WEB SERVICES
“your 24 hour shop window”
Your website is your 24 hours a day shop window to your products and services and needs to present a clear message of what you do, and how your services can benefit your customers
Design
User Interface | Graphics
Development
Content | Layouts
Migration
to WordPress
WHAT makes a good website?
Your first answer will probably be design, mobile friendly or keeping up with the latest trend.
Other websites talk about things like:
- purpose
- communication
- typefaces
- colours
- images
- navigation
- grid layouts
- f-pattern design
- load time
- and mobile friendly
But what really makes a good website?
I like to keep it simple, and ask myself a few questions.
As part of what I do, I will actually look around the site for a while, but your customers and visitors WILL NOT.
If they cannot work out what product or service you offer in around 10 seconds, they will leave your site and continue looking for whatever they are searching for.
Try this for yourself. Search for a product or service in google and when you select a link from googles search page, ask yourself:
What do they do?
O.K. that is a pretty easy task, and you will quickly find that these answers are obvious, or you will ask yourself why they did this or that like that.
Now for the Challenge
Try it on YOUR site. You have the disadvantage that you are attached to your site in an emotional way, and the other trap that you may fall into, is that the site was DESIGNED FOR YOU and not your visitors.
I can think of no other industry where the product or service is created for the business who is making the product or service.
They are in business to meet the demand for their customer base and market segment, and have to understand what is required from the market in order to satisfy demand and grow their business. This is clear, until you get into the website business.
I have seen so many times that the business owner loves their website and can see no problems with it, but are not getting found on the internet because of bad designs, bad names, confusing layout, I could go on and on.
So, why does this keep happening?
The designer will create what you tell them to, so if you are unable to look at your site objectively, you will be on the path to failure and wasting a lot of time and money. The process is simple. All that is required is to look at your business as your customers do, and ask yourself the same questions they ask when they are searching.
Who is your ideal customer?
What problem are you solving?
That sounds obvious, but time and time again I visit sites and I have to play detective to find out what the business does.
Do you want them to sign up to a newsletter?
To you want them to call or email you?
What do you want them to do?
Managing digital marketing is a time consuming project, and many people start and drop off within weeks or months.
What about Mobile Friendly Design?
Mobile traffic has surpassed desktop in the USA already, with European countries catching up quickly.
You can no longer ignore the needs of your mobile visitors and lose leads due to sites not being responsive.
I can create a bespoke mobile-friendly website that looks equally attractive on all screens no matter the size.
We design using clear and simple navigation, prominent call-to-actions, clever lay out and use of images to guide the busy mobile browsers in the right direction – this makes the key elements of your business pop and strike your prospects straight away.
Google Ready
Optimized according to the latest guidelines and best practices.
Fully Responsive
Your business looks equally attractive on all types of screens.
Still none the wiser? - click to find out more
SEO – A WORKING EXAMPLE
Can you remember before the internet how did you used to find a supplier in the yellow pages? Well, the yellow pages was the original search engine database, and YOU were the searcher. You lifted the directory and were in need of a service. Let’s say that you needed a plumber, what would be your next move? Look under P for plumbers of course. When you find the page, you then review the adds. OK this is a very easy example, and the yellow pages had their own way to decide who was shown first in the plumbers section such as company’s alphabetical name, or the largest and boldest advert.
Now lets jump back to 2023, and Google is your new resource. Let’s continue with the plumber example. Instead of just typing in Plumber, now you can be very specific. For example “I want a plumber who specialises in boilers within 5 miles of my home“.
Wow! You can really do this? YES!
Now the examples have shown how you find things via the search engine, let’s look at how and why it does.
In order for the plumbing website to appear at the top of the search engine screen, the website has to comply with Google SEO Guidelines. There are many factors in these guidelines, but I will talk about just a few. Before I go into that, the thing you need to understand and remember is that the search engines look at your site with robots, and not people. So, they can only follow rules programmed into them which are simple and logical.
When reading and scanning your site, they ask a number of questions.
– What is the site about?
– Does the page title reflect what the business is about?
– Does the page description give a reasonable understanding of what is on the page, and is it relevant to this business?
– Are the images on the page identifiable as relevant to the subject of this business and contains information the robots can read and understand?
OK, its all getting a bit “information overload”, so I will just highlight the technical background to what has been discussed.
In order for the plumber to be number 1, or appear on page one of the search engine, the SEO elements had to be completed correctly.
This is called Meta Data, and as you would expect, that’s what they are called to identify them in SEO.
The page needed a relevant Meta Title – “Joe Bloggs Emergency Plumber”
The page needed a relevant Meta Description “Are you in need of an Emergency Plumber in the local area?”
The home page (and other pages) needed to have a heading “Welcome to you Emergency Plumber Joe’s Page”
Just these 3 factors above (and there are many, many more) would help Google bots to read the site, and say
Hey! The word Plumber appears in the Title, the Description and is the headline of the content of the page. This guy must be a Plumber or selling Plumbing services. Hey, when someone searches for a Plumber, this would be something they would want to see.
Now if you have ticked all the SEO boxes and your content is good etc, they you will climb the search engine ladder and the more relevant your site is to the search term, the more chance Google will put your page up higher.
Simple.
OK. It’s not all that simple, but that is the building blocks of how you get your site to appear, so customer can find you.
There are many web designers out there in cyber space, and indeed even more web developers, but its a rare combination to find a designer and developer in one.
It’s even more rare to find a designer/developer with an eye for Search Engine Optimisation. What does this mean to you?
Well, if you have spent your hard earned profits on this amazing web design, and the SEO is poor or non existent, that means that no one will be able to find your site, and would be a large waste of time and money.
What about the development side? Well the same applies. You could have the best coding, optimised for speed and load of amazing widgets such as slide shows, movies playing as backgrounds, but again, if the SEO is not been done, no one will find your site.
It’s therefore, imperative that your site is constructed with all these elements in mind:
- Great Design
- Great Coding
- Great SEO
Then you will have a fighting chance against your competition.
Sounds simple? IT IS!
My skills are in both Web Development, Web Design & SEO, so I can offer the complete service where we can implement your vision of a new site, update your existing site or migrate from your current platform to WordPress for example.
I have decided to concentrate on WordPress exclusively, although I would use something like Wix as a design platform for development for the look and feel of the site before development on WordPress.
Check out some of my website designs & developments.
Web Design, Web Development and Search Engine Optimisation
These are the vital ingredients for a successful website, and as you will read below, finding this combination is harder than you may think.
A web designer is someone who is both creative and technically inclined, and uses both these attributes to build or redesign websites.
The web designer has the ability to understand what is needed to make a website functional and easy to use, but at the same time make it aesthetically appealing to the user.
A web developer is a programmer who specialises in, or is specifically engaged in, the development of World Wide Web applications, or distributed network applications that are run over HTTP from a web server to a web browser.
A web developer is responsible for programming the code that “tells” a website how to function.
WordPress is one of the most popular Content Management Systems in use today, and while there is a certain amount of in-built security, you can never be too secure.
Below are just a few things you may wish to consider for your own site, or have a serious think if you are creating sites for your customers and have not reviewed the security levels.
GET IN TOUCH TODAY!
If you are looking for a digital marketing all-rounder with years of customer service experience to join your team, and help your customers grow – contact me today!