February is drawing to a close, putting us firmly in the new year and looking forward to onset of Spring. The past few days have been warm enough to suggest that hanami season is just around the corner. We’re all ready to open the windows and start enjoying some cool breezes in the office and (especially) out on our spacious new balcony. Which reminds, I need to get my hands on some director’s chairs…

The year has gotten off to quite a busy start, which is a refreshing change from the end of 2009, which found us with a bit more free time on our hands than we like. Lots of inquiries and many approved projects have us all feeling very good about the coming year and excited to do some interesting work.

Some of what we’ve been up to so far this year includes redesigning client’s websites. One of these, for destination management firm Villissima, went live just last week and looks like this.

Villissima Redesign

The redesign was mostly cosmetic, and we thinks gives the site a much more sophisticated look overall and better fits the company’s high-quality image. Have a look at the live site if interested in seeing the whole thing.

We also completed the redesign of the website for Japan’s leading translation and rewriting company, Forte, specialists in scientific and academic papers. The new design represents a huge improvement over the previous site, and the project also gave us the opportunity to implement various enhancements in the areas of usability and user experience.

Forte Redesign

We also performed extensive Search Engine Optimization (SEO) on the site to get it into page 1 on both Google and Yahoo! for all 10 of their core keywords, such as 英文校正 and 論文校閲.  Conversions are up one month after the launch of the new site and we’ll continue to tweak and tune to get the best performance possible out of the site.

Finally, our most recent launch is the website for Tokyo-based venture Australia Property Inc. Find full details on this great project on the Netwise website shortly…