Recent Project Showcase: Froglegs
Froglegs Kids Culinary Academy is a daycare/cooking school with locations in Seattle and Kirkland. In 2016, their website had a great look and feel, built by graphic designers. But it was lacking a lot of important aspects, most notably mobile responsiveness.
The site is both a point of contact and a registration system for parents to sign their kids up for classes, so it needed to be mobile responsive. Beyond the negative SEO implications of having a non-responsive site, it was very difficult to read on a phone.
A friend of mine is an instructor at the Kirkland location, and she showed me the site one evening. I noticed it needed mobile work, so I got in touch with them and offered my services. They had been looking for responsive help.
They liked the existing look and feel, so I had to work around it and integrate all the new mobile styles as seamlessly as possible.
I set out to change as little as possible in the HTML markup, but I had to rewrite some portions to add hooks, classes and extra divs. A number of CSS breakpoints were added in the stylesheet. A mobile menu was added. Some of the custom imagery had to be cut up a bit and redone, and a few items were moved slightly.
While performing the responsive work I also indented all the code, optimized images, made outside links open in new tabs, added phone and maps links to the site and made numerous usability tweaks. I re-ordered the menu structure to meet common standards and I added a home link.
The result of all this is a website with the exact same look and feel, that is entirely mobile-friendly across platforms.
I had offered my services for a one-time flat fee; however, the owner was so pleased with this result that she hired me immediately after deploying the responsive site. Since then I have maintained the site and published updates. I make regular improvements to the code to bring it up to date with modern standards.
In the first half of 2017 Froglegs was attempting to open a new location. I was asked to make a showcase video to convince the landlords in University Village to offer a lease to the academy. I gathered some camera gear, filmed a class and edited 90 minutes into 90 seconds to show off the business model.
This video was shown to the people at U Village. They were pleased, and Froglegs has since signed a lease there. This will be an enormous leap forward for the company.
The SEO of the site has also improved markedly. The site shows up as the first result or above the fold for many common Google searches, i.e. ‘kids culinary,’ ‘daycare cooking,’ ‘cooking Kirkland,’ ‘kids cooking,’ ‘cooking school,’ and many others.