Your website is one of the most important business decisions you will make. An understanding of the nuts-and-bolts of web development along with a recognition of how effective design creates an enjoyable user experience allows us to create designs that your visitors will respond to. We create more than websites, we create an interactive user experience through the art of presentation with easy-to-use navigation, attractive graphics, and professional animations. Whether you want a new site or a tune-up on an existing one, E. Curtis Designs provides you strategic, fully customized site design, and works side by side with you from start to finish beginning with a detailed appraisal of your web design requirements to the implementation of a comprehensive solution; as a result, your site will be one that truly reflects your personal vision and accurately meets your business needs.

E. Curtis Designs is a Sacramento Web Design Firm that specializes in low-cost website design solutions. We have tailored our services primarily for the smaller business and organization in need of a brochure website, and pride our self on being inexpensive while providing professional website and graphic design layouts. Our quality designs are always customized to our clients and reflect the best of the contemporary and traditional while utilizing the latest in advanced web scripting and design practices. In addition to our designer services, E. Curtis Designs also offers advanced SEO (search engine optimization) and website marketing, domain name registration assistance, and full website hosting. E. Curtis Designs is an industry leader in affordable design options that are always beautiful, inexpensive, and professional.

As a client of E. Curtis Designs you will receive free email and phone support and ongoing personal attention throughout the design process, and beyond. As the owner, I am always available to assist you personally, and can be reached during the day, evening, and weekends. We also offer complimentary services which include an existing website appraisal and free initial consultation, free phone and email support, registrar support, and link resources to scripts and applications of the best available on the web. If you have design questions, need a free and honest assessment of your current site without the pressure to buy, or are in fact ready to begin a new design, E. Curtis Designs can help. Contact us today to learn how we can help you achieve the most for your business or organization.

Whether you want a site with all the bells and whistles or one that is clean and simple, we'll make your site visually beautiful, quick-loading, and easy to navigate, holding your viewer's attention longer and tempting them to stop by often. Our approach to design is based upon the realization that a site must visually engage your visitors; for this reason we utilize the psychology of spatial relationships and color theory with your business image and target market in mind.

Banner, Logo, and Header Design

We design traditional and contemporary masthead/header graphics - both static designs, animated image slideshows utilizing JQuery, and custom Flash animations. As needed, we can also assist you with acquiring quality images, and repair and optimize your existing images for quality presentation and web use. We also create custom static and animated banner ads, and other graphical web marketing. If you need a logo for your business, E. Curtis Designs can create one that your customers will respond to, and will put in the effort to ensure that the design created will aptly reflect your company or organization.

Brochures, Flyers, and Cards

E. Curtis Designs can also design a professional downloadable PDF brochure, engaging promotional flyers, or business cards. We can create and edit Powerpoint presentations, and we offer PDF conversions of most document and image formats, image/document scans, and creation/editing of dynamic fillable PDF forms.

We understand that for a business to be successful it requires more than just having a professional website designed, it needs to be marketed effectively. We take the time to optimize all of our client websites and submit your website to the top ranked search engines (included in our standard design rate); and if the competition in your area of services requires more, we provide an advanced website submission and marketing service as well where we will look for every opportunity to get your name out there instead of just the common ones.

Search Engine Optimized

For your business to be successful it is necessary that your website be optimized for the search engines. SEO (search engine optimization) is essential for any website to achieve and maintain a high ranking. SEO is achieved primarily through the proper use of the metatags (found in the head of a page in source code view), keyword relationship and density, and accessibility tags. E. Curtis Designs has extensive experience with SEO and we optimize all of our websites for a prominent search engine ranking.

While many companies "promise" a high ranking, we do in fact deliver! The majority of our clients achieve a first page listing of Google and Yahoo after just a couple of months. Considering that most of these websites are either completely new (so have no history on the web), or they were ranked so low that they could not be found by a relevant keyword query, the quick success of our clients in this area is something we are very proud of. Take the example of "Sam's Signs and Window Painting". Sam is a Sacramento window and sign painter who wanted to be his own boss. He had worked for another company (Judy's Window Painting Inc.) who was consistently ranked #1 in the search engines by her time on the web and the utilization of yellow page ads, reviews sites, and other networking options. In a couple of months we had Sam's website ranked #2, just below Judy's. Sam was pleased with the progress, but wanted to be #1 (don't we all!), so again, we spent more time evaluating his niche market (professional Sacramento window and sign painters), and after making a few more targeted changes to his website Sam now ranks #1, #2, and #3 in Google and Yahoo for relevant keyword queries (took less than a year to achieve this placement). Of course his business has done extremely well since, and he is very pleased. You can view a screenshot of his ranking here. On a side note, another one of our clients also is shown on "Sam's" search, "Four Season's Painting"...another great ranking success story!

Social Media Marketing

Social media is becoming increasingly popular, and while there are many options, we recommend interactive blogs, Facebook, Twitter, submitting to forums, and YouTube. We can help you devise a social media strategy that will be effective and easy to maintain, and can help you set up an effective blog, create a custom Facebook page that will be engaging to your visitors, and include a facebook "like" button (or box) and your twitter feed into your pages.

In addition to Social Media marketing and integration, we recommend and can assist you with targeted e-mail campaigns through effective newsletters customized for your business model. Learn more about marketing strategies that work.

Google Tools and Analytics

We use Google Analytics to help our clients track their website progress overtime and make targeted corrections. Other effective options include Google Webmaster Tools (keyword query tracking and XML Sitemaps) and Google AdWords for the new business in a competitive market. Please note that we do not recommend paying for SEO marketing, traffic, or submission; in most cases, these "experts" are little more than charlatans.

Design scripting has changed considerably over the years in response to the transition from HTML to XHTML, the growth of Flash and jQuery scripting, and the benefits of content management systems. We use jQuery, JavaScript and DHTML, and Flash animation to ensure that your site is interactive and engaging, and through an exacting process we are able to incorporate rich images and dynamic pages without sacrificing short download time. For sites that require dynamic content, the ability to easily add new and change existing content, and an easy way to allow visitors to contribute to the flow of ideas we offer scalable PHP based CMS (content management system) designs.

XHTML/HTML5 Designs with CSS

Our early designs were created with HTML, while in the last few years our original designs were fashioned almost exclusively with XHTML in response to the change in web standards, and most specifically XHTML's addition of cascading style sheets (CSS). The current approach to design is accessible CSS (tableless) web 2.0 layouts that utilize the 960 grid system. Our current designs follow these recent conventions. Most recently HTML5 has become popular, especially for use with Mobile websites.

CMS Designs

CMS (Content Management Systems) are websites built upon an advanced scripting framework, most often PHP. Content Management Systems provide the ability to automate many of the dynamic scripting needs of clients, and is often used to provide an effective means for a site visitor to interact with the website; such interactive features include calendars, blogs, forums, e-commerce, newsletters, web directories, polls, a site search engine, and password restrictions. Another important element of CMS is that there is an administrative control panel that allows the owner to add/change content from any location that has internet access. We build CMS websites with the popular Joomla and Wordpress applications.

Template Layouts

Our designs are in most cases unique and custom works, though we do customize templates of quality if needed to best meet the specific needs of a client. Template designs are especially effective for advanced gallery presentations, mobile websites, and other Flash driven layouts. Note that current Flash designs are integrated with XML which allows for the addition and editing of images effectively over time.