Project Page: oahuwaterlilies.com
Services Provided: Website Hosting, Website Design, SEO
The concept for this website was to be fast and to the point. Ashley wanted a website that plain enough that it could be access in a web browser or a mobile device like a phone or tablet.
As a water lily enthusiast, she gets the most joy from the beauty of her plants. She wanted to be able to showcase some of her plants on her website.
The website represents a phone book of her social media with links to her different profiles across the web.
She also finds joy in helping others with their plants, so she wanted a feedback form on the page incase someone wanted to provide her with feedback.
Now for the nerdy stuff
As anyone that knows me, I am a maximalist when it comes to speed. To ensure that this site was as fast as could be, I host all of my sites on Amazon Web Services. I back this up with a CDN provided by Cloudflare. Theres a few other tricks that I use for optimization. The database is ran from a MariaDB instance, which has performance enhancements that exceed that of MySQL. The webserver component consists of an optimized version of Nginx which utilizes FastCGI Page Cache which is also paired with a Redis Object Cache. The end result is a blazingly fast response time.
Website Ranking (SEO)
Lastly, what good is a fast website if its not found by your potential clients? For this project, I had the opportunity to choose the domain name on behalf of the client. This made search optimization easy for our targeted keyword “Oahu Water Lilies”. Having the right keyword allowed us to get the page to the first page of google for that exact keyword. It is ranked 2nd only to be outdone by the almighty Facebook.
In case you didn’t notice by the screenshot above, that facebook page also links to my clients website. That is her facebook business page. To the right of the search results, you can see her Google Local Business page. Yes, it dominates that spot with no competitors because it was a direct search hit. For the content search, her site also held the top spots for images and videos
Since the publishing of the website, Oahu Water Lilies has enjoyed a stream of new customers searching exactly what they were looking for. It’s not about the quantity of the traffic, its the quality and people looking for lilies on Oahu found exactly what they were looking for.