Melissa Marr, International Author & Best Seller

An introduction to one of our most delightful client relationships & how we solved her web problem.

Melissa has never been good at choosing just one path. After finishing high school with the dubious honor of being voted "most likely to end up in jail," she went to college and graduate school. There curiosity (and tuition bills) led her to the dual jobs of teaching and slinging drinks at a biker bar. During the daylit hours, she indulged in long literary chats; at night, she lingered with intriguing people with one word names.

Eventually, she went on to bartend at a number of other weird little bars, teach lit both live and online, and discover the joy of tattoos. All three have been great rushes. The latter borders on addiction, but is held in check by the desire to attend the opera without flashing too many tattoos.

So when Melissa contacted in2it, we jumped at the chance to work with this unique woman and up and coming author.

When she called, she had a site that was falling short of the mark for the form and function she desired. The existing design was a bit stale for her taste and wasn't quite "Melissa" enough.

In terms of the function, she needed her site to be SEO friendly (SEO = search engine optimization), and needed to be able to use it as her primary way of communicating to her readers and fans without using a slew of other, unrelated and separately housed online services.

The solution to her woes began with the total redesign of the look of the site. Everything was changed - from fonts to colors, layout to navigational buttons. The overall look and feel was reinvented from vanilla and expected to "this could only be Melissa's site."

The solution to her function complaints were a bit more challenging because it involved taking the functionality of other online services (i.e. forums, gallery) and customizing them inside melissa-marr.com. We ultimately attained her goal of communicating with readers and fans from one URL, eliminating the need for them to jump back and forth from her site to other sites she was using for her posts.

The site re-design and re-development has afforded her:

- a forum that is user-friendly enough that she posts new dialogues on a daily basis, boosting her rank in search engine results pages
- a news system that keeps visitors up to date on Melissa Marr happenings, as well as keeps the search engine bots happy
- a gallery that includes photos, tattoos, and book covers, which gets updated frequently
- a bustling e-commerce shop
- and a blog on which she writes daily and is read daily

All of these frequent updates not only have served to keep her readers happy and in touch with the author, but have also positioned melissa-marr.com as one that gets picked up by the search engines and ranked very highly on results pages. For more on the importance and benefits of maintaining fresh content, check out Content Is King in this month's new media section.

Since in2it's site revamp, Melissa's web traffic has more than doubled over a 5-month period from 2,500 visits in November 2007 to 6,300 in March 2008. In addition, Melissa has heard extremely positive reviews from her publishing company.

For more on Melissa visit melissa-marr.com.

With questions on all things techy, send Scott K an email.