The main idea behind the site is to be a source for iPod related news, reviews, and technical information for fans of the popular portable devices, as well as to generate extensive organic traffic, and to allow the owners to publish their own articles, complete with dynamically generated RSS feeds. Along with this goes extensive search engine optimization and findability optimization that was integrated into the site.

Performance Workbench began as a joint project between BMC and nHive. BMC performed all design and development work, and nHive created the marketing and advertising campaigns. The site was designed with accessibility in mind by implementing a clean and simplistic zoom layout. Unfortunately, this project is currently on hold due to company budget constraints, but the existing site is fully functional and live on our servers.

The new website features a zoom layout which provides for optimal readability of content by allowing the viewable area to expand along with increasing font-sizes. This design technique is useful not only for low-vision users, but for all users who access the site by enhancing the reading experience. Instead of squinting or leaning in closer to the monitor to read a paragraph of text, just click the zoom button and the text will come closer to you. This feature is also useful for those with large screen resolutions or wide-screen monitors.

Zoom layouts, while uncommon, are typically simplistic in design and comprised mostly of text with few graphical elements inside of a single-column layout. BMC’s new flavor of this technique breaks with that tradition by implementing a clean, two-column GUI while minimizing unneccessary markup (XHTML) elements to render it. Though it is experimental and still undergoing QA testing, it has proven to display eloquently in most common browser / platform combinations.

This new website allows BMC to provide potential and existing clients with examples of many useful features that can be used to build or integrate with their websites. Soon to follow, BMC will redesign and release their web hosting site to showcase even more design and accessibility techniques.

The new site still has a long way to go inasmuch as adding content and features, but the release was approved for publishing based on design and adequate content, as well as the potential to attract new clients and organic traffic.

Nighsta’s new website will feature a redesigned layout in XHTML 1.0 Strict, CSS controlled presentation, and a brand new graphical user interface (GUI); all of which is being developed by BMC. The ultimate goal is to bring Nightsta into the ranks of such sites as MySpace and Match.com, but with its own flavor of networking power. The new version of Nighsta is scheduled to be released at the beginning of February, 2006 with many enhancements to follow. Stay tuned for follow-ups to this post.

The site was redesigned using XHTML 1.0 Strict, CSS 2.0, and PHP integrating Salon Matos’ existing logo and color scheme. A strong focus on search engine optimization has increased the website’s unique visitors and hits exponentially since its release, which has resulted in a great deal of new business for the salon.
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