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, kindly built by a friend. And fell in love with designing websites.
If you build it, they won't come. Not long after, 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. For some years, the SearchEngineForums 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.
Diane Vigil
