MightyFunk

I’d like to men­tion that I have recently made a major web­site update to my Archi­tec­tural Ren­der­ings com­pany web­site, Lunarstu­dio. The over­all look and feel has stayed the same, but many of the images, as well as new ones have been updated. Sev­eral new cat­e­gories have been added includ­ing Sketchup Mod­el­ing Ser­vices and Cus­tom 3d Mod­el­ing Ser­vices.

If you have a spare moment, please check out my archi­tec­tural ren­der­ings web­site at:

Archi­tec­tural Ren­der­ings by Lunarstudio.

The orig­i­nal Lunarstu­dio web­site was setup before blogs ever came into pop­u­lar­ity, so keep­ing the con­tent “fresh” was always a bit of a man­ual chore ver­sus hav­ing a blog­ging sys­tem that makes post­ing new items eas­ier. It often involved resiz­ing sev­eral ver­sions of the same image, painful image crop­ping (I pre­fer to present art­work as it’s intended to be pre­sented), and cre­at­ing sev­eral dif­fer­ent HTML pages to accom­mo­date each image as well as key­words for the search engines.

Now, gallery updates are pretty much a cou­ple of minor steps instead. While it’s still not quite a blog per se, I can just copy code and pretty much plug in a new image rather quickly. The con­tent is also eas­ier to main­tain and nav­i­gate — no more brows­ing mul­ti­ple pages — it’s all con­ve­niently there at your fin­ger­tips using Lightview (a light­box Javascript code) that pops open unob­tru­sive windows.

As for the search engine opti­miza­tion, the code and the images are more stream­lined and eas­ier to nav­i­gate by Google, Yahoo!, and Bing spi­ders. By stream­lin­ing, I mean code opti­miza­tion or SEO. The images are clearly labeled with proper alt and title attrib­utes now. I found some code errors and fixed those as well as reval­i­dated the entire web­site. Over the past month, I’ve seen traf­fic increase about 50% and now place in the top 10 for over a hun­dred search engine key­word terms.

When I orig­i­nally set out to cre­ate the Lunarstu­dio web­site, I designed it many years ago with­out search engine opti­miza­tion in mind. The prob­lem with the site was that the design sat per­fectly cen­tered within a con­fined rec­tan­gle. It was also sev­erly lim­ited because the web­site is mostly an image gallery and port­fo­lio. Search engines have a ten­dency to really “like” text whereas my site didn’t have too many words but had many images instead.

After a cou­ple of years, I finally took the time to study up on SEO. I wanted to redo the web­site but was forced to work within the rec­tan­gu­lar, min­i­mal text para­me­ters of the over­all site design. The code “under the hood” became really messy, and the text on the pages were for­mat­ted to read like a search term — com­pletely inor­ganic and unnat­ural. I actu­ally hated (I know it’s a strong word) how it read.

Now that I’ve added more space and built the web­site ground up know­ing search engine opti­miza­tion bet­ter, I’d expect an increase in traf­fic and over­all rank­ing for my archi­tec­tural illus­tra­tor and 3d illus­tra­tion ser­vices — both of which I have seen for Google. It remains to be seen how the web­site per­forms in Yahoo! as well as Bing.

There’s a few more pages I’d like to men­tion in this post as they will help with the search engines and graphic-related terms. Please excuse my self-promotion but with the cur­rent econ­omy, build­ing and con­struc­tion has slowed down over the past year and every bit of link­ing helps. Archi­tects feel the pinch prob­a­bly more so than any­one else and ren­der­ing com­pa­nies are some­times last on their pri­or­ity lists.

Right now these pages are not get­ting indexed with PageR­ank and I’d like to see/test if a post here helps the search engines. These links are:

Lunarstu­dio Archi­tec­tural Ren­der­ings Information

Archi­tec­tural Ren­der­ing Services

Archi­tec­tural Ren­der­ing Pric­ing and Prices

Archi­tec­tural Ren­der­ings and Illus­tra­tions Clients

Archi­tec­tural Ren­der­ing Job Opportunities