Website Optimisation Service
As the Global Recession takes hold, the online world has had a few fatalities. Many of our clients operated as Online Mortgage & Loan Intermediaries, and as everyone knows, this is one of the hardest hit segments of business. As such, we are sad to say that we have lost a number of clients.
On a positive note however, those companies that have been able to weather the storm are contacting us, keen to improve their websites ‘visibility’ with the Search Engines or Optimisation (Optimization for our American friends!).
Therefore much of our time has been spent stripping apart other peoples websites and implementing up to date SEO principles. A few things are really standing out as ‘holding back’ many a good website.
A few mistakes, some obvious, some not so ….
- Page Titles, MUST be different on every page. You will lose vital SEO ‘brownie points’ if you fall foul of this one.
- Meta Tags, USE THEM! They really are there for a purpose, they help the search engines categorise your site, help them and they’ll help you.
- H1, H2 & H3 headings, again these instruct the search engines as to what YOU think is important on your site. Don’t trust the search engines to do your work for you.
- Alt tags, these are great things, why? Because it’s a way to get more Keyword information onto a page whilst avoided ‘repetition’ of keyword phrases which gets really boring, not to mention difficult to read.
- Image Height & Widths. Browsers don’t always work the same way, again you have to help them. They aren’t ’stupid’ but they aren’t that clever either.
- Keep CSS, Javascripts, etc OFF the html by using ‘includes’. Search Engines will only check the first few hundred characters of code in their search for relevent content. It’s not good if they don’t find your sites ‘message’.
- Flash is great, but it sucks for SEO even now. Don’t rely on ‘moving images’ to get you a good position with with Google, CONTENT really IS still KING.
Not a complete list, but I’ll assume you understand that ‘tables’, ‘frames’ etc are still BAD, so apply the 7 points above and you’ll certainly notice a jump in your position.
As the worlds economy slows down, now more than ever you really do have to keep one step ahead of the competition. Getting your site a few positions higher on the page will go a long way to achieving that.
Living in Italy site update completed
One of our clients in Italy recently requested an update of their Living in Italy ‘portal’ site. They wanted a ‘fresher’ and more user friendly design.
The previous site was designed using Mambo CMS software around four years ago, times and styles change. Whilst Mambo was a pretty stable system, we opted for Wordpress this time around. This meant more work as all of the articles would have to be manually updated, but in order to give the best solution to the client it was decided this was the only way forward.
Given a relatively tight budget and an “as quickly as possible” timescale, we set to work.
Working to the clients brief of ‘fresh, friendly and magazine-ish’, we suggested a modified version of the BranfordMagazine template by Der Prinz, it seemed to tick all the right boxes and worked with the latest version of Wordpress (2.6).
Once installed, the theme itself was relatively straightforward to modify and personalise to our clients requirements. Obviously colour was a major change, in it’s standard form, the theme does not really reflect the ‘colours of Italy’. After a little consultation, this was rectified.
In less than one week, the site update was completed and our client (who had been watching closely throughout) was delighted. Well, we aim to please!
Update Completed!
Well, that didn’t take long!
We have been using Wordpress to develop customer sites for sometime now, with great success. It was only obvious that at some stage it would be included into our own ‘Webworks UK” website.
Those of you that are familiar with the many CMS options available, will already be aware of the power and ease of use that Wordpress offers. Between us, our team here have great experience when it comes to most ‘flavours’ of Opensource Software and we have used them extensively to speed up the development of client sites.
Speed, is a major advantage of using Opensource Software, mainly because it enables us to select a readymade ‘framework’ for our clients websites, leaving us to concentrate on the ‘personalisation’. Obviously, the less time we speed developing a site, the less we can charge our customers. As Opensource Software is free (though some ‘donations’ are made) we don’t have to pass on any software costs either.
As Opensource Software goes, we believe that Wordpress is possibly one of the best options available. With an extremely large user base, a vast number of ‘plugins’ and thousands of ‘readymade’ themes out there, the options are unlimited. No matter what plans you have for your site, property listings, ecommerce, blog or just a static website, it can be acheived with Wordpress.
Visit http://www.wordpress.org to find out more.
Work in Progress
Welcome to Webworks UK!
Currently we are upgrading our site to use the ‘Wordpress’ CMS system. This should be completed within the next 24 hrs, please bare with us during this time.
Webworks UK