Village Art Center Website

The Village Art Center is a local, small business in Fullerton, CA. They specialize in custom framing, have a large art gallery, and have about 2 shows a year. The owner/framer is extraordinarily talented at designing a frames and matting that are complimentary to the art work. Noticed by the local Museums, Galleries, and churches in the area he has created exquisite framing for these institutions, as well as for my own home. 🙂

The plan

Design and develop an easy to use responsive website to showcase the local framer’s services and art gallery. The shop had poor web presence, so a SEO and social media campaign were added to the services. The Village Art Center is a one person shop, and the owner’s time and resources were limited. So he wanted to focus first on the picture framing, and the gallery he would attend to later.

Getting results on the search engines for framing:

His first biggest concern was that he wasn’t getting any exposure on search engines.  Firstly, I updated and claimed the auto generated google places page and yelp page, and added a framing tag to them. This garnered results for his business on google within a week.

The next challenge was to redesign the existing, largely unusable, pre-fab website. It was unorganized, contained very little content, and had very large images that slowed down the site’s performance. Firstly, I employed an information architecture plan to drive potential customers to the right places and highlight the business strategy, and modernized and optimized the images for speedy loading. Secondly, I placed heavy emphasis on picture framing services in the text, in order to generate organic search results.

Social media

Fortunately, the previous owner had a Facebook page that he could take advantage of existing potential customers. Once we gained control of the page, we were able to begin making posts that highlighted his specialties, new framing ideas, art works that came into the shop, and invite his Facebook audience to the events. He was concerned that his customers were in the older generations, and that younger people (under 40) didn’t like to do framing, but I assured him that social media platforms like Yelp, Facebook, and Google place results were universal.

The results

Since his site launched 6 months ago, he is enjoying first page presence on search engine results, increased his Facebook audience, and has received several glowing reviews and stories from existing customers. I continue to post in a limited capacity to the Facebook page and update the site, but my recommendation is to increase updates to engage his audience more and keep the search engines up-to-date.

View Village Art Center website below