HWG State of the Group

Posted in: Blog, Graphic Design, Hawaii Videos, Maui, SEO, Social Media, Testimonials, Twitter, Web Design by MauiHawaiiUpdates on February 4, 2012 | No Comments

Here at Hawaii Web Group, we believe in being transparent.  This is why we’ve decided to issue a yearly “State of the Group” to let our clients and our ohana know where we stand.  See Previous State of the Group.

2011 HWG Traffic

After reviewing our analytics in 2011, we’ve found that our small network of Maui/Hawaii websites (owned and operated by HWG) brought in the following traffic relative to previous years.  All of the numbers below come from Google Analytics.  (If anyone shows you numbers for their sites that are derived from some other analytic program, be wary!  We only trust Google for this.)

Increase in traffic

In the last 31 days, our websites have increased in traffic by over 47% across the board.

In February of 2013, you can expect a similar report.  On this new report, you’ll find that the numbers above will have increased substantially.  Our goal is to grow by around 50% every year for the next 5 years.  Our goal is to market our islands while maintaining an educational emphasis.  We want our visitors to leave with more than just a tan.  We want them to leave with a better understanding of the unique culture and environment that we love on the islands.

New websites built in 2011

MauiWebCameras.com – This site shares the webcameras of Maui by area of the island.

In 2011, we concentrated on building up our social profiles and growing our blogging community.  We also did a few side projects for clients: Haleakala Bike Company and Auntie Snorkel.  We also began building a website about Molokini, which is still in progress.

The Social Web

In 2011, we’ve been extra busy socially on the web.  We’ve built 2 new social blogs and we’ve been diligent with Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Foursquare, and more.  Below are some of our growing numbers.

Outsourcing

We still have yet to hire anyone not on the island of Maui.  All of our independent contractors reside and work on the island of Maui, Hawaii.  We believe its important to keep jobs within our own State.

Overview

All in all, we’re very happy with what our efforts have produced in 2011.  It’s been more work than we’d ever imagined, but the feedback from our clients and our increased numbers above make us feel like it’s all worth it.  How do we do it? The old fashioned way with a lot of HARD WORK. We believe that nothing worthwhile comes from shortcuts. We build the best content possible and focus on our visitors. If they’re not happy with what we give them, the page (or site) will come down. Overall, we want our impact on the web to be positive in a way where our visitors appreciate the work we’ve done and share it with friends.

We’re looking forward to sharing our numbers again in 2013!

Maui Web Design

Posted in: Blog, Graphic Design, Maui, SEO, Web Design by MauiHawaiiUpdates on October 1, 2011 | No Comments

We’re building websites for clients again! We know, it sounds strange that at one point we had even stopped.  I’ll explain:  We took a short hiatus from designing websites for clients in order to concentrate on our own network of Hawaii websites.

Now we’re back and building!  Our goal is to build no more than 6 websites per year.  because of our detailed methods involved in designing, we can’t take as many clients as we’d like.  Below we’ve listed a few prerequisites required of our clients.

1. Flexibility – This is very important.  Hawaii Web Group builds websites for local businesses in order for them to grow their exposure and brand.  Ultimately, the website has to help the business become more popular and increase their sales.

This means that we have to have the final say in design.  Again, this sounds strange.  You know your business, but we know the web.  If you want someone to build a site exactly as you want, we recommend you find different designers.  We’ll do everything in our power to make your site look the way you want, but some things shouldn’t be done if you want to reach the largest amount of your ideal visitors.   You have to trust us.

2. Content – You know your business better than we do.  We need you to write the content for your pages before we even start.  This point will make or break a business relationship.  Right off the bat, I can tell you that most people we deal with are amped to begin the project and ready to pay, but they’ll never get us the materials we need.  This kills the project. We can make things up for your business, but it won’t be entirely accurate, it will take longer to write and fix mistakes, and it will cost you more for us to write it.

3. Commitment – Once you’ve decided to go with us, you need to be committed 100%.  When we need your input, you’ll need to give it to us in a timely manner. That means getting us answers within hours, not days.

I know this sounds strange to have prerequisites for clients, but we have high standards for what we build, and it takes time.  If we’re going to build, we’re going to do it right!  Give us a shout!

CS5 Photoshop Tutorial

Posted in: Blog, Graphic Design, Hawaii Videos, Web Design by MauiHawaiiUpdates on April 5, 2011 | No Comments

Here we’ve made a tutorial of a new logo Hawaii Web Group built for a new surf/skate shop opening up on Newport Blvd. in Southern California.  The logo will be featured on the homepage of Newport Surf until the new site is completed.

Video Transcription

Aloha and welcome to Hawaii Web Group‘s CS5 Photoshop tutorial.  This is a sped up version of a logo design for a new surf and skate shop on Newport Blvd  in California for Newportsurf.com. Here you can see us using the 3D text tool where we’re tweaking position, perspective, and adding spotlights. To do this, you have to go to 3D, Repousse, and then Text Layer. If it won’t let you because it says you have a faux bold text, go ahead and select the text with your text tool, and then right click and then toggle off the faux bold. When you do finally render the text for spotlighting and shadowing, make sure you have a lot of time because it takes a while.

Here we’re extending the background because we don’t have enough room, and we’re positioning the words to fit better and look like they’re kind of sitting on top of eachother.

What we’re gonna do is fill in each letter, so we’re not really interested in what the front face looks like other than having it be clean and white.  There’s a lot of different ways to do anything in Photoshop.  And here we’re using it for the web so we’re not too concerned about the high high quality you might need to print something. Read more…

HWG State Of The Group

Posted in: Blog, Graphic Design, Hawaii Videos, Maui, SEO, Social Media, Twitter, Web Design by MauiHawaiiUpdates on February 3, 2011 | No Comments

Here at Hawaii Web Group, we believe in being transparent.  This is why we’ve decided to issue a yearly “State of the Group” to let our clients and our ohana know where we stand.

2010 HWG Traffic

After reviewing our analytics in 2010, we’ve found that our small network of Maui/Hawaii websites (owned and operated by HWG) brought in the following traffic.  All of the numbers below come from Google Analytics.  (If anyone shows you numbers for their sites that are derived from some other analytic program, be wary!  We only trust Google for this.)

Increase in traffic

In the last 31 days, our websites have increased in traffic by over 55.92% across the board. Read more…

Haleakala Observatories

Posted in: Blog, Graphic Design, Maui by MauiHawaiiUpdates on | No Comments

Haleakala Observatory - Click to Enlarge

Incongruous in the cinder desert, like a science-fiction movie set, this cluster of white-domed buildings connects Haleakala to outer space.  The domes house powerful telescopes for the defense and scientific communities.

Observatories were built near the highest point on Maui because the site offers the fourth-best viewing conditions on the planet.  Here above the clouds the atmosphere is clear and dry, with minimal air and light pollution. Read more…

Keeping Your WordPress Blog From Being Hacked

Posted in: Blog, Graphic Design, Web Design by MauiHawaiiUpdates on December 8, 2010 | No Comments

So, over the last 6 months, every WordPress blog I’ve set up has been hacked in one way or another. It sucks. I thought I was doing everything right, but apparently I didn’t do enough when it comes to security (you can never do enough!) The following are some of the things I did to help secure my sites from malicious evil bastards. Keep in mind that these things can help secure your site, but as far as we know there is no way to keep hackers 100% from getting into your site.  These measures merely make it harder for them, which will hopefully persuade them to move on to another WordPress Blog that isn’t as secure as yours. Read more…

WordPress Themes

Posted in: Blog, Graphic Design, Maui, Web Design by MauiHawaiiUpdates on | No Comments

I used to use free themes for my wordpress blogs. Some work well, others are riddled with problems (often, you get what you pay for.) The last one I used worked very well, but it had a broken link to their own development site in the footer of every page. Seriously? How does a theme company screw this up out of everything they could screw up? It was engineered to where I couldn’t easily fix it, plus, they wouldn’t let me reverse engineer anything due to copyright. Read more…

Maui Maps

Posted in: All Sites, Available Ads, Blog, Graphic Design, Hawaii Videos, Hawaii Websites, Maui, Personal Favorites, Projects, Twitter, Web Design by NORBERG on November 15, 2010 | No Comments

The Client: Hawaii Web Group LLC

Project Description: This is one of our favorite websites ever made.  We think our visitors are going to love the Flash interactive map on the home page.  Each location and activity page has a Twitter feed for each subject, video, photos, local tips, and detailed information.

Feel free to poke around and enjoy the site.  We’ve spent a lot of time to make it great.  Mahalo!

Visit Website: Maui Map

Maui Sailing

Posted in: All Sites, Available Ads, Blog, Graphic Design, Hawaii Websites, Maui, Personal Favorites, Projects, Web Design by NORBERG on October 4, 2010 | No Comments

The Client: Hawaii Web Group LLC

Project Description: We used a premium domain name to secure a URL that can be identified as an authority for this particular activity.  The site has some custom-built maps of the harbors as well as photos, directions, information, and a list of the many sailing tours available on the island.  The site uses pure CSS and HTML.  We used really clean and lean code and we’ve featured some new additions that add to the overall fun of the site.  (We like that the sails are transparent!)

We plan on promoting this site and getting it to #1 for most all Maui Sailing keywords.

Visit Website: Maui Sailing

Slimy Webmasters & SEOs

Posted in: Blog, Graphic Design, Maui, SEO, Web Design by NORBERG on September 29, 2010 | No Comments

Recently, I’ve had to let go of a very large SEO and Web Maintenance client due to our little company picking up too much steam in other directions.  We felt it necessary to help our former client find replacements that will suit their needs.

Understandably, we’ve never looked for webmasters or Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Experts before because that’s what we do.  As we contacted dozens of companies in Hawaii, this is what we came up with:

• A few solid quality companies
• Many companies that wouldn’t get back to us
• Many companies that took a week to reply to our inquiry
• Many companies that claimed they have experience doing SEO, but clearly don’t
• Many companies offering web design that would make my cat puke
• A few companies that are based on the mainland, but have satellite sites for different states.  (Their offer was very generic, over-priced, and didn’t feel honest.)
• And then a few slimy webmasters (see below)

The slimy webmaster

I have to share this quick story.  I asked for a list of websites that they’re responsible for the SEO paired with the keywords they had gotten up in the rankings. Read more…