Mark Wyner Design

Case Studies: the mathematics in web design and development.

Mark Wyner Design’s websites are not only usable, well formed and sensibly designed—they perform. Following are some brief case studies exhibiting key showings.

Blackwell Book Services

Project: Blackwell Book Services wanted to redesign and rebuild blackwell.com to better serve their customers. Visitor retention and increased use by customers was a primary objective, requiring nothing less than an approachable design, with well-structured content constructed with broadly-accessible markup.

Results: The original website received approximately 1,100 page views per day, and consumed around 180MB of bandwidth in the process. The new website receives approximately 3,300 page views per day (300% increase) and reduced bandwidth consumption by 1/3 to a mere 120MB.

Northland Group

Project: A complete overhaul of the company’s corporate website. The primary goal was to increase search-engine rankings for important key phrases, specifically the company’s name and a commonly used misspelling. Both yielded ranks of 3–4 in major search engines, and not even among the top 100 returns in Yahoo.

Results: Search engine rankings were dramatically increased for the targeted key phrases. The current rank for a search by name is position 1 across the board. Other important key phrases yielded no returns, and are now holding the 1st position.

HGTV

Project: HGTV wanted to convert the antiquated markup on their home page to standards-based markup. The primary goal was to increase bandwidth efficiency, improve load times and offer greater accessibility. The home page would serve as a test case for potential web-standards evolutions to their entire site.

Results: The original home-page weighed in at 74kB, employed 1,135 lines of code and utilized 110 images. It was also inaccessible to many modern desktop browsers and to nearly every handheld/aural device. The new standards-compliant home-page was reduced to 46kB (62% or original), 396 lines of code (35% of original) and 27 images (24% of original). It also became accessible to virtually every browsing device.