OUR BLOG

Here you will find our latest works, company news and more. We update it on a regular basis so be sure to come back soon. Please like, share, pin or tweet the post you enjoy.

Visual Lure’s New Website Receives Special Kudos Award

Posted on May 18, 2016 by JUSTEN HONG

award winning website design

Visual Lure is proud to announce that our new website has received a Special Kudos Award from CSS Design Awards. CSS Design Awards is an organization that recognizes and honors the best in website design and web development through an international panel of judges. Below is the awards message we received:

“We are happy to inform you that your website has received Special Kudos from CSS Design Awards. Nice work! Special Kudos is CSSDA’s way of recognizing outstanding site designs that demonstrate high levels of creativity, code and usability. It is a professional ‘pat on the back’ for exemplary work that deserves recognition… We’re proud and honored to evaluate the work of the most talented web designers in the world and congratulate you on receiving Special Kudos.”

Learn more about our website design & development services »

Balanced Care for Women WordPress Website Redesign

Posted on April 25, 2016 by JUSTEN HONG

WordPress website Balanced Care for Women

Balanced Care for Women is a team of three OBGYN specialist in St. Louis, MO made up of Laura A. Baalmann, M.D., Holly Hiroko Kodner, M.D. and Donna N. Senciboy, D.O., M.H.A. Their offices are located right off of I-270 on Olive Boulevard.

Balanced Care for Women came to Visual Lure when they wanted to redesign their existing website. Their old website was dated and non-mobile friendly which provided a bad user experience. Visual Lure’s new design was built using a fully custom, search engine optimized, responsive designed WordPress theme.

The new site now renders beautifully on all phones, tablets and desktop computers. New features include a form to schedule appointments, an e-commerce section that allows customer to pay their invoices securely online, a custom admin section to manage staff profiles and a sticky header. The sticky header keeps the logo and navigation at the top of the screen, no matter how far down you scroll, always making it easy to navigate the site. We also added elegant CSS animation effects to give the site a sense of sophistication.

Visit Balanced Care for Women

Learn more about our St. Louis website design services »

New Custom WordPress Website for Rivas Photography

Posted on April 2, 2016 by JUSTEN HONG

Visual Lure recently completed a new website for Rivas Photography. Rivas is a soon-to-be husband and wife photography team based out of Kansas City, MO. They specialize in wedding, engagement, corporate event, professional sports and newborn baby photography. They are known for their clean, bright, vibrant and dramatic imagery. They also happen to be good people which is a pretty important characteristic you want your photographer to have.

I had the pleasure of meeting Kyle and Melissa (the owners) this year at Shutterfest 2016 – where I spoke to professional photographers about branding and search engine optimization (SEO). They took my SEO class which will help their already well ranking website climb even higher.

This brings us to Rivas’ search engine rankings. Before Visual Lure designed and developed Rivas Photography’s new website, they were using Square Space. While Square Space is super easy to setup, use and maintain, their websites tend to load very slowly. What’s the big deal with having a slow loading website? Having a slow site provides users with a bad user experience. This can effect bounce rates and cause users to “pogo-stick” back to their original search – both of which are proven to negatively effect a website’s search engine rankings. Before their new site, they were ranking somewhere beyond the first 15 pages of Google for most of their targeted search terms.

As of today, April 2nd 2016, on Google searches: they are on page 1 for “kansas city event photographer”, page 1 for “kansas city sports photographers”, page 2 for “kansas city engagement photographers”, page 4 for “kansas city newborn photographers” and page 4 for “kansas city wedding photographers” (climbing more than 10 pages in Google in one month). The website also ranks well for many variations of those keywords.

The Results

Within the first month of the new website going live, Rivas Photography acquired five new clients, all directly tied to Google search leads. This has lead to Rivas’ initial investment being paid back three times over. This, ladies and gentlemen, is why we do what we do. We love nothing more than helping other entrepreneurs find success. We couldn’t be happier with these results. We wish Kyle and Melissa future success in both their business and their upcoming nuptials.

Visit Rivas Photography

Learn more about our website design services or our fully custom WordPress designs.

Tradeshow Graphics for FUELAB, a Digital Fuel Delivery Manufacturer

Posted on January 20, 2016 by JUSTEN HONG

FUELAB is an industry leader in the development and manufacturing of aftermarket fuel delivery products. Their extensive line includes digital fuel pumps, fuel pressure regulators, fuel filters and accessories. They are headquartered right here in the St. Louis Metro East area in Collinsville, IL. Visit fuelab.com to learn more about this state-of-the-art company and their products.

FUELAB originally came to Visual Lure to re-design their existing trade show booth panels. The old design was distracting and visually muddy which made their products (the most important part of their booth) difficult to see.

Below you can see before and after photographs along with the artwork we created. The new design makes the booth stand out and it allows the products to be the main attractions. At the very bottom is a print ad we designed and wrote.

st louis tradeshow graphics design

Holland Construction Christmas Card Design

Posted on December 16, 2015 by JUSTEN HONG

Every year Visual Lure designs a custom Christmas card for Holland Construction Services. This year’s card was designed utilizing five stock illustrations. Safety glasses and a safety vest were custom drawn onto the stock illustrated snowman. The final artwork was then reformatted for a postcard.

HcsXmas2015 Hcs-Xmas2015-2

Professional Photographer Logo Designs Catch Up

Posted on October 26, 2015 by JUSTEN HONG

Visual Lure designs a ton of logos for professional photographers. Why? For a couple reasons:

1.Because we truly understand the photography business.

How? Well it all started out with our good friend Salvatore Cincotta. We’ve known Sal since he was working at Microsoft and just starting his home-based photography business. We’ve always shared contacts, resources and we have done whatever we could to help each others companies succeed. In the very beginning, we would talk with Sal about his branding, promotion strategies and all aspects of the business almost on a daily basis. It was during this time that Sal was developing and refining his current business system which he now teaches to other professional photographers. We know this system first hand and have actually had the pleasure of watching it transform over the years. Today Sal is a world-class photographer, educator, author and entrepreneur with multiple award winning companies. Just this year his umbrella company was on the list of Inc. 5000’s fastest growing companies.

2. Because we write about branding for one of the top professional photography resources and publication in the market: Behind the Shutter and Shutter Magazine.

Justen Hong of Visual Lure writes articles about branding and marketing for Behind the Shutter and Shutter Magazine. Topics include articles about logo design, website design, package design and search engine optimization (SEO). We also speak every year at Shutterfest (Behind the Shutter’s annual photography conference held in St. Louis, MO). This leads to a lot of photographers contacting us for help in defining their brand (which usually starts with a new logo).

3. Because of photographer referrals.

When you combine the referrals from Sal, all the Shutter entities along with all our happy photographer clients, it leads to more photography logos. Which leads us to the true purpose of this post. We simply do not have the time to write up a blog post for every photography logo we design, so we decided to pack a bunch into one post. Below you can see a small collection of logos we’ve designed for photographers from all over the United States, and one from Austria. The collection features monogram logos, a couple crest/seal logos, and a few typography-based logos.

If you’re looking for a new photography logo that will stand out and last the test of time, contact Visual Lure today. We would love to help.

View more of our photography logos & branding projects »

Logo & Trifold Brochure Design for St. Louis Non-Profit

Posted on October 21, 2015 by JUSTEN HONG

One Classroom™, a St. Louis, Missouri based 501c3 non-profit organization, hired Visual Lure to design a new logo along with a new trifold brochure. Their mission is to give children with special needs the opportunity to study and learn in normal Catholic school classrooms, side by side with their peers.

Below you can see the final logo both in color and black and white, the color palette, and brand typefaces along with a sample identity package. Underneath that is the new brochure design along with unselected logo explorations.