Mountain Magic Catering, one of Lake Tahoe’s premier catering companies and Gossamer Web Design combined talents to give The Wizard’s website a makeover. Gossamer designed the original website a decade ago and while the website proved extremely popular, the technology used was showing signs of wear and tear.

The first step in upgrading any website is to come up with an appropriate theme. Dozens of themes were reviewed before the selection was narrowed to two themes, then one. We wanted a theme that was simple, yet elegant, and that included a splash of flash to spice things up.

One of the larger challenges faced when redesigning a website is predicting what effect the redesign will have on the search engine rankings. Quite often new designs are not received well by the search engines for a variety of reasons, so a great deal of effort was devoted to the new structure of the website. Current page rankings were analyzed along with how to organize the new website with the keywords we wanted to target prior to upgrading each page of the new website.

Each page was then carefully crafted in order to optimize the page along with our keyword selection goals. While I fully expected a temporary drop in rankings since we were both changing the IP address of the website and completely redesigning the website; Gossamer and Mountain Magic Catering were pleased when we found out that rather than see a drop in our rankings, we actually saw an increase in the number of and rankings for the majority of our targeted keywords.

The biggest surprise came when Peter revealed that he had been saving up new photos for the last two years and submitted some 700 new photos for the website. The Wizard’s new website now has over a dozen new photo galleries. These galleries are an ideal way to let future customers see what a magically designed catering event looks like.

During the several month process redesigning the website, I bombarded Peter with a ton of technical details. Peter took them all in stride, indictative of his uncanny ability to take in and organize the thousands of details each and every catering event demands.

Your work to date with my content is cutting edge… – Peter

Along with the transfer of Peter’s website to our server was a transfer of Peter’s email service. Peter had been complaining of excessive amounts of SPAM with his previous ISP and as I had boasted, Peter’s SPAM was dramatically reduced.

My Spam is way down/very nice.. – Peter

Gossamer has been designing ‘Websites that Work‘ in the Lake Tahoe area since 1996 and this year is celebrating fifteen years of service; which makes us one of the oldest web design companies in the Tahoe Basin.