About Us
Diane Vigil
Why I have this blog. I'm Diane Vigil, head of DianeV Web Design Studio in Los Angeles. The stuff below is a rather lengthy yack. But I think that this explains it: Help for Help's Sake.
History
Within months of discovering the Web in 1996, convinced that I could do it because I'd seen <b> tags ("how hard can it be?"), I was redesigning our first website which had kindly been built by a friend. And fell in love with designing websites.
If you build it, they won't come. Not long after — having discovered server logs — it became apparent to me that the hype of that time that "if you build it, they will come" was not true, and so I set about discovering how to get more traffic — and discovered Jim Wilson's VirtualPromote (later called JimWorld). It had a background image with text running up the side: Promote or Die. Indeed.
VirtualPromote in 1998 had a raucous forum of early SEOs, the SearchEngineForums. For years, it was the place to be and be seen; many of today's biggest SEO names frequented the place and, though things got pretty heated at times, I stayed for years. Jim tapped me for his Site Review Please! forum, which I accepted because I'd observed too much trashing of sites and web designers and not enough creative reviewing. Concurrently, as I'd already been building websites for a small list of clients, I thought it time to formally found our Los Angeles web design company, DianeV Web Design Studio.
As to SEF, I'm pretty sure I was the lone voice — amid all the "traffic-traffic-traffic" chaos — declaring that it was all about marketing, and that SEO techniques should be melded with good, solid, marketing copy — in short, that one should employ a variety of disciplines to create effective websites. I'm pleased to say that we enjoy a growing roster of local, national and international clients, from world-known artists to one-person shows to multi-million and -billion dollar corporations.
The developedtraffic.com blog is my venue for observation and discussion of web design, search engine optimization, marketing and Web industry-oriented issues outside of my now very-occasional Web Design Basics articles and the DianeV blog. I also launched DesignerJones, a rather sporadic and decidedly non-Webby online mag for appreciation of good design and style in any field.
And, yes, I've spent quite a bit of time at other "places" — excellent multi-disciplined forums like cre8asite, the WordPress forums, any place that takes my fancy and where, perhaps, I can give back a little.
Why "DianeV"? Someone else had already registered as "Diane" at Virtual Promote. By the time we needed a name, DianeV was already too well-branded. Left to my own today, I'd probably choose something that sounds like a high-end German architectural firm.
Man, I sound like one dull geek!
Diane Vigil
