Bridal Network / bride.ca SEO and Internet Marketing

Bridal Network Inc. is an online media and advertising company, focusing on the wedding industry. It's primary market is Canada. The challenge here was the development of a quantifiable online marketing strategy for their "retail" properties, primarily their flagship bridal website, bride.ca

Bride.ca has a seemingly straightforward subject matter: wedding planning in Canada. However, typically, in practice this is an overgeneralisation; potential customers (brides-to-be) will almost never begin their web searches looking for something as general as "planning". As a result an exhaustive amount of reasearch was inititally required, to identify current trends, needs and popular areas of immediate need to brides just beginning their wedding planning process, since (a) there is an overabundance of similar services on the Internet (b) brides-to-be are a rather short-lived customer, completing their purchasing cycle in 4-12 months.

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3 Shining Stars: Student Work

George Papazian is the Creative Director of OptoDesign New Media Creative Studio. In addition to this role, he finds the time to instruct students in a variety of web related courses. Over the past 10 years he has managed their client projects and has shared his knowledge, skills, and experience with this very talented pool of developers. It is only fitting to acknowledge the hard earned results of a sampling of these students.

LDAFS and Opto: Helping People with Learning Disabilities

Melody Oshiro approached Opto with the momunental task of developing a site with an interface which would be clean and easy to use for people with learning disabilities. Melody's organization is the Learning Disabilities Association Fraser South, and after 8 months of intensive development their new website can be seen at ldafs.org.

LDAFS provided Opto with valuable information to assist in the design of the interface. This information was the result of obtained studies for users with learning disabilities such as what typeface and size is best read by users with learning disabilities, which colours provide a warm and comfortable user experience, and specific functionality such as increasing or decreasing text size to ease reading.

With the content management system, The folks at LDAFS can now update the entire website by themselves.

Both OptoDesign and LDAFS wish the best of luck to those who will benefit the most from this project: children with learning disabilities and their parents.

Promoting community pride and unity with the help of Opto

The Hellenic Community of Vancouver's stunning new site has been launched! This project was a six month endevour produced by a creative team of three: Project Manager / Developer George Papazian, talented Art Director / Designer Costa Dedegikas, and php Guru Krishna Awatranami.

The new site and its applications will give the Hellenic Community administration the ability to manage their own site and post information on all of their various programs. There are multi level logins on the back end through the sophisticated administration interface. This site features a completely customized template, and has been hand coded using no external CMS applications.

The project has now entered its second phase which will see the completion of a photo gallery application and archive, and an enhanced "past events" photo and story archive application.

Congratulations go out to the team, as well as to Gus Karvelis and Peter Kletas for all their hard work.