Starkmedia took home an Excellence Award from the Business Marketing Association of Milwaukee’s Bell Awards ceremony last week Thursday. Since this particular site was a labor of love for all involved in its creation, Starkmedia is happy to get recognition from a group of seasoned and influential marketing communications peers. Fortunately, the BMA - Milwaukee isn’t the only group who has noticed our new site. Clients and visitors alike have admired the site for its clean design and unique rich media features such as videos and an RSS newsfeed.

While Starkmedia is always thrilled to accept recognition for its design efforts, it’s the results of this web development that excites staff the most. During the planning phase of the redesign, it was Starkmedia’s goal to be found on search engines, especially by visitors searching for local web development services. When people were searching for Milwaukee web design firms online, Starkmedia’s site was visibly absent from the list of search results. As a company that specializes in web marketing, this definitely had a negative impact.

When Starkmedia decided to redesign its web site in 2005, Senior Designer Kristy Schomburg took the lead and made sure the site was built according to current web standards. She implemented CSS into the design not only because of the fresh clean look it produced, but also for its search engine-friendly nature. (See If You Build It, They Will Come? Think Again. to learn more about CSS.)

When the site first launched in December, Starkmedia took advantage of the paid search services offered by Yahoo and Google to give the site immediate exposure on the web. However, within the first quarter of 2006, the site was attracting more leads from local businesses than ever before. While the paid search campaign has helped in this vein, natural search rankings have done their share to pull in more targeted traffic to the site. For terms such as milwaukee interactive marketing, web development milwaukee, milwaukee web design, and web site development milwaukee, starkmedia.com appears on the first page of search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, and AOL. This has helped Starkmedia gain more exposure within the local marketplace and receive more clicks from visitors who are interested in the particular services we offer.

Schomburg attributes the web site’s success to the implementation of CSS. Along with her fellow work colleagues, she couldn’t be happier with the results. "I am glad our entire staff has embraced this progressive change in web development because it adheres to current web standards, creates new avenues for design ideas, and it really does perform well in search engines. After all why have a web site if it can’t be found?"