Essex Website Design

Recently been talking to one of the guys here at Delicious Webdesign about the standards and ethos of the company so wanted to get a few down for reference about us:

We build sites that work for our client’s clients and customers.
Every site we build needs to be a bit special and ‘different’.
Standards Standards Standards ! all sites need to be W3C xhtml / css compliant.
All sites need to be checked for dead links and html errors before being put live
Spell check all webcopy (from client or from webcopy specialist)
Always give more than someone expects.
We aim to use tableless / css designs where possible.
Flash is nice !? but should be used sparingly on banners / headers.
All website are build in a search engine friendly manner from the start
Semantic Markup is practised (correct use of headers)
We dont want to win website design awards but we want our clients to earn money from their website
We believe in a ‘holistic’ approach to website design, dont sacrifice one aspect to the cost of another.
Create the site for people not search engines
Remember that search engines will decide if the site is a hit or a miss though !
Content is the most important part of every website
Ensure the content is signposted correctly with good navigation / anchor text
Images used should be optimised / labeled corrected and represent what we want to say
We are only as good as our last website
Customer referrals are what we strive to get, todays client will turn into tomorrow’s referrer, fingers crossed anyway.
Dont spent time doing what isnt needed, do whats needed first.
We want lifelong relationships with our clients not one-night stands.
Our prices are set to attract customers, deliver more than they expect for less than they expect to pay.
Advise on the best practises.
Give advice openly and honestly, as you would like to receive it yourself.
If a client wants something that isnt in their best long term interest, advice against it even if it means a financial sacrifice (no full flash sites )
Check existing images and text for duplication from other sites.
Code for and check for browser compatibility before website launch.
Expect website revisions, we want the client love love their website not just put up with it.
A website is for life, it grows, evolves, matures and eventually tries to dominate its ‘niche’
Be proud of our work.

Well actually we will if you ask nicely but its amazing how many of our clients ask for advice on PC / Windows / Office / internet problems they are having. We are obviously one of the few people that most of our clients know that are IT literate and having heard some of the stories people tell me about using high street PC support and the costs of them I dont blame them for asking advice on technical issues. I dont think I will be buying the tshirt ‘No I wont fix your PC’ yet but if this carries on will have to escalate all non website specific queries to our new Tech Help Desk person (aka PC Paul)

previous wrote about how in demand our webcopy services are, this promoted me to add another page on the site to explain a bit more about the benefits of good webcopy on your website and how it shouldnt be overlooked.
At Delicious Webdesign we dont want to be an Award winning website design company at the expense of the other aspects of a website, we go for the all-around or holistic approach to website design whereby we ensure the website is geared towards the goal of the website owner which is normally making them money. We ensure that a website looks great, works perfectly and is updated with the latest industry standards (W3C Compliance for xhtml and css code) as well as ensuring that the site is optimised (SEO) and a big part of the SEO process is ensuring the website text is unique, relevant and search engine friendly.

Take a look at our page dedicated to the benefits of having your website copy done professionally

We are please to have completed our newest website that was launched today,
Calibre Interiors are a new Essex Based Kitchen, Bedroom and Bathroom Design company that will take you from the design / idea stage right through to the installation and aftercare stage.
Good luck to Kirstein and Mike for the future
http://www.calibreinteriors.co.uk/

This is one of our most favourite types of challenges, we were delighted to work with Phukets premier Technical Diving center and we decided together that the best thing for their business would be to completely redesign the existing website and then with a search engine friendly and optimised site in place to go forward promoting the site via SEO and SEM.

Oceanzone Divers has a large website with hundreds of pages containing a huge amount of information about technical diving and the courses, diving and services they provide. that needed to be arrange logically, the redesign of the site had to show that this was a modern, professional and dynamic technical diving center and the website was received with great enthusiasm by the owner of the company Andrew Fortune, with the SEO process half way through we can report that the websites’s ranking and visitor numbers are vastly improved

Pretty fed up of having to pick up the pieces from so called SEO experts after they make a real mess on people’s sites and then the site owner sees no increases in site position or visitors before deciding to move on. The problem is that the period of them making a mess of the site and the site owner actually realising that the site is not performing well can be months or even years.

Recently had a client that had been given a list of keywords from his previous SEO company that they were optimising for, out of a list of 12 search terms only 1 was a competitive search term that was relative to the clients website. Some of the search terms were things like ‘local builder’ and ‘<company name> services’ which are totally useless as search terms that convert searchers into clients. To top it off the only competitive search term they listed was ‘essex builder’ and told my client (by email and by a chart and by a video of them searching) that he was in position 2 on google.co.uk. After 2 minutes of verification all the search positions were made up and instead of being in position 2 they were in position 56!

Once we took over the site and migrated it to our hosting company the real nightmare begun, the code was horrible, massively bloated, terrible navigation, no SEO attempted on titles / headers / descriptions / keywords or content. Google had 5 variations of the same page indexed and two of the main pages were not even listed in Google. I could go on but it just gets worse.

Needless to say be very selective when choosing an SEO ‘expert’ as you are putting your companies future in their hands and they could indeed ruin the company if the SEO campaign is done in an incompetant manner by someone that has no idea what they are doing. Check out their previous record of SEO and ask them some questions that require some SEO thought like ‘ what do you think is going to be an SEO factor that is going to have its weighting in the search algorythms increase over the next few years’ and see if they can give you an intelligent answer. There are some questions that do not have a right and wrong answer and sometimes you have to put your  trust in someone, but best put your trust in someone that has a proven track record and has previous clients that say nice things about them,  like…….. erm us

Check this for more SEO info and how we can help your website move up in the rankings

http://www.delicious-webdesign.com/seo-package.html

The biggest growth area for the business over the last 6 months has been web copy or website content creation. I have always known and believed that you should build something useful and they will come. In the analogy above ‘building something’ is a webpage containing useful information relevant to the search and ‘they will come’ is the website visitors that have been encouraged to go to your page due to a high ranking from the big G or your other favorite search engine.

Well lets get something straight in the SEO world there is a limit to the amount of improvements you can give a site by ‘polishing’ or SEO’ing it, you need unique, relevant, easily readable and search engine friendly text indexed, therefore a phase in our SEO process is to ensure we have the correct text in place to begin the SEO process in the first place. This is where the webcopy / website text creation is generally suggested and taken up by our clients.

Recently had a client that wanted to rank highly for terms like ‘essex conservatory’ ‘loft conversions in essex’ and other building related terms, this client had spent loads of time / effort and money on website design / video / images and other SEO companies but after all the ’stuff’ was cut out his website featured only 3 paragraphs relating to his key search terms. I have benchmarked the sites positions prior to the new content and SEO process beginning (website client http://www.johns-brickwork.co.uk)

and will update this story in 3 months to see the improvements our Webcopy and SEO process makes to his SERPs and visitor numbers.

We have recently done a massive project for webcopy for a Dive Theory site and the proof of that is that it ranks Number 1 for ‘Dive Theory Physics’ within 2 months of launch
Google search Dive Theory Physics

One of the real headaches for website designers is the variety of browsers out there, meaning that we have to ensure that a website looks and functions in different browsers.

I recently was reviewing the browser usage stats for 2009 and quite surprised to see that IE6, 7 and 8 are being used almost equally, you would expect that people would upgrade their browser (as its free and normally better and more secure) but some months the usage in IE6 actually increased slightly. IE and Firefox are the main browsers, Firefox is the web designers friend due to its plugins and customisation, but Google Chrome (the new boy) finished the year with a near 10% market share.

I entered my internet life with the choice between Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer when Freeserve, Yahoo or Alta Vista were the home pages of choice. We now have much more choice and much more complexity to deal with to ensure that a website is functional and beautiful for as many users as possible.

This was a question I was asked the other day by a potential client and it got me thinking. When we started out all projects were accepted and we had a broad portfolio of work, including ecommerce, flash, and static websites but now we have come to specialise in Business Brochure websites for startup / small and medium sized businesses.

We don’t go in for website design competitions and actually don’t really want to win website design awards as we believe that work / money spent on a website should ensure that it isn’t lacking in any area and therefore money spent on making it look that 5% better may not make any difference.

The website should work well on all browsers and should validate to current standards (W3C validation), it should work (nothing worse than a link on a website that doesnt work or gives you a missing page error. The website should look great (but once it looks great there is no need to tinker with the look for hours and hours on end) as long as the site is attractive enough not to turn the website visitor away then its done its job. The Search Engine Friendliness of the site is very important to ensure it features and ranks highly for its target search terms.

All these factors together go into all our websites:

Looks Good
Works Well
Navigation Clear
Search Engine Friendliness

We don’t sacrifice one factor for another and if we lean towards any of the factors it’s the Search Engine Friendliness of the site and it is common for clients to hire us to work on their site for a period after launch to ensure it ranks as high as possible. Our Search Engine Optimisation Projects are very cost effective and can be tailored to your needs.

Very happy with my clients SEO Serps results that I benchmarked today, it shows massive increases in ranking for their key search phrases over the three main search engines in the course of the last year, this client was advised to update their Joomla and Virtuamart to all some basic (but crucia) SEO data to be controlled (title, description and meta keywords)