Redesigning Our Murder Mystery Website For Today's Users

Our company provides professional entertainment for dinner theater, private parties and company events.  We specialize in interactive theater like Murder Mystery shows and games, strolling magic and clean live comedy.  Our website is often the first look people have of our company.  It needs to be top notch, fully functional, easy to use, informative and of course entertaining.

From creating the events, casting, rehearsing, performing, coordinating with clients, finding props and maintaing costumes to answering phones, keeping the books, marketing advertising, maintaining the website, it seems that running a small entertainment business in California requires 12 to 14 hour workdays 7 days per week.  A good, informative website cuts the workload tremendously.  It provides customer service, ordering options, acts as a receptionist, etc.  Without a good site we would be doomed.

So, this week we took a good hard look at sharpo.com.  We asked some tough questions of ourselves and came to the conclusion that it was time to make our site sleeker,simpler, bolder, and faster - without spending a fortune.  We kept the humanizetheweb.com walk on video.  We shot that a couple of years ago and have been delighted with the reults ever since.  We kept our site colors the same.  We have gone through so many backgrounds over the years.  We like the 003366 blue and will stick with that for now.   Then we looked at changing the menu bar at the top of the page.  This  was tricky because we want an SEO friendly bar and that means CSS instead of fancier flash stuff.  We wanted some drop down features to save space and simplify the navigation and of course we needed it to work in IE, Firefox, Google Chrome, or whatever browser our viewers are tuning in with.  We found vista-buttons.com and after a few days of learning the software we were able to create a nice new nav bar for the site.

After the menu bar, we looked at our logo.  The old one was hard to let go of since we have been using a simple cooper font logo for Sharpo.com since the mid 90s.  We used a logo making software from laughingbird.com that has opened our eyes to new thinking.  Very easy to use and fun to design.  The new logo incorporates our entertainment services and changes our sharpo.com logo font to hoteldel or plazapult, which screams "Show-Biz!"  We like the look and feel.  We also like the fact it says a lot with just a few words - and that brings me to the next challenge we faced: We need good content for SEO right?

We need to talk about our interactive murder mystery shows.  How they are different from others. We need to shout that we are the among the first to incorporate social media sites like twitter and facebook in our events.  (We tweet murder mystery clues and story exposition).  We needed to tell people about the fabulous El Cid Dinner Theater in LA and why it is the perfect and best location in Los Angeles to host a murder mystery dinner party.  We needed to inform people about our strolling magicians and clean party crashers.  The changes made so far to the site have provided the simplicity of an informative image logo that takes up a big part of the screen.  In order to be informative with real content we first used some image "alt" tags" so the search engines will pick up the content and then we put several informative paragraphs below the image.  They content is written first to inform our customers and second to be SEO friendly.  We are true believers that good content will produce good SEO.

Finally we needed to highlight our upcoming and special events.  So we made some fun easy mouse-over buttons  at cooltext.com, and placed them to the left of our logo image. This was a personal triumph for me since I am no guru when it comes to design.  I create all my websites in a simple on-line text editor.

The result is live at sharpo.com.  I am absolutely sure I will be making many many more changes soon to keep up with ever evolving trends, innovations. and of course our content which must change in order to continue our mission to entertain!  I hope that what we created is a fun easy page that represents our little company well.  I welcome any suggestions and comments and hope to see you all at one of our upcoming events!