Rich and Clever

Rich and Clever recently launched the redesign (and complete overhaul) of Schnetz Landscape, a Southern California landscaping company dedicated to creating dazzling environments out of each project. The site puts a new emphasis on their impressive portfolio, displaying several large images from selected jobs, and includes extensive information of the company, their philosophy and process.

We were provided with a hand crafted design and had the job of making it and the site’s content web-ready. As always the code is lean, flexible and very SEO friendly, but with Schnetz Landscape we went a step further to improve the site’s performance with clean URL’s.

If you’ve ever read a blog or shopped online you’ve probably encountered a URL like this:

www.domain.com?option=store&product=3001&view=cm

Everything after the “?” are variables (the “option” variable has a value of “store”, etc) which dynamic pages use to display the correct content. This is great because it allows information to be kept in databases, which makes it much easier to change and display without making a page from scratch for every product or post. But it also comes with problems.

Variables is a URL can give hackers clues to how the site is programmed, therefore making it less secure. URL’s should be easy to read and remember. These are not. Also, search engines don’t follow links with variables, meaning that content is never available for search results. Bad news all around.

The solution is a technique called mod_rewrite. I won’t go into the details, since these articles are for people who manage websites, not build them. But the simplest explanation is that mod_rewrite allows you to take a confusing URL like this:

http://schnetzlandscape.com/page.php?page=portfolio&portfolio=California+Casual&img=3

And turn it into this:

http://schnetzlandscape.com/portfolio/California+Casual/3/

Nice, huh? So when you ask about your new website, be sure to let us know you want clean URLs.

Possibly my favorite part of the design process for new and growing companies is the brand and logo development process. Often these people will have an idea in their head of what symbol or image should represent their company, and other times they already have a logo that could use some improvement.

After initial concepts are discussed we and the client will work through several iterations on a theme, sometimes deciding on something completely different than what we started with. It’s always an exciting and organic process, and it’s important to know your client’s work well in order to create a brand that will speak to their audience and leave a good impression.

Below are a few of the recent logos I’ve created or improved. Click on the thumbnails for full-size images.