As a web designer at Digital Craft Consulting, having the opportunity to contribute to the company website’s design enhancements has been a rewarding educational experience. In addition to leveraging my background in digital media arts to add engaging video and animations to the homepage, I learned a lot about marketing and SEO by single-handedly building the website’s blog and city-focused service area pages.
Diving deep into on-page SEO, I gained practice writing keyword-rich meta descriptions and schema markup code. I also framed my design decisions around the needs of our target audience, crafting smooth user experiences for small businesses looking for a reliable and results-driven expert to grow their online presence.
Design Enhancements Using:
Homepage Improvements
To incorporate motion and provide more succinct messaging in the homepage’s hero section, I added:
Additionally, I revamped the homepage’s challenges section. While the previous design of this section featured a generic stock photo, my new design features LottieFiles animations I created using assets I customized in Affinity Designer and brought to life keyframe by keyframe in LottieFiles.
I also simplied this formerly text-heavy section by narrowing down the number of challenges to two (low online visibility and poor conversion rates) and mapping them to specific DCC services, conveying how the company is the solution to small business’ digital problems.
Building the Blog
Utilizing the full capabilities of Elementor Pro’s Theme Builder, I built Digital Craft Consulting’s blog so that its design would match the quality and professionalism of its content. Features of DCC’s single post template include:
Although I did not write the blog posts myself, I strategically contributed backend and frontend elements meant to increase authority and optimize the appearance of DCC’s blogs in search engine and AI results.
These included keyword-rich page titles, meta descriptions, alt text for images, as well as schema markup for each post. The author bio in the sidebar was also a specific ask from my boss to strengthen not only credibility and personal connection, but also SEO through Google’s E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) guidelines.
City-Focused Pages
To promote Digital Craft Consulting to their local service area, I designed and developed a set of city landing pages that covered 9 locations throughout the DC Metropolitan Area. After building a page template in Elementor Pro that highlighted the company’s differentiators, expertise, services, and social proof, I used Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) to tailor each page to its specific city with unique content such as a local success story featuring a client from that city/area.
Keeping in mind the goals of boosting local SEO and expanding the brand’s visibility in valuable neighborhoods, I incorporated intent keywords (e.g., “Bethesda, MD Digital Marketing Agency” and “Arlington SEO Company”) throughout each page’s copy and in title and meta descriptions using Yoast SEO. I also added LocalBusiness schema markup to each page to support search engine rich results.
Kind Words From My Boss
“As the owner of Digital Craft Consulting, I’ve had the pleasure of partnering with Ana across nine different client engagements. Over the past year, she has significantly elevated her UI/UX capabilities while also becoming a strong WordPress developer. I trusted her to redesign my own company’s website, which reflects the level of confidence I have in her. Ana’s work is of extremely high quality, and she is reliable, adaptable, and efficient in every project she takes on. Our clients say amazing things about her, often leading to follow-on engagements. Whenever I need design support, she is always my first call.”
– Zack Burstein, CEO & Founder of Digital Craft Consulting