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Career-Magic.com Launched

New CareerMagic Website Design

An updated website for a Denver career coach

CAREERMagic came to Katz Web Design to give their website some fresh blood.

When Career-Magic.com was last updated, I was in high school.  Yes, it’s true — and I said it. The website not only needed updating visually, but there were a lot of parts of the website that needed to be better integrated with how the business ran.  The new Career-Magic.com website launched last night.

Here are a few of the ways KWD improved the CAREERMagic website:

An usable shopping cart, please!

CAREERMagic offers many services, and were processing all their transactions using a hand-operated credit card machine. They wanted their process to be streamlined, for their own sake, and also for their customers.

Don’t you want control over content?

Since the previous site was built using static HTML pages, every time Tracy wanted to update the website with a new article or content, she had to manually make edits to code, add the link on the articles page, rename the page, etc…It was a hassle.

The new website is built using WordPress as a CMS (Content Management System), and allows her to update every page’s content, add new blog posts, and change the banner image and text on her own.

Custom post types for testimonials

Using the More Fields plugin, KWD set it up so that when Tracy wants to add a new testimonial, she won’t have to think about it: instead of going to Posts, selecting a category, and formatting the testimonial properly, she simply clicks Testimonials, and the Reference Name, Reference Location, and Quote fields are ready for her. 

Once she adds a testimonial, it’s added to the Testimonials page, and not shown in the blog.

SEO sure would be nice…

The new website is super SEO-friendly.  A few obvious (to SEOs) yet notable features of the site:

  • The logo uses image-replacement and is a headline on the home page, and a paragraph link on other pages, allowing each page to have the most content value for their own keywords.
  • Each page has multiple customizable SEO-valuable variables, allowing a rich mixture of optimized keywords the client can use:
    • Custom page title (in the navigation)
    • Custom headline
    • Custom title tag (what Google will display)
    • Custom banner image & text — have a different banner message for each page

2002 is a long time to wait for a redesign

The old CAREERMagic website looked great in 2002, which was the last time it had been refreshed. It was also a solid design launching pad for the new look and feel, but it had to go:

Career-Magic.com Before Denver web design

All in all, this website was a smooth development process, and I’m glad that it’s up and running.  What do you think of it?

4 replies on “Career-Magic.com Launched”

I know this site has been up for a while and I wondered if you had done any A/B testing with the big image on the home page and the text in the Main Image area? I would be curious if a photo of the owner or staff photos rather than the stock photo of smiling faces would sell the trust and authority better.
Just looking for feedback because I have a HR client that I’ve been dying to switch to this kind of a site (staff photo not stock photo), but have gotten resistance. Client’s in denial though – even the sales people don’t care at all about the website because it never keeps up with what positions are truly the hot ones. Sales guys feel the website is a nice little vanity project for the boss! Yeah, $20K a year in upkeep/ SEO/ agency hours/ marketing costs.
Anyway, just wondered if you had any thoughts now almost a year out…

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