Antique Helper Indianapolis Auction House Website

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Antique Helper's new website is a big step forward in many ways. It features a complete re-design from the ground up for a robust Content Management Systems (CMS) and lots of new functionality. Want a tour of the website, CMS and search engine results? Here you go!

Want to know a secret? The previous site, built 5 years ago when Jeb Banner was still a partner at Antique Helper, was built by Joe Downey when he worked at Antique Helper. It was the first site Jeb and Joe built together which eventually led to starting Small Box! So naturally we had a lot of ideas on how to improve things. Fortunately Antique Helper's owner, Dan Ripley, was open to many of these ideas.

Building on the site's existing search engine traffic we added keyword triggered calls to action (CTAs) that rotate across the site in the top right of the header. These CTAs appear based on the keywords found on each specific page. For instance, if the visitor searches Google for "Italian glass vase" and finds an auction page featuring Italian Glass they will also see a CTA asking them if they want to consign Italian glass to an upcoming auction. Example below:

This has created a flood of interest in appraisals as well as new consignments. A contact database captures all information from forms filled out via the site for easy export as a CSV file.

The new site also adds a blog giving the company a platform to share their knowledge with others as well as ask for input on new collections.

The site integrates with their auction partners at Art Fact who provides online bidding functionality including real time live bidding.

Auction preview videos create interest in upcoming auctions by bringing the viewer into the auction house for a detailed tour of sale items.

The site is optimized for search engines and is ranking well for local and national searches.

In addition to providing web design, development and SEO, Small Box also provides ongoing New Media Consulting, Social Media optimization (including Twitter and Facebook accounts), print and email ad templates and press releases.

"After launching and working with our original website format for a period of nearly 8 years, I had become fairly comfortable with the ability to promote our auctions online. I felt that the next step in the process was to make the site more interactive and add functionality that would integrate information directly to our auction database management system. Finding the right consultant was easy for me. Jeb and Joe had demonstrated their abilities and increasing competence since builing my first Antique Helper site and then starting Small Box. I had always consulted with them for small issues on the existing site. They had provided some minor upgrades over time, but when I approached them with the overall goals for my site, they efficiently illustrated the need for a full redesign. The result has been a site with the best presentation of my product. Their CMS provides detailed admin functionality that allows me to constantly add and manage the information that we rely on the web to market to our clients and customers. We are employing Small Box long term to take advantage of Jeb’s acute awareness of the future of online networking and I look forward to a tremendous increase in traffic and continued growth of my business thanks to their help."

Dan Ripley, Owner and President, Antique Helper

This project took advantage of these Small Box services:

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