We are pleased 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
| Google SERPS results | Nov 08 | Mar 09 | June 09 | Jan 10 | July 10 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| tech diving phuket | 65 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 |
| technical diving phuket | 22 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 |
| tech diver training | 300+ | 300+ | 154 | 3 | 37 |
| tech diver training phuket | 35 | 31 | 54 | 3 | 4 |
| tech diver training Thailand | 77 | 70 | 65 | 7 | 9 |
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
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)
| Keywords | Jan-10 | Mar-10 | Jul-10 | Feb-11 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| essex builder | 56 | 7 | 1 | 1 |
| essex builders | 54 | 10 | 7 | 3 |
| builder essex | 15 | 9 | 3 | 1 |
| conservatories essex | 211 | 188 | 163 | 42 |
| loft conversions essex | 270 | 67 | 43 | 40 |
| house renovations essex | 111 | 20 | 16 | 21 |
| southend builders | 339 | 48 | 33 | 17 |
| house extensions essex | 500+ | 56 | 46 | 28 |
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.
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)
| Search Term | Google Nov-08 | Google Jan-08 | Google Jan-09 | Bing Jan-09 | Yahoo Jan-09 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| id card accessories | 600+ | 47 | 5 | 6 | 1 |
| retractable badge holder | 8 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 2 |
| retractable card reel | 51 | 12 | 8 | 11 | 9 |
| retractable badge holder | 600+ | 120 | 5 | 5 | 2 |
| Badge reels | 145 | 43 | 63 | 9 | 6 |
| id card accessory packs | 98 | 11 | 6 | 1 | 1 |
Recently had a client enquire about having Google Adsense on their site, these are the small Google adverts you see traditionally at the top and to the right of webpages and similar adverts are embedded within Google Search Results (adwords).
I believe some sites lend themselves to having these adverts on, sites that are for information / portals (like the padi idc guide but other ‘standard’ business websites for small businesses would do well not to use adsense, my reasons are:
Therefore I would advise most small businesses with a standard brochure type site that they should concentrate on something else for their site like fresh new content / a blog etc..
These type of websites allow the Website owner / Photographer to upload their photos to the ecommerce part of the site which makes them available to people to purchase. This is a dream for wedding photographers who can have the photos for sale on the day after the wedding.
We love Photography Ecommerce websites and we are really liking using and maintaining these website software packages that are specifically created for Photography Websites, We have created five photography ecommerce websites and expect that number to increase rapidly. We have just finished the fifth one in November 2011 and so far have only good things to say about its useablity / features / functions and website owners feedback. If anything was to be improved I would like to see an integrated FTP gallery upload (currently you can manually ftp the galleries of load them up one photo at a time on the admin side of the site)
Update – There is now an option to have a ftp upload function integrated with the website.
Clicking on the ‘clients’ or ‘shop’ or ‘clients gallery’ or ‘buy’ links on the sites below brings you to the ecommerce / shopping part of the site
The recent Photography and E-commerce websites we have completed include:
www.garrysandison.com - Most recent photography / Ecommerce site
www.pinkonwhitewalls.com – click on clients as an example of the e-commerce part of the site
www.ginasmithphotography.com click on client gallery for e-commerce part of the website
www.roastphotography.co.uk (new one with no galleries in the ecommerce side of the site yet)
www.duckmania.co.uk this is selling prints not photos (click on buy to view the e-commerce part)
The cost of these sites varies depending on your exact requirements so there is no set price for them but you should get change from £2,000 for a full featured (multi-gallery) photocart (picturespro) website that includes a 3 month SEO project after your search engine friendly site is completed. Call James at Delicious Webdesign on 01375 460094 or 07743 853976 to discuss your exact requirements and let us create a website for you to take your new photography business online successfully.
Seems Google has been kind to our sites this update (Think this update happened on the 31st December 2009) Keeping to the 3 monthly schedule of updates.
Most of the sites we created 2-3 months ago got an increase of between 1 and 2 grades, a couple of older / smaller sites went from 0 to 1 but three older sites went went from page rank 2 to 1.
The sites that got a Google Toolbar Page Rank update:
http://www.bradford-coaches.co.uk from 0 to 1
http://www.silent-bubbles.com/ from 0 to 1
http://www.allamber.co.uk from 2 to 3
http://www.fitted-bedroom-furniture.co.uk from 0 to 2
http://www.idc-guide.com from 0 to 1
http://www.coates-builders.co.uk from 0 to 2
http://www.calibreinteriors.co.uk from 0 to 2
http://www.essex-wedding-cakes.co.uk from 0 to 2
http://www.dottyhippodesign.com from 0 to 2
If your website gets an increase in its Google Pagerank this is generally very good and means that you have links and traffic going to your site. The Google Pagerank* algorithym is indicative of the websites importance (in Google’s eyes). Every webpage of every website it crawls on the Internet is assigned a numeric weighting between 0 and 10.
MSN and Yahoo have similar ranking metrics.