The site needed to be "smooth", mellow, with natural textures and symbols, to reflect the style of the teacher. "Dru" yoga is a style which emphasises calmness and avoids the more strenuous exercises of some other schools. It was also useful to publicise the class dates and locations in Devon.

The teacher was starting from scratch and so publicity and visibility was essential. We were fortunate to secure the ideal domain name which has exactly the words required to convey the site. This is a big plus for search engines. As with all my sites, HTML validation was ensured as well as use of keywords within the headings. After launch we made small improvements but the basic structure has remained, and the site has very gradually improved in Google rankings over a few months. On most of the target search rankings, the site has performed much better than expected, especially when searching for "yoga" plus a relevant placename. It is on page one of Google for a couple of key searches.

Google Picasa Gallery

As something of a bonus or side-show, we added a small photogallery of "inspirational" pictures. The gallery was built using Google's excellent Picasa 2 free package - we customised a Picasa template to resemble the rest of the site, while retaining sufficient difference to indicate that you are in a separate section. The gallery has the added advantage of providing an excuse to insert some extra Devon-related placenames, which is a small boost for the Google localisation.

Web Re-design

The current style has developed from a smaller earlier layout. Then, the front page was very different in style from all the back-pages, and using a different CSS file.

As the teacher's business developed, the front page accumulated too many links and looked cluttered, which is why we adopted the new appearance, breaking into two menus, one for information and one for services offered. Apart from the front page, only one menu is shown, at left or right respectively.

I also converted over to using PHP and a simple bespoke template system, so as to centralise common functions such as menus and layouts. This helped make the layout consistent and was much more efficient when making changes.