Skibo’s Tattoo has been tattooing and piercing the front range area of Wyoming and Colorado since 1982. Today, the company operates out of two locations in Wyoming and Colorado, employing many talented tattoo artists and body piercers. I have been a friend and patron of the shop for years, so I was thrilled to take them on as a client. Their previous web site just wasn’t cutting it: client-side pull was way too high, and updates were a nightmare.
The Direction
The goal of the project was to reinvent the existing web identity to improve public perception of the business and provide a conduit for interaction between shop artists and their customers. We also wanted to make each artist responsible for maintaining their own profile and photos, which would save shop managers a significant amount of time. Additionally, there would be an administrative profile that would have access to every piece of dynamic content on the site. This administrative user could add or remove profiles as artists joined or left the team. Greg Skibo and Andy Robbins provided original artwork, which I re-illustrated and arranged into a overall design for the site.
The Results
Six months after launch, Skibo’sTattoo.com was receiving an average of 6,000 page views per month. Bandwidth usage also skyrocketed, which was actually a good thing. Users were hitting the site more frequently, staying longer, and viewing more photos than ever before. The per-page pull of bandwidth was a fraction of the original figure.
Many of Skibo’s artists reported receiving a lot of first-time business generated directly from the site, and observed that customers were very pleased with the new style and functionality. This has translated into a direct improvement in public perception of the business, as they can now more effectively promote the quality and professionalism of their services, and are often booked solid many weeks, if not months, in advance. This project really opened my eyes to the immediate return on investment of a successful web site for a small business.
