although your actual content is most important, an attractive page layout will appeal more and be enjoyed by visitors.  We choose colors that work together, leave lots of whitespace to keep the page uncluttered, and line everything up to exacting detail.  Our skills make sure you make a good impression.

9. Be Sincere and Instill Trust
The number one factor on the Internet is trust.  We can ensure your website is trustworthy and your customers will be more likely to place an order or contact you for more information.  We do this with organic content that appeals to your target audience as well as the search engines.

10. A Highly Polished End Result
We pass all of our websites through rigorous quality assessment testing and ensure both the aesthetic value and spelling, grammar and layout is error free.  All of your information needs to be accurate and precise.  A clean, well kept website is like a clean, well kept storefront in the high-end shopping district.  By ensuring your visitors have faith in you, you are sure to attract more customers and covert more sales.

Contact us for more information about our Website Design and Development services.

We recently had the opportunity to meet with Lee Smith and Nicole Marchen, principals of Blood & Iron Martial Arts, and discuss their long-term vision for Blood & Iron, a Western Martial Arts school specializing in Historical European combat training. Western Martial Arts refers to the study and preservation, through training, of combat skills developed in Europe prior to the 2oth century. These skills include unarmed combat, grappling, and armed combat with the longsword, schiavona, falchion, rapier, dagger, shield, halberd and many other period weapons.

The Blood & Iron logo was designed to incorporate several iconic elements easily recognizable in the WMA industry. These illustrated elements include a basket handle schiavona sword, buckler style shield, and torc necklace. The logo design also includes a human skull (the epitome of human mortality) and some filigree to tie it all together.

We look forward to working closely with Lee and Nicole and providing the neccessary marketing required to make Blood & Iron a successful venture.

Leran more about ikrave's branding services or view more logo designs in our portfolio.

As a thriving business in the current soft-economy we recognize that in order to remain competitive we must focus on our core competencies, and as such we have streamlined our new website to reflect our most successful service offerings, which include:

• Branding - logo design and brand identity design (business cards, letterhead, brochures, sales materials, presentations, annual reports).
  
  
• Graphic Design - print designs (stationary, postcards, posters, booklets, pamphlets), sign designs (store front, real estate, concession), applied graphics (vinyl lettering, vehicle wraps), and printed banner, awning, and flag designs.
  
  
• Web Development - unique and custom website design, full custom web development in HTML/CSS and PHP, as well as full development for open source CMS and eCommerce solutions - Joomla, Wordpress, Magento Commerce, MySQL.

The company's newest website design has a vintage look and feel that was created as a reminder of how our field of graphic design for marketing & communications has a historic longevity in the world's economy.

We hope you find our new website to be both engaging and interesting, while remaining informative about ikrave and helpful when it comes to making a decision about your marketing and communciation needs.

If you are planning on having a new website created, and will be registering a new domain yourself, make sure you only register the domain and DO NOT purchase any hosting packages offered through the registrar at the time of the domain registration.  In fact, don't even seek out hosting until you have discussed your needs with your web developer.

You should leave the selection of your web hosting to the experts. When we build your website we know what technologies are required and can offer our recommendations. We don't require that you host your website with us, however we also do not support the myriad of control panels and user interfaces provided by the countless hosting companies out there. If we did, we would be spending costly amounts of time learning new interfaces, which vary so much from one to another that the task of understanding and effectively managing all these systems is daunting at best.

This leaves the task of supporting your website hosting to you and your hosting company. If you ensure that your own development environment is setup to accommodate our requirements then we can produce your website in a staging location on your own web server.  However, if your hosting environment is not setup to accommodate our requirements at the time of development, we will simply develop your website on our own development server, and once you and your hosting company are ready, we will migrate your website over to your web server for you.

Of course you always have the option of hosting with us. We provide top-quality web hosting solutions and support for all types of business websites. Feel free to contact us for more information or learn more about our web hosting packages.

The Motion Capture Society approached ikrave and requested a redevelopment of their static and antiquated website on an open-source content management system that would allow them to better manage their content and assets, while introducing new features and streamlining their current forum and wiki posting processes.

ikrave chose Joomla as the platform for the content management system, as it fulfilled all of the client's development and administrative needs.  Some of the functions implemented in the Joomla development included:

• Passphrase protected self-registration form for paying members
• Restricted access to certain content for members only
• Social event posting and archive
• Multiple newsletters and mailing lists sign-up and management
• On-site Blog with RSS feed
• Integration with existing MCS Forum