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Why is it so important for any business to have a well-designed mobile version of their website

 

Let’s face it: many of us are glued to our smartphones. If the battery dies, we often can’t wait until it’s charged to check our social media feeds or when our food will be delivered.

Smartphones have become part of our everyday lives as people buy the goods and services they need.
We all know that smartphones are an essential part of modern life. Yet here’s the thing: Many businesses make the mistake of thinking that getting a business website designed and making it responsive is just something that’s needed.

The website needs to be responsive, yet that doesn’t automatically make the mobile design good.

So, a conversation with your web designers might go a bit something like this:
– “Included in the price, will the website work on smartphones and tablets?”.

Now, normally, for a fixed fee, web designers will design a mobile version of the website. Yet here’s the thing: a website might be responsive, yet it might not be that good. It might have a super high bounce rate, be slow, or be difficult to use, resulting in the website falling down

 

Google’s SERPs faster than you can say bad design.

What are the features that make a mobile design suitable:
– Very simple to use
– Fast, your mobile version of your website must be high-speed, if not supersonic
– Have a low bounce rate
– Text and font must be simple to read
– The main menu should be a piece of cake to use
– Must have reliable hosting
– Must follow white hat SEO methods

 

So, what’s mobile-first design?

So, walk into most web design offices, say from the early 2000s through around 2014, and most web designers were solely focused on getting the desktop design of the website right. So when the client walks in and sees the new business website, they are instantly impressed, and the mobile version of the website—well, often, that wasn’t considered that important back then.

However, things changed.

Google introduced “mobile-first indexing”

This basically means that the company website’s mobile version gets indexed first. More and more shoppers started buying everything from new woolly jumpers to sports cars off their mobile phones.

So, in a nutshell, more shoppers started buying goods and services off their mobile phones, as the mobile phone networks around faster internet on the move. Plus, smartphones began getting faster and faster, thanks to innovations with the processors, with companies such as Snap Dragon making faster processors.

Therefore, it was inevitable that buying habits would change. Someone who needs, say, a new toaster is not going to flip open their work laptop to make a purchase; often, with a few clicks on their smartphone, they just buy that item.

So, this means that we web designers, web developers, and SEO experts have to pay a lot of attention to designing a really good desktop version of the website, but the same, or even sometimes more effort, needs to be paid to designing the mobile version of the website.

 

What will I learn from reading this article?

  • You will learn what mobile first design means
  • Why it’s important to hire the right web designers in Cardiff
  • And why do you need to consider U.X that’s, user

 

Mobile-first design

According to StatCounter, over 53.91% of shoppers now use their mobile phones for web browsing.

So, in a nutshell, this is why it’s crucial that when you purchase a website for your business, the desktop version must be well designed, but so must the mobile version as well. Now, from an SEO perspective, it’s even more important than ever that the mobile version is well designed because of “mobile-first indexing”—meaning the content marketing and on-page SEO on the mobile version get indexed by Googlebot first.
This is why the mobile version of the website must be well designed and have good quality white hat SEO applied to it.

 

So, what are the main benefits of responsive web design?

 

Just consider how long you spend on your smartphone/tablet daily.

Some interesting statistics were published back in 2022. The average mobile user spends 4 hours and 48 minutes browsing on their smartphones daily. That statistic comes from APP Annies State of Mobile Report 2022.

So, what that tells us is simple: If your Cardiff business doesn’t have a good web design, complimented by excellent SEO and digital marketing, well, during those 4 hours, 48 minutes per day a shopper spends on the phone, your business is not going to appear.

Without investing in good quality SEO, for example, your business is unlikely to rank in the top 10 organic results on Google. And because of “mobile-first indexing,” unless you have a mobile version of your website designed, it won’t appear in the mobile Google results.

So, as the old saying goes, you need to be in it, to win it- so, its essential that whatever type of Welsh business you run, if you want to gain more shoppers, that shopping on their smartphones, then you need to have a mobile website designed for your business.

 

Responsive web design helps to:

How do you design a well-designed responsive website?

SEO agencies and web design agencies spend a lot of time building and designing the mobile version of a company website. Often, the designers design a good website but then constantly work on it, say every month, to improve it and lower the bounce rate.

So, for example, let’s say that you run an online e-commerce business selling clothes. Often, there will be an SEO agency or, let’s say, an in-house marketing team, which should work hard to lower the bounce rate and improve the time on site. So, to do this, web designers often use split testing, or some marketing agencies call this A/B testing.

The point that we are trying to make here is that web designers often design a responsive version of a website and work on improving design even more on an ongoing basis.

 

So, how to design an excellent responsive website>

Have to improve the readability

There’s no point in splashing out tens of thousands of pounds on getting a new e-commerce website designed if the font doesn’t load on some smartphones or if the font is just really hard to read.
So, whatever font you use, make sure it’s simple to read, but more than that, it should work on all smartphones and tablets.

Create a picture: people waiting in long queues at supermarkets and self-checkout areas all look unhappy because of the wait.

Supersonic

Have you ever stood for a while in a queue in a supermarket self-checkout area? Well, you often hear people moaning and groaning about the wait, which can last just a few minutes.

But because they have a basket full of milk, bread, and chocolate bars, they are often around until a till becomes available.
However, when you’re running an online business, you have to bear in mind that shoppers won’t wait around. Therefore, if your company website is slow, say on a smartphone, shoppers won’t be willing to wait. They will leave the website and often head directly to a competitor’s website. This means that the business will get a sky-high bounce rate, which is not good for the business’s organic SEO.

So, purchase fast, super-fast website hosting and make sure the web designer can build a fast website and knows how to design one.

 

So there you have it; we have explained why mobile-friendly design is crucial, and now here’s the good news:

So when you chat with some web designers, whether that’s a freelancer designing websites in their house or a large web design agency full of 70+ staff. Usually, they will charge you extra for designing and building a responsive version of the company website.

However, we are cut from different clothes, and we are different.

We know that when a business needs a new website in Cardiff, whether it’s an MOT station or a hairdresser, we know your customers are going to want to access your website off their phones. Whether that be the latest iPhone 17 or a Samsung Galaxy, the website must work on a range of different smartphone brands.

Here at W&P Designs, a well-known web design agency in Cardiff, when we offer a quote to design a website, our quote always includes

designing the mobile version.

Some web design businesses charge extra for designing a mobile version of the company website. However, we like to offer excellent value for money, so we offer to create the mobile version of the website. We often provide free hosting for the first year.

 

Would you like a web design quote?

Whether you run a plumbing or beauty business, we can design an amazing website for your company.

Come to us, give us a call today:

 

AI in web design- how will artificial intelligence change web design forever

AI and web design

 

Marketing / Web Design

 

It can be difficult to estimate the time it takes to design a website. Let’s give you an example: The client wants a picture of someone wearing running trainers running through a park.

Sounds simple, right?

Well, you could spend 30 minutes or more looking for the right stock photo on Adobe Stock Photos, or you could spend more than that editing and perfecting an image so you get it the way you want it to look.

Times that by a hundred, and web design takes a lot of time.

So now you can see why so many web design agencies have put their espressos down and started to wonder how artificial intelligence is changing web design and how it can revolutionise future website design.

 

Let’s dive in, A. I and web design

 

Are you stuck for an idea of what to write about for the latest blog post?

Well, why not chat with ChatGPT if you are struggling to develop some good ideas about what to write about for your latest blog posts?
Don’t get us wrong; here at our web design agency, we will have copywriters writing the text.

However, picture this: It’s a rather cold winter morning, and your copywriters have just arrived at the office.

Two espressos later, they struggled to develop a coherent plan on what to write for a solicitor website’s latest article.

Well, this, my friend, is where Chat GPT comes into its own.

It acts like a de-icer to the car window, instantly making things clear.

You can chat with ChatGPT; suddenly, your creative juices are free-flowing, and you know what to write about.

Thanks, ChatGPT. We think you’re great.

 

Huemint

Have you tried changing ties or shirts before a meeting to get the look just right?

 

Now, you might think, don’t want blue shirt today, don’t want red, don’t want white.

So, it can take a relatively long time to choose the fitting shirt and tie—this is the same when designing a website. Getting the colour scheme right is essential. Do you want to convey a sense that you’re selling a luxury product, for example?

Do you want to convey that you’re a funky, modern company with bright in your-face colours used?

This is where you might want to use Huemint to determine which colour scheme you want to use on your new website.

 

Fontjoy

Which font you use can significantly impact the website’s appearance. A good font can make the website look stylish as if you are reading flowing text as you land on each page.

However, some fonts make the website look dated, old-fashioned, and behind the times.

This is why businesses and web designers use handy tools such as FontJoy, which can help us narrow down which font to use.

 

Teleport HQ

 

 

A bricklayer today wouldn’t carry bricks up a ladder; it’s not safe and is hard work. Neither would they pull bricks up using a pulley.
No. They just wouldn’t.

This is why web design agencies worldwide sometimes don’t design a website from scratch. To bring the cost of the web design down for the customer, there’s often some “heavy lifting” that can be removed by using tools such as Teleport HQ. Here, you can get a rough outline of a site created, offering a good starting point for those who want to create a website for their business.

 

3D compositions

Blender is an advanced AI tool that can create 3D elements.

Dalle2 and Midjourney

It used to be the case that if you wanted to add a picture of someone sitting enjoying craft beer with a large glass beer, well, eating wood-fired pizza, with a wood-fired oven burning in the background, outside an old-fashioned pub, then you often had to hire a photographer for the day or morning at least.

Yet, as the picture above shows, you can create AI photos with a few clicks of the mouse in seconds. These are great to add to, say, a blog post to enhance it and make the text more interesting; after all, which shopper wants to read 3,000 words without any pictures added to make it more enjoyable?

 

It helps the customer understand how the website could look

So, for example, instead of hiring a photographer for the day, some web designers use ChatGPT to place some A. I took photos on the website as a temporary way of designing it.

It gives the web developers and the client a good idea of what the website could look like when finished.

Then, once the client says, “I like the text and the pictures you’ve added with A.I.,” the real photos can be taken and added.

So, for example, if a brand new restaurant is opening up, let’s say a steak restaurant, then you could add A. I took a photo to show how we raise our herd very well. This one is the team, this one is someone eating a steak, and this one is a cow in the field. Then that allows the web designers to set out the pictures to design the website, and then the client can say, swap this part, replace that, etc.

The photographer obviously knows what photos they must take and what the client wants, so the A. It allows you to visualise the website before it’s even been completed.

 

A.I can help to write code

CSS styling, PHP, HTML structure or JavaScript functionalities

We web designers often encounter glitches and errors developed with a company’s website.
Many web designers use A. I have tools to fix problems with a website’s code.

 

Chatbots

 

Hiring a customer service team is expensive, yet they are often needed because customers usually have complicated queries that need to be answered, such as “My parcel says it’s been delivered to my bin, and it’s not there; it’s not in the bin.”

A chatbot cannot help locate where the parcels have gone, so a customer service team is essential.
However, more and more businesses now want their web developers to design a WordPress website which has built a chatbot into the website.

There are various chatbots you can use. Some only offer basic functionality: a customer selects a button, which generates a pre-written

answer.

On the other hand, some web designers are adding highly sophisticated chatbots, so sometimes, shoppers might not even realise they are conversing with a chatbot.

How you use various A. I have tools to improve the design of your company website

So, how do some U.K. web designers use A? I have tools right now to design websites for their clients:

 

Logo design

 

A lot of businesses use Stable Diffusion, using what’s called the LORA model, to design their logos. Another option is to use Hatchful.

 

Does your web design agency believe that A? I will replace web designers one day.

So, we are a web design company based in the city centre of Cardiff, South Wales.

Some of our highly skilled PHP web designers have been designing superb websites for well over ten years.

And there’s no two ways about it: web design will change over the following ten years. There is no question about it: we might see drones delivering our parcels, robots bringing out our lunch in restaurants, and we might have A. I am doing a lot of the web design process, even by us just speaking and during the A. I as the website gets built in front of us.

 

 

However, hold your horses just for a second.

There’s no substitute for human creativity; there just isn’t.

If we listen to music while enjoying a nice, refreshing pint, sometimes we don’t know why the beat of the drums lifts our mood; it just does.

The same goes for web design. We can make websites that are mass-produced, like nuts and bolts in a factory.

Yet there needs to be that flair or creativity, a sense that the person designing the website understands the business, its main selling points, its company history, and the main benefits of owning that product.

 

Will A. I pick up on that?

If guided and told to do something, there always needs to be human input, perhaps the web designer.

So we think that web design agencies will always be needed. In the same way, painters and decorators are always required; you could, for example, pop along to a local DIY store, buy some excellent paint and splash it around the living room yourself if you wanted to spend some money on DIY costs.

 

Yet a lot of people still hire a painter and a decorator?

Why? Because the finish is better, and you save time. And when you come in from your work, you often have the, well, that looks a lot better impression on your face when you see the living room redecorated in lovely colour orange.

Now, this is the same for website design
Sure, you could design a website yourself- but do you want to?

 

Do you have the time?

When finished, how will it look? A bit basic might do unless you can dedicate a lot of time to writing text and improving the design.

This is why our phones are always busy ringing, with businesses based all over Cardiff wanting a quality website designed at a fair price.

Now, don’t get us wrong, there could come a day when artificial intelligence takes over web design.
But until that day, web design agencies like us are using A. I have tools to help design better websites, create better U.X for shoppers, and design websites faster, which brings down the cost of web design.

 

 

 

How to install WordPress: A Complete Tutorial

Installing WordPress

Subject: WordPress

Date: 17/10/2024

Do you want to install WordPress? First of all, we think that WordPress is amazing, and this guide will help you install it so that you can start designing your brand-new company website.

What’s included in this guide:

  • Why our web design agency believes that WordPress is a very good choice for a lot of businesses
  • We will explain how to install WordPress
  • What you will need to install WordPress
  • Where you need it, all programs can be obtained free and securely.
  • Where you can obtain all of the programmes you need to do this

 

Why install WordPress?

First things first, why install WordPress?

WordPress, a free content management system (CMS), is the most popular and widely used worldwide. Roughly 33% of all websites are run on WordPress.

 

Used by well-known brands

Some of the world’s leading companies use WordPress, which is another reason our web design agency often recommends it to our clients. WordPress is trusted by well-known businesses.

 

So, what tools will be needed to install WordPress?

We recommend using an FTP client and Webspace.

We will need website hosting. We recommend using a company that offers hosting for WordPress websites. Will your hosting require a PHP database, MySQL, or MariaDB?

 

Pick a website hosting company that offers a high level of support.

 

FTP client

You will need to install an FTP client. This allows you to transfer files from your Apple Laptop to hosting online. It’s super simple and often works on a drag-and-drop basis.

Here are some of the programs that you might want to use:

 

Which program do most web designers use?

So we use FileZilla, which many businesses have widely used for a long time. It also works on different operating systems, and many other web design agencies use it globally. Here’s the link if you want to read about FileZilla: https://filezilla-project.org/.

 

Install WordPress and Filezilaa

Then, it is time to download WordPress itself

 

WordPress Download

The great news is that WordPress is offered free of charge. Incredibly, it’s provided for free when you consider some other Content Management Systems, which can sometimes charge a monthly or one-off fee. WordPress being offered for free is fantastic.
So, visit WordPress.org to learn more about the benefits of owning a WordPress website for your business.

 

Hosting and WordPress

WordPress will then be in a zip folder, including all the necessary files. You need to upload these to your hosting. So, when choosing a hosting company, choose one that offers WordPress hosting.

WordPress Install Tutorial
WordPress upload

Now we are ready. Connect FileZilla to your web space. For this, you need the FTP access data from your hosting provider.

 

How to upload WordPress

This is then when you connect your FileZilla to your hosting; for this, you will need FTP access; you will also need the following information:

  • Host
  • Username
  • Password
  • And Port

 

WordPress Filezilla Data Transfer

WordPress installation

Set the language and connect the database.

When installing WordPress, you will be asked which language you want to use for your backend. Confirm this choice and press continue.

Installing WordPress onto your website hosting
When installing WordPress, there is often an option in the C-panel to do this. You will need information regarding your database name, the server, and password. Often, it’s just a matter of one click, and that is done.

 

Install WP

WordPress Setup Installation
WordPress setup and installation
So, when installing WordPress, you want to complete the installation. Your web designers will take care of this for you.

 

Setting up WordPress

WordPress first login

Set up WordPress login details: Choose a password and username, and keep this login information safe. Any SEO companies or, let’s say, web designers working on your website in the future will need this information.

Website hosting and WordPress

You should then receive a notification in your C-Panel that you have successfully installed WordPress.
You can then add a WordPress theme.

 

Do you require help creating the website?

We have built many WordPress websites for construction businesses, electricians, and carpenters.

We have built WordPress websites for solicitors’ practices.

Would you like to obtain a well-designed website for your business?

We design and build very high-quality websites; our digital marketing agency can offer you the following services:

– Web design
– WordPress web design
– Website Hosting
– Search Engine Optimisation
– Managing your business’s social media

 

Why do we recommend opting for WordPress?

There are a massive number of content management systems to choose from. Now, if we put ourselves in the shoes of a customer, they often don’t know what CMS to choose.

Drupal or WordPress?

Wix or Squarespace?

We fully appreciate that most businesses don’t know which CMS to choose. However, as we have been building quality and unique websites for businesses all over the U.K. for over ten years, we can say, hand in heart, that we think WordPress is a brilliant option.
Now, the other content management systems out there are also excellent. Some might suit your business better. For example, you might find the dashboard, which is the website’s back-end, more straightforward.

As the old saying goes, there are horses for courses, meaning you must find the option that best suits your business’s requirements.
Now, let us put it this way: choosing a website or a website designer can sometimes mean the difference between your business’s success or failure.
Some businesses are solely and 100% reliant on getting more customers via digital marketing.
Without digital marketing, some businesses may go bust in a very short period.

So, a word to the wise: Choose your website design company carefully, choose a good website designer, and take your time to find the right company and CMS that works for you.

 

These are, therefore, the considerations that you should make when choosing a web design company and CMS:

– Do you find the admin/ dashboard a piece of cake to use?
– What content management systems are your competitors using? Do you want to use the same?
– Is the CMS simple to update?
– How much is the CMS? Is it within your marketing budget?
– Talk to your SEO consultant/ SEO agency. Do they have experience using that CMS, or do they recommend using it?
– Talk to your friends in business about which content management system they use. Have they encountered any problems or issues with the CMS?

Can WordPress be used as an e-commerce website?

It most certainly can. Millions of businesses worldwide use Woocommerce and WordPress together, and it’s a good partnership.
WordPress and Woocommerce are brilliant, and we highly recommend WordPress to all our clients.

How much does it cost to get a WordPress website designed?

The price fluctuates often depending on the area, whether you’re hiring a freelancer or agency or perhaps you’ll have a go at building it yourself.

Building it yourself is sometimes not the cheapest option. On paper, it does appear to be the most affordable option, but if you’re going to spend days on end working out how the dashboard works, how to move a block of text, or, let’s say, how to add a company logo, well, this can be counterproductive.

It can take you well over two weeks to design the website, whereas a highly experienced web designer might have been able to do this work in a fraction of the time.

It’s a bit like tiling your kitchen or painting the living room. You can do this work and save money, but do you want to? What’s the result going to look like? Are you going to have to tear the tiles off the wall because they look wonky?

This is the same with web design. Some businesses think, “How hard can it be to design a website?”

Well, it isn’t accessible if you’ve never done it—there’s much to consider.

So why not hire our highly experienced web design team?

For just £950.00 flat fee, we can design a 7-page website and offer super fast hosting for the first year for free. This offers unbelievable value for money. So why not give us a ring today?

 

Why you should take your time to find the right website hosting

So, your websites must be speedy if you want to improve your businesses later on, such as organic or local search engine optimisation. It needs to be supersonic because today if you hold up the shopper for even a few seconds, they won’t wait for the website to load. Therefore, the bounce rate can get high.

When you have a cup of tea and sit down with your local SEO company, they will tell you that a high bounce rate is not good news.

It tells search engines, such as Google, that many visitors are not interested in visiting another page on your website; they’re turning around and going elsewhere.

So, you don’t want this.

You want engaged shoppers who view many products and pages and ultimately part with their hard-earned money. So you want engaged shoppers who read various guides, look at many products, and read your company’s information about us, for example.

In summary, you want the bounce rate to be low, and you want engaged shoppers. Therefore, one way to minimise that bounce rate is to purchase fast website hosting.

Do many businesses within Cardiff use WordPress?

Yes, whether you run a dog-walking business or a local bean counter, i.e., an account, ask your website designers to run a search for your type of business within Cardiff.

Such as “family lawyers + city name”

Then, have a look at the website’s source code.

Your web designers will then be able to examine the source code and tell you how many of the businesses ranked in the first ten results on Google.co.uk are using a WordPress website.

You often find that many of the businesses on the first page use WordPress. Don’t get us wrong; you still need to apply a lot of SEO and hard work to get any business onto page one of Google.co.uk.

The point we are trying to make here is how popular WordPress is with many businesses. You will often find that some of your direct competitors within Cardiff frequently use WordPress as it is simply such a brilliant CMS.

 

What are 7 different ways that we could reduce our bounce rate?

 

So, you’ve just got off the phone with your SEO agency. It’s the first month that they have been working for you. They’ve logged in to an SEO tool such as Google Analytics, and in a matter of just a few seconds, they can see that the bounce rate is through the roof.

There can be many different reasons for this, but often, it boils down to two main factors: the website being too slow or the design being just, well, a bit rubbish, putting off potential shoppers.

 

So, first things first:

What is a bounce rate, and how is it calculated?

So, the bounce rate is calculated when a shopper visits a single page or blog post on your website and then doesn’t take any action, such as clicking on another page. The shopper, therefore, leaves the website without browsing any of the products you have for sale.
Now, this is bad news on two fronts:

 

Costing the business sales

So, if many shoppers leave more or less straight away, they may not like the design or find the website a bit difficult to use.
Either way, they are not purchasing items, which means that the business is not making sales. Now, it could just be that the website is too basic, looks a bit rubbish, or that the customer can’t find the answer that they are looking for.

The really good web designers, the web design agencies that design good websites, often keep things simple. They put themselves in the customers’ shoes. What products/services do they want? How can you make it a piece of cake for them to get to that page from, say, the homepage?

Then, there’s often a lot of effort that goes into producing the content marketing, so it’s helpful, useful, and useful so that it helps the shopper.

If a customer can’t find an answer to a question, such as how energy efficient a washing machine is, they will just leave the business, increasing the bounce rate.

 

Bad for SEO

So, if thousands, if not millions, of shoppers are leaving your website faster than you can shout “bounce rate,” then it is not good for the company’s search engine optimisation. Google, as well as other search engines like Bing, see that shoppers are not spending too long on the website, which shows low engagement. This means that the business, over time, starts to go down the ranks and not up.

 

You need to create a better user experience that doesn’t need to cost a fortune.

Many web design agencies always talk about improving a business’s UX, but what does this even mean?
When you walk into a car showroom, the car retailers want to make it a pleasant experience.
Perhaps a friendly, smiling face at the front of the house, a free coffee, and light, bright, and airy spaces where the cars are illuminated and shining like stars.

This puts the product, the car, in its best light.

If you had to see the car in the middle of a muddy field on a winter’s day, you would not purchase it.
So, it’s all about generating a positive experience, and you must think about this when designing your company website. How can you improve the U.X.

 

Well, let us give you just a few ideas and suggestions on how you can improve your website U.X.

– make your website super sonic fast
– design the website so it is simple to use; don’t make it complicated and complex. The bounce rate will go through the roof
– use a font type that works on all mobiles and desktops

Work with highly experienced UX designers to design the mobile version of a website.

Let’s say you’re purchasing a rather expensive pair of running trainers on your Apple iPhone; the bounce rate will often increase sharply if the website is not simple to use.

So, for example, in a burger menu where the icon is just too small, some shoppers might not be able to click the icon. Therefore, they may be unable to work out how to use the main menu and, thus, leave the company website.

 

Use Google PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix to improve page speed

In an age of bullet trains, 5G mobiles, and fast electric cars, we all like things to go fast.

So, if your company website is loading slowly, work with a local web design company. They can use Google PageSpeed and GT Metrix to find ways to make your website faster.

For improve to improve the U.X the website designers could make the website faster by:

– improving load times
– switching the hosting company to a hosting company that offers faster website hosting
– get an AMP website designed.

 

Is the website navigation super simple to use?

So, many businesses have opted for burger menus or an expanding menu that goes across the whole screen, and you can pick a page you want.

Regardless of which type of main menu you go for, just make sure that it’s designed to be super simple to use. If the main menu is not a piece of cake to use, and shoppers find it a headache to locate the products they want, they often leave, and yes, that means, yet again, the bounce rate is increasing.

Come to us; we can design a fantastic website for your business

We design amazing websites that offer a good U.X. Our websites are fast, well-designed and offered at great prices. So why not call us today?

 

 

 

 

Website design costs: How much does it cost to get a website designed in the UK?

 

In this in-depth article, we explain how much it costs to get a website designed for your business and why sometimes the lowest-cost option is not always the best for web design.

 

Web design

 

Table of contents

  • Why it’s essential to get an excellent website designed and not just go for the cheapest option
  • Why we recommend WordPress
  • Why do you also need to work out what is not included in the web design cost

So, how much does a website cost? Well, often, the cheapest options may not be that cheap once you factor in everything you need. For example, you will need super fast hosting, a responsive website, and often at least seven pages designed, plus the text written.

So, often, that super cheap price, at the end of the day, once you’ve added in everything you need, is not so cheap.
Weight up, therefore, by getting everything you need from a company that you know will design a website that will serve your business well over many consecutive years.

 

Investing in a quality website

So, there are websites, and then there are websites- what do we mean by that?

Well, some websites cut the mustard and are just good; some are just online business cards, which tell the business name, address, phone number, and a brief introduction of the services.

In 2023, 72% of businesses will have a professional website, meaning your business faces enormous competition. So, just having a “run of the mill” website is not enough. It would be best to have something that stands out, is well-designed, and makes an excellent first impression.

 

Website Design Services

Website design services

First impressions matter

When you first meet somebody, you consciously or unconsciously decide whether you like that person, right?

Well, this is the same for a company website. It’s said that it only takes 0.5 seconds for a shopper to make a decision about a business. So, you could be spending hundreds of hours improving search engine optimisation and paying a small fortune to an SEO agency to get the business ranked higher on Google.

But you could be flogging a dead horse if the design is good. As we just mentioned, it only takes a blink of an eye, 0.5 seconds, for a shopper to decide if they like that business, if they will stay on the website, or if they will leave.

 

Make sure everything works as it should

We think that one of the best TV commercials was made by Honda. It was simply brilliant; the message they were putting across was clear: “isn’t it just nice when things work?”.

This is a clear statement to promote the reality of their cars and their sound quality.

You should think about this when designing a website: it’s all good to have an ultra-complex, impressive design, yet if the complex design means it doesn’t work simply, then the bounce rate will go through the roof.

Poor functionality causes 42% of people to leave a site; basically, if something doesn’t work that well, or it’s just tricky to sort products by, say, price, whether they’re in stock, by customer ratings, well, customers will leave, increasing the bounce rate.

 

So, let’s get down to the nitty gritty—how much does a website cost to build in the U.K.?

Free

Free? Really?

Well, yes, there are websites that a business can build for free.

Yet, the quality of these websites depends on how much time you want to invest in designing them.

It’s a bit like hiring a painter and decorator. Sure, you could paint the living room yourself—but do you want to?

Do you have the time?

Will it look good in the end? Or will your furniture be covered in paint splashes, and will the “cutting in” look like a dog’s leg?

Well, this is the same for web design. You might design a website that puts customers off, and they swiftly leave the website, causing the bounce rate to increase. So rather than making a sale, you could have a website that just has a very high bounce rate across every single page.

 

Freelancer

So, let’s say we are talking about getting a relatively simple website built, a brochure website. Well, in the U.K., if you hire a freelancer, this would cost anywhere from £700 to £2500.00, depending on how intricate the design is.

Web design agency

Web design agencies typically employ many staff, often around 20 on average, so the overheads are higher.

This means that it’s often the most costly to get a website designed by a web design agency. At the same time, there are benefits to choosing an agency, in that they have a staff, and the website can often be built much faster. Also, you usually have a group of staff with a diverse range of marketing skills, so whether you need help with SEO, graphic design or help to promote your business on social media, often there’s a wide range of different staff that you can hire to help promote your business.

Would you like to hire our super-talented web designers?

Whether you’re about to open a funky coffee shop in Cardiff or a brand-new car insurance company, we are on hand to help. We are a well-known web design agency that can help you with every aspect of your digital marketing.

We are the WordPress web design experts in Cardiff, so if you would like a quote to build a quality WordPress website, why not call us?

 

A beginner’s guide to using wireframes and why they are important when designing a new website

 

Table of contents:

  • What exactly is a website’s wireframe?
  • Why should your web designers create a website wireframe?
  • Are wireframes needed for every single website designed by web designers?
  • How to create a simple wireframe
  • Wireframe examples

 

Introduction

You might be about to launch a brand-new business?

Therefore, you may have contacted various web designers to explain how you want your website to be designed.
The various web design companies might all say that creating a wireframe for your new website is crucial.
Yet now you might be wondering, well, what is a wireframe?

What is its purpose?

How can it help me obtain a brilliant and well-designed website for my business?
Strap yourself in and get comfortable, because this comprehensive article will tell you everything you need to know about wireframes and why they are needed during the web design process.
Create a picture: someone designing wireframes on a tablet.

Think of wireframes like a set of architects’ plans

When you’re getting a relatively simple extension added to your house, a builder doesn’t just rock up with his van and start laying bricks willy-nilly.

There will be a set of architectural plans in place that the construction firm should follow. This is the same when designing a website; however instead of architectural drawings, you have wireframes that web designers construct to later design say a Drupal, Joomla or WordPress website. This allows an outline to be sketched based on the website’s appearance.

 

Wireframes therefore allow:

– Rough sketch of a website to be created
– Directors and stakeholders to have input on changes / improvements they want made before finished design goes live
– Using high fidelity wireframes gives you a good idea of what the website looks like, before it goes live

 

User experience (U.X) and putting the customer first

Just as when you’re designing the interior layout of the new shop, you will have a lot of people giving their input into how the design should look. For example, how the lightening should work, what flooring to use, which colour you should be painting the walls.
This is the same as with a new company website; there will often be many stakeholders, company directors, marketing managers, and senior employees which will all have input into how the website should look. For example:

– Which hex codes / colour schemes should you use?
– Which CMS should you use
– What should the footer look like?
– How the home page look?
– Which website hosting company are you going to use?
– How should the layout of the main pages look?

 
These are all questions that businesses often have, and these are the conversations that web design agencies, have with their clients often on a daily basis.

For example conversations are often had to discuss the website’s typography, colour scheme that’s going be used, and page layout for example, as these are all important considerations that will need to be thought about when designing a brand new company website.

Now, if you’re going to hire a web developer, they may decide to dive in headfirst and start designing the website without using wireframes.
What often happens is that many, if not even hundreds, of changes need to be made if the client is not happy with the finished design.

Therefore, it is a good idea to get a rough sketch and create a wireframe, whether “high-fidelity” or a “low-fidelity” wireframe created.

Don’t worry if you don’t know what high-fidelity and low-fidelity wireframes mean; we will explain more about this later on in the article.

High-fidelity wireframes are detailed and closely resemble the final website, while low-fidelity wireframes are more straightforward and focus on the basic structure and layout.

 

So, what exactly is a website wireframe?

The website wireframe is simply like a rough sketch of your website.

 

It allows you to plan what functionality your website needs, such as where the contact us boxes, buttons and CTA’S should go.
It also allows web designers / web developers to place where the pictures on your company website should go, and where the text should go where the buttons should go.

As we shall explain later in this article, when creating wireframes you don’t need expensive computer software to design them. It’s not uncommon for a business, for example when designing a simple brochure website, for the client to rock up at the web designers offices with a piece of graph paper laying out how they want the website designed.

Create a picture: Someone designing wireframe for a website on pen and paper.

 

Can you skip designing wireframes to say money and time?

You can skip the wireframe stage, which can bring down the cost of designing that website.
However, to do this, the web designer and the client must be on the same page. You might be scratching your head, thinking, “Well, what does that mean?”

This means that the web design team and the client need a very clear idea of how the website will look.

Therefore, they need to agree on, for example, the page layout, the typography, the logo, and the colour scheme they used.
And what we would encourage, at a minimum, is a very basic mockup. A low-fidelity mockup is created at a minimum using wireframes.

The reason for this is that on the day of the website’s grand unveiling, let’s say you’re asked to visit the web design agency’s offices to see the finished design.

You might be anxious about the website’s appearance because it’s been months in the construction stage.

The risk of not having wireframes created is that during the website’s grand unveiling, you might look disappointed.

That’s because the web designer thought you wanted the website designed that way, but it might be different from what you had envisaged.

Therefore, the website might look overly basic and a bit naff.

So what wireframes actually do is allow a very concrete idea of how the website is going to look.

Because a high-fidelity wireframe actually sets out everything from web buttons to the main menu, the picture layout, the text layout, you can gain a very good understanding of how the website is going to look before it even gets finished.

So, in more instances, can you skip designing a wireframe?

You might find some web design companies that absolutely insist that a wireframe is needed no matter what type of website is designed.
However, in some instances, we think this is overkill, and it actually costs the client an unnecessary amount of money.

As we know by now, a wireframe is simply a blueprint, a rough sketch of how the website will look.
This is all well and good- but let’s say that your web design company charges a minimum of £2000 to design wireframes for the website’s desktop and mobile versions of the website, which sounds reasonable if its say a 25-page website.

Let’s say that you need a basic one-page website to set up an event.
Its lets say a rock festival event is about to take place. You need a one-page website that links you to a ticket management company that handles ticket sales for you.

This sounds like a relatively simple website, so do you need a wireframe constructed?

In this instance, we would say that if the client and the web developers are same page regarding what is needed from the design, and sometimes, then sometimes you can actually skip the wireframe stage. For instance, a wireframe may be unnecessary if you’re creating a simple one-page website for an event or if the design requirements are straightforward and well-understood.

This can save about weeks’ worth of work in some instances or even more if it’s a large e-commerce site. These potential time and cost savings can be a relief, especially for businesses with tight schedules and budgets.
So how do you begin designing wireframes?

 

First, you have to think of the goal you want to obtain.

Let’s say it’s garden fencing business, just as an example.

How can you design the best website to bring as many visitors from Google as possible so you can sell more fencing?
So this adds another element to the web design process because what can happen with web designers is that they have a tunnel vision of just making the website look good and impressive, which is, of course, important.

When you think about your customers, you start to think about their questions they often have and how you can bring as more through shoppers to your website as possible.

Then, you stop thinking about things like an FAQ page and add content marketing and detailed product descriptions, which changes the web design because your website becomes much more helpful to your customers, which often means more text, more infographics, more helpful

YouTube videos, explaining the benefits of owning that product or service.

 

How many pages need to be designed?

Different wireframes need to be designed for each page. In some instances, this might be the case; the main service pages share the same wireframe construction because you want the same layout duplicated across say 7 main service pages. This can save time and often reduce the cost of getting a website designed.

Mobile phones

Don’t forget that it is crucial to get wireframes designed for both the mobile and desktop versions of your company website.
A different wireframe construction must be created for the mobile version because it’s an entirely different and separate design from desktop wireframes.

Your mobile version of your website, needs to be designed to be responsive, you will want it to work brilliantly on a mobile device, and arguably, we would say that you need to pay particular attention to the mobile design.

The reason for this is that the number of people buying goods and services on their mobile phones is on an upward trajectory. Therefore, web designers need to spend a lot of time designing both sets of wireframes, the desktop and mobile.

The other reason we say to pay particular attention to the mobile version when designing the wireframes for the mobile version of your website is that you need to make mobile version very simple to use.

We’ve all been there: when looking to buy goods or services, we encounter a mobile website that is just tricky and difficult to use.

 

 

The mobile menu might not function smoothly, and if it’s a burger menu and the icons are designed to be too small, you might even struggle to locate them by squinting at the screen, trying to find where the main menu expands to.

So, your web designers must design a “good user experience”.

You’re likely to hear your web designers bang on about until they are blue in the face: improving the UX of the website.

That is the user experience of a website.

You might want to go low-tech and use good old-fashioned pen and paper
So when we think of web design offices, we think of multiple staff, cutting edge computers and many people sitting around drinking fancy coffee’s.

However, if the customer has a rough sketch of how they want their website designed, say just designed on a piece of paper this can massively help the web design process.

From pen and paper, low fidelity and then a high-fidelity wireframes can be created later.

So some businesses, often small businesses, might think, well, I can’t take in scraps of paper with a rough sketch of how you want your website to be designed, to the web designers, but you can.

Many web design agencies like this because it can quickly convey how was let’s a brochure website designed.
So why not create a rough sketch at a web design company’s office, even on pen and paper or perhaps on a whiteboard?

 

Low fidelity wireframes

Asking your web designers to create low-fidelity wireframes can be extremely useful. It allows stakeholders, such as employees, directors, the marketing team, and even friends, to have a lot of input on how they want the website designed.

And what often happens is someone comes up with a really good point, such as, “What about this service, can we add that page?”
Therefore, this can be a precious experience in gaining feedback from your employees or friends on how to improve the design.

 

Content marketing
Content marketing is what petrol is to a car. If your website has no well-written, helpful text, the SEO will not go that far, if anywhere.
So, content marketing, which is just a rather fancy way of saying text needs to be applied to your website, but that text needs to be well written.

However, wireframes allow you to visualise how the text should be laid out. You need quite a bit of text added to each page, but you don’t want so much text added that it overwhelms the shopper. They don’t want to read that much text, and they leave your website causing the bounce rate to soar.

 

Why do we need to keep bounce rates low?

If you get the design wrong, then this means bounce rate can be very high, meaning shoppers are leaving more or less straightaway.
It is a bit like a lot of people stepping inside your restaurant, asking to see the menu, and walking straight out the door. The chef or the company director may wonder what is wrong. Why are so many people doing this?

Well this be the same for your website, if of the bounce rate through the roof, is there a reason for this because of the design or because it offering a bad user experience?

So, for example, if you apply too much text to a page, the shopper might think they are not reading all of that, its simply too much text, and they leave the website. They turn on their heels and leave straight away.

 

Buttons and links

You need to use calls to action throughout the website, which web designers call “CTAs”.

You want to offer valuable information the customer finds useful when deciding whether to buy a product or service.
Then follow that up with a CTA, which might be a button that simply says contact us

The CTA is, therefore, simply a prompt: Do you require further help?
Yet without this, we might lose the customer; they might have gone off the website and onto a competitor’s website.
But a well-designed website, with a clear call to action, guides the shopper and helps them when they’re about to make a purchase decision.

For example, you might be selling a high-value product, let’s say, just for example purposes, a garden room.

But if you add a CTA that says, why not sign up for our monthly newsletter?

How can we design a low-fidelity wireframe?

You might hear your web designer’s say are building a low-fidelity wireframe using content blocks.

So this could simply be setting out a block which shows where the text is and another block that shows where the picture is.
Sometimes, these need to be high fidelity design designed, to give you an excellent understanding of how the website could look when finished, or low fidelity is just like a rough sketch, as if somebody made it with a pen and paper.

So, how these wireframes are created depends on the software the web designers are using.

They might have content management systems (CMS), allowing wireframes to be created in the CMS.

Alternatively they might use a wireframe designing programme to design wireframes.

 

Why we think you should ask for an interactive wireframe to be created

As we discussed earlier, there are low-fidelity and high-fidelity wireframes. You can take this a step further and create “interactive wireframes”, which are basically wireframes that you can click on and use the different elements, such as the buttons.
So basically, you’re getting your website, but if it’s not finished, it’s just a rough outline of what the website will look like and the buttons you can use to press.

 

How does using wireframes improve the web design process?

So we would highly recommend that your web design business use wireframes for you get an idea of how the website could look before it’s finished. It also allows input from, say, the company director for the marketing teams, so you can make changes to the website before is actually been fully designed.

Do you require a brand-new website to be designed in Cardiff?

Cardiff is a capital city, and that like most capital cities throughout United Kingdom there are a massive amount of web design companies to choose from.

However, many companies choose us, because our designers have over 10 years’ experience designing websites.

 

We can also offer the following services:

  • Organic SEO
  • Website design
  • WordPress web design
  • Drupal web design
  • Joomla! website design

We can actually offer also offer to design a brochure website, complete with 7-pages for just £1000.
If this has you interested in any of the marketing services that we can offer, when why not get on the dog and bone, that’s phone and have a chat with us today.

 

What exactly are pillar pages?

What Are Pillar Pages?

 

 

Date: 11/10/2024

Long-form content marketing

So, think of the wheel of a bicycle just for a second, you have a lot of spokes, all leading to a central hub to support the wheel on the bike.
Well, this is a bit the same for “pillar content marketing” in that it’s the central hub, the part to which everything connects.

 

 

Now, suppose you hire the right web developer and SEO team- in that case, you will use on-page SEO methods, including internal links, to ensure your website is optimised for the keywords your business wants to improve its organic search engine optimisation for.

 

Reaching the top of Google.co.uk

It used to be, let’s say, seven or eight years ago, that a website designer could sometimes design a website for a business that’s operating in a low-competitive business sector and, with no ongoing SEO work, reach the top of Google.co.uk within a few months.
So, why did that happen?

Well, often, it’s because the business operates in a low-competition sector, meaning that not many businesses have invested in SEO services for that industry.

This means that, let’s say, a well-designed WordPress website, with well-written content marketing and good on-page SEO, could sometimes cut through straight to the first page of Google.co.uk.

 

Fast forward to 2024

Now, things are much different; across the U.K., countless web design businesses and digital marketing agencies work for their clients to help get them onto page one of Google.

Years and years of SEO graft have therefore, gone to improving the on-page and off-page SEO for many businesses.
This means that the bar, which is the standard of SEO to beat, is now much harder and to get any business on page one, whether a solicitor or a hotel is now hard work.

This is where many businesses have developed marketing strategies that now involve using “pillar content”.

This is to clearly demonstrate to Google’s algorithm that business are the experts when it comes to talking about that product or service.
Businesses all over the U.K., therefore, if they want to get on page one of Google.co.uk, must now produce work that clearly shows they know about “Google E-EAT” and how to write white hat content marketing.

 

Google E-EAT
Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness

It’s essential that when a business produces a piece of evergreen content marketing or produces a piece of pillar content, their work is top quality; that an expert has written it. The work must, therefore, demonstrate Google E-EAT.

To do this, leading web design agencies must work hand in glove with the experts within the client’s business. Suppose it is a solicitor practice, just as an example- in that case, the web developers and the copywriters must now work with many of the most experienced solicitors within that business to produce good quality content marketing.

If you want your business to rank higher than a direct competitor, then Google’s algorithm must deem your business’s content marketing to be better.

So, work with the company’s experts to add high-quality and useful text to your website.

 

Google and the first index of a new company website.

Walk into a new shop or restaurant; it only takes a few seconds to get a first impression of the business, are we right?

Well, this is how the search engines work. Google will crawl and index your company website, and the first indexation of your website by Googlebot is very important.

The reason is that this is where Google will then decide where to rank the business. Is the website excellent and should, therefore, rank on page one of Google.co.uk straightaway after indexation?

 

Should the business be ranked on page 7?

Or is the website entirely made up of duplicated text and poor on-page SEO, so it shouldn’t be indexed on Google at all?
These are the questions that Google’s algorithm will ask.

This is why it’s important to hold off on launching your website until you know you have put in your best effort in terms of writing the text for your new company website. So do make sure that your web designers write white hat, high quality content marketing.
One way of doing this and improving your business’s on-page SEO from the get-go is to add quality pillar content.

 

Pillar pages and cluster pages

So, it’s important to create evergreen content marketing, or “pillar pages,” and then link related blog posts to that page.
For example, your main piece of pillar content might be 7,000 words and take a very long time to create.

You should aim for you Google Analytics account to show a low bounce rate, high on-site time by shoppers.
Then, you might write a blog post about a similar topic, say once every month, and then internally link back to the pillar content marketing. Just make sure that all of this work is done in a white-hat way.

 

 

Covers a topic in-depth, very different from a main product page or landing page

So, a company website’s main page advertises a product or service you sell. It doesn’t need a high word count; it just needs to describe the product or service accurately.

However, a piece of pillar content marketing is different; it’s your business’s opportunity to show that you are the experts at what you’re talking about and that you know your stuff. Google’s Knowledge Graph will be used to see how well-written the article is.

Google RankBrain

Then, Google will use “Google RankBrain” and its AI to see how engaged the shoppers are with the work.

  • Are they spending a long time reading it?
  • Are they clicking to read more pages?
  • Is the shopper engaged?

You can monitor these statistics using Google Analytics, which will tell you how high the bounce rate is and what the time on site for each page is —these are really useful metrics that your web designers and SEO company should monitor.

How to design an environmentally friendly website

 

 

Introduction

When we think of greenhouse emissions, we normally instantly think of cars, trains, and planes contributing to our warming planet.

Yet, fewer people know that websites, or more specifically, data centres, also consume a huge amount of electricity. The heat generated from these servers is considerable, and therefore, because all of this heat and electricity is being used, it can cause a lot of environmental damage.
So, we think that in the near future, you will see more and more web design companies pop up that specialise in building environmentally friendly websites.

In this blog post, we will discuss how to build a more environmentally friendly website for your business.

 

Quick introduction on us…

So, W&P is a highly experienced web design company based in the beating heart of Cardiff’s busy city centre. We offer the full spectrum of digital marketing services, ranging from improving your business’s SEO to graphic design. We have some of the very best SEO consultants in the whole of Wales working for us.

So we are, therefore, well placed to advise you on how to design and build a more environmentally friendly website for your business.

 

What is a sustainable website?

So, a sustainable website is simply a website where the website designers have carefully considered its impact on the environment. For example, they might have used lazy loading techniques, made the pictures small so that, let’s say, the product pictures load faster, or purchased website hosting that is mostly or completely powered by green electricity.

 

Data centres

We are all used to buying items from our phones, tablets, or desktops with just a few clicks. It’s simple, straightforward, and a piece of cake to buy anything we need.

Now, we all carefully consider what mobile phone, laptop, or tablet we want to buy. Yet often, we don’t consider whether the websites we are buying items from have a green policy to minimise the impact on the environment.

So, we think that more and more companies will promote their green websites at this web design company. Often, this means using hosting companies that use renewable energy.

Data centres are simply what are used to host a website. So, for example, it doesn’t matter if you run a solicitors website or, let’s say, you run a demolition company; you’ll need website hosting.

Now, a good web designer will tell you that website hosting quality varies massively. Companies offer super cheap prices, yet the hosting might be super slow.

Then there’s fast hosting, which is commonly more expensive. However, many hosting companies are setting up to offer “green website hosting.” This typically means that part of the energy or all the electricity consumed is from renewable sources.

Offsetting

So, we think that at this Cardiff web design agency, we will hear the term “offsetting” much more soon. When we say this, it’s not just something to do with web design or hosting; we think we will hear this term being used by many more companies.

So, off-setting means, perhaps planting trees, to off-set the company’s emissions through website hosting.

Why not ask your website designers to implement lazy loading?

What’s lazy loading? We hear you cry!

Well, it’s a method of designing a website which reduces the amount of content requested by the shopper at any given moment.

The whole page doesn’t load straight away; it only loads parts of the page as the shoppers scroll down the page.
So, this has a twofold benefit: it can substantially reduce the load time, which means there are some SEO that organic search engine optimisation benefits.

Yet, there are also benefits from an energy consumption point of view; it’s a bit like someone only placing what they know they will eat on their plate rather than wasting food. This is the same concept with lazy loading; basically, only part of the page will load, such as a row of products will load. Then, as the customer scrolls down the page, more of the page will load.

 

Font, colour schemes and web design

So, believe it or not, which fonts you use and the colour scheme you have chosen for your company website can directly affect how much energy is consumed when loading the page.

So, talk to your website designers today about how they can design an eco-friendly website for your business.

Web designers
We have highly experienced web designers working for us at W&P.

We can offer your business the following services:

  • Eco-friendly web design
  • WordPress websites
  • Organic SEO
  • Local SEO
  • We are a Welsh web design agency
  • Mobile website design

Why not call one of our team for a quote today?

A day in the life of a Cardiff website design agency

Date: 08/10/2024

You might currently be reviewing various web design quotes and deciding which one is right for your business.

Sure, freelance web designers will cost a lot less, yet often, they specialise in one aspect of marketing and perhaps even building one type of CMS, like designing websites in Drupal.

So, your business might be considering pushing the boat out, going the whole hog, so to speak, and hiring a web design agency.
But before you hire a web design agency, you might want to understand what they do and how their work can help your business grow.
So, without further ado, we pull back the curtains, invite you backstage, and explain what a web design agency can offer your business.

You might have a preconception that marketing agencies and web design companies are all about boozy Friday afternoon celebrations and holding so many meetings that the coffee machine gets worn out from producing so many frothy coffee flat whites.

Well, this is partly true, yet a good web design agency can take care of a whole business’s online marketing needs, from creating a stunning, well-designed website that offers a fantastic U.X to taking care of your business’s SEO so that your company starts to climb Google. That phone starts ringing a lot more often.

So, let me walk you through some of the job roles you are likely to find at a local digital marketing agency:

 

Web designers

We work with a talented bunch of web designers. We build the vast majority of our websites using the WordPress CMS. We design websites that look amazing but are also super simple for shoppers to use, therefore offering a brilliant UX.

 

Planning stage

A good SEO consultant or web designer will have a lot of tasks to complete on any working day.

In fact, it can feel as though there are a million and one things to do, from liaising with a client over how they want the footer designed to building backlinks.

So, anybody working for a digital marketing agency must plan out the day-to-day work they plan on completing. Plus, for example, a website will need a plan on how it will be built so that all the various team members can work on the site and complete their work so that another team member is not waiting for them to finish a piece of work.

Therefore, web design needs to be carefully planned. One of the first stages is creating wireframes and working with a copywriter to ensure the text fits neatly onto the page.

Then, it’s over to web developers to design and finish the rest of the website.

Administration tasks do need to be completed.

A web designer can become so busy writing code and designing the website that the client may not know what work they are completing.
So, it is always essential, and web design agencies often use time management tools to set aside time for a phone call or an e-mail to update the client on what is happening with the website build.

 

Designing

Of course, most web designers spend most of their day designing websites, yet many hours per day are also spent working with copywriters, UX designers, and web developers.

That’s the client as well.

Therefore, a web designer could use Adobe Photoshop in the morning to edit photos and then work with copywriters in the afternoon to add text to the main pages.

 

Brainstorming

SEO consultants have SEO tools, which are brilliant for helping you know which keywords you should optimise the website for. Then, there are backlink-checking tools, making it a piece of cake to look at your competitor’s backlinks and get an idea of the websites you might want to build backlinks.

However, web design is more subjective.

It’s about what the client and business’s customers wish to do.

Therefore, what the website should look like is open to interpretation. So, a lot of time at web design agencies will be spent brainstorming,

which also involves copious amounts of tea drinking and some good old-fashioned boiled sweets.
Yet brainstorming can save a significant amount of time because you can start to whittle down what the website should look like. Rather than going full steam ahead and fully designing a website, the client doesn’t like the colour scheme, fonts, or page layout.

Brainstorming allows creative suggestions on how the website should look to flow, but it also ensures that the client and the web design agency are on the same page.

 

Copywriting

Most digital marketing agencies spend a lot of time using Microsoft Word to simply write the text for main pages. Yet this text is so important because it has to answer the questions a shopper needs.

If a page doesn’t answer a pressing question that the shopper has, you could lose that visitor, and if this happens often, the bounce rate can start to increase.

Editing the text and website

Even if you spend, let’s say, forever and a day planning how you will design a brand new website, let’s say for an e-commerce business, you could plan, have meetings, and scribble ideas on a whiteboard until the marker pen runs out!

Yet sometimes, it’s only when all the code, such as the PHP web development and web design work, is finished that you can take a step back from the masterpiece and consider whether it’s a job well done or whether more refinement is needed.

The copywriting team could spend hundreds of hours on the project, but sometimes, it becomes apparent that there’s too much text on a page, such as the homepage.

So, web designers often spend a lot of time refining and improving a website, such as slimming down the amount of text, perhaps adding titles to make it clearer what the page is about, or simply making changes to speed up the page so that it loads faster.

 

A leading web design, copywriting and digital marketing agency in Cardiff.

 

Choosing a digital marketing agency for your business is like shopping for boots.

Some just won’t fit, yet when you find the right pair, you will want to keep them for an extended period.

On-going business relationship

Often today, businesses want an ongoing relationship with their digital marketing agency.

Gone are the days of asking for a timescale for how long a web designer would take to design a website and then for the business to never use the marketing agency again. Often, things are different now; enterprises have worked with digital marketing agencies like ours for a very long period and hopefully have built a long and mutually beneficial relationship.

Cardiff-based businesses often need ongoing support, whether that helps them improve their organic search engine optimisation or website hosting provided by web designers.

 

For example, W&P can offer a massive range of services, such as:

– Graphic design
– WordPress design
– Drupal design
– Joomla design
– Local SEO
– Organic SEO
– And much, much more.

Call us today to find out why so many businesses in Cardiff hire us to build a website and partner over the long term.

Web Design Mistakes to Avoid

What are some of the most common web design mistakes to avoid?

Date: 07/10/2024

 

Many start-up businesses and entrepreneurs may have had a website designed before. So, it’s too simple to hand all the work over to the web designers. Yet, when your website is back up and running and it’s been live for three months, you might start noticing functionality you wish you had incorporated into the design.

Choosing the right CMS for your business is crucial. For instance, a high bounce rate on Google Analytics could indicate that you’ve picked the wrong one, affecting your business’s performance.

The web design team at W&P has many years of experience designing brilliant websites. We, therefore, know what works and what doesn’t regarding web design. So, we thought we would write a quick article explaining some shared web design problems many businesses encounter.

Just as you wouldn’t attempt to build a wall and extension on your house, you should entrust your website design to a professional. This is why web designers are in high demand for their services. When a business needs a professional, high-quality website, it needs a highly skilled web designer. At W&P, we offer web design and SEO services to meet your needs.

 

So what are some of the more common web design mistakes?

We would say that the most common mistake a business makes is purchasing an overly simplistic website. One that is too basic doesn’t fully detail all of the business’s services. Therefore, improving the business’s organic search engine optimisation is tricky when each leading service is set out on its page.

So, the website often lacks clarity regarding the services the business offers. And shoppers today don’t wait around to look for a service. They leave that company’s website if they can’t find the exemplary service they want to purchase quickly. This causes a higher bounce rate, damaging the business’s search engine optimisation.

 

Main menu design

Therefore, the main menu must be designed to get the shopper to the right page quickly. Plus, you also need every service on its page. Let’s say you have a one-page website. You are a family solicitor, for example. However, if customers cannot quickly read that you offer collaborative law, they may leave the website.

However, you can design the website well so that collaborative law has its page. The main navigation should also be well-designed so shoppers can quickly spot the page they want.

 

What are your main competitors doing?

So, if your main competitors are at the top of Google and those businesses are thriving, what are they doing right regarding their website design?

For example, if you sell products, they make a presenter dedicated to explaining each product’s benefits. Do they have well-written, bullet-point product descriptions?

 

Do they have a chatbot that’s good at answering customer questions?

You should consider incorporating similar functionality; for example, if your main competitor has a chatbot, your business may require this.
For example, if your main competitor has many YouTube videos with staff explaining how to use a product, you may sell kitchen tiles. Many videos describing how to tile a wall will be helpful to the customer.

From a web design perspective, adding this to a website will cost more. Yet, the most successful businesses in your business sector might have achieved this because they have gone the extra mile to offer helpful advice to customers.

Ever since the Google E-EAT update and Google Helpful content update, it’s more important than ever to write and publish work that your customers will find very helpful. This increases time on site and reduces bounce rate, which is good for your business in terms of your sales being more likely to improve.

Most definitely purchase a designer to design brand guidelines.

So, many businesses, let’s say a brand new start-up company, might be moving to headquarters, let’s say, in Cardiff Bay. They may call a local web designer and start designing a website.

Now, for some businesses, this is all good, yet it’s best to spend some time creating a set of brand guidelines for some other companies. This is to create a company logo, choose a font, and, for example, choose a colour scheme for the business. This ensures that the company branding is consistent, from the company’s business cards to the branding on the company vehicles to how the website looks.

Poor mobile design

Many web design agencies sometimes design websites that look good on desktops. For example, the website looks fantastic on your MacBook Pro, and you’re pleased with the design.

However, the mobile design of the same website might be super basic and not say much about what your business offers.

Now, most web design agencies agree that for most businesses, whether they specialise in catering for weddings or construction business, roughly speaking, over 50% of the visitors, that’s organic visitors via Google.co.uk, often come from a mobile device, primarily smartphones.

So, if your business doesn’t have a well-designed responsive website, then this could mean that many shoppers may find your mobile website hard to use. They may find that it doesn’t answer a question they may have had, so they leave the website.

Therefore, the bounce rate is high, and the dwell time is low, which is terrible for your business’s search engine optimisation. That’s because Google’s algorithms will deem your company website offers a poor UX or user experience.

So, what are some common mistakes that web designers and businesses make when designing the mobile version of their website?

 

Text

Sometimes, the text is too difficult to read, and some fonts don’t work on some browsers. So, you must pick a font that works across different browsers.

It doesn’t scale to match the screen size.

Some websites do not scale to the size of a smartphone or tablet, meaning shoppers often go to another website, increasing the bounce rate.

 

Websites navigation

 

Avoid burger menus

So, let’s say your website has a well-designed homepage. Let’s say you sell hypercars, and the homepage instantly communicates that this is what your business sells, using Lamborghinis, for example.

But let’s say your web design agency designs a budget menu for your car dealership. It’s a menu with three small lines in the top right-hand corner of the screen. Yet, seeing the burger menu might be challenging when the website loads on a smartphone.

Many shoppers might not even get past the homepage because the main menu is so difficult to use.

Sure, a burger menu makes the home page look minimalistic, yet if this comes at the cost of the website’s simplicity, then you might end up with a lot of frustrated shoppers who can’t get onto the page they want.

This will, therefore, increase the bounce rate.

 

Is your company website a bit sluggish?

If your company website is a bit slow, especially on mobile, this can hamper your company’s SEO efforts and mean that you may also miss out on customers. Many incredibly cheap websites often have super-slow hosting, which will damage your business’s organic SEO.

 

A balanced approach

So, often, businesses want the full-hog, with autoloading videos at the top of the homepage, high-resolution images of the company staff, premises, and products, and chatbots instantly loading. All of this drains the speed of the company website.

If you have high-speed, lightning-quick hosting that instantly loads your company website, then that’s no problem. Why not ask your web designers to design the website how you want it?

Yet, ultra-fast hosting doesn’t often come cheap. Servers are expensive, so you usually have to hire a hosting company. Moreover, different website hosting companies offer various hosting speeds.

Some hosting companies offer high-speed hosting, yet you often must pay more. So, a common mistake is businesses choosing a hosting company that offers sluggish, slow hosting. This means you have many frustrated shoppers who are impatient and won’t wait long, resulting in a high bounce rate.

Pop-ups can be annoying.

So, just as when you walk into a car dealership , and you have a pushy salesperson, this can put you off buying from that car dealership,

right?

So, you will likely turn on your heels and go elsewhere, right?

Well, this is the same with a website, where the web developer has designed it so that on every page that loads, a pop-up loads to perhaps ask the customer to sign up for a newsletter.

This can get annoying for the customer, who may not want to hand over their e-mail address, for their e-mail inbox to be rammed with spam.

Some businesses insist that web designers add pop-up messages and screens, yet often, this can annoy the customer, causing a bad user experience. This can mean that you lose that customer, and yes, again, the bounce rate may increase sharply.

 

Do you want a DIY website?

So sure, DIY websites are often offered as cheap as chips.

Yet here’s the thing: When starting a business, we understand that you will likely be cash-strapped.

So, the temptation is to buy things on the cheap.

Cheap stationery—well, why not, a pen—but a cheap website—well, that’s a false economy.

The reason we say that is that when you sit down, make a cup of tea, and think about how customers are going to find your business, most of the time, a business is either heavily reliant on or solely reliant on its company website to drum up business.

Now, if you spend, let’s say, thousands of Google Adwords to help you gain more sales, but you send customers to a poorly designed website, you’re unlikely to get many sales.

Sure, Google Adwords is brilliant at gaining more customers for businesses; with the flip of a switch, your Google PPC campaign can be live.
Yet, if your website is rubbish, people will not stay around for long. It’s a bit like opening a restaurant, spending a fortune on advertising for the build-up to the opening night, only to purchase cheap and nasty ingredients, which means your customers don’t return.

And this is the same for website design; you might be forking out dough on the following:

 

  • Google Adwords
  • SEO Consultant
  • Social media advertising

 

But what’s the blooming point if the website is rubbish and poorly designed?

Hire a web designer or a large web design agency that can design a website that cuts the mustard.

 

Why is your web design company always so busy?

So, it’s true that our web designers are like busy bees. One hour, they’re writing PHP to design a main menu, and the next, they could create a brochure website for a top solicitor’s practice.

We are always busy because we design top-quality websites at some of the best prices you will find.

So, here’s why so many companies choose W&P:

  • We design the mobile version of the website for free
  • We offer one year of free hosting
  • We specialise in designing and building WordPress websites.

Are you spending money advertising your company on Google, Instagram, or Facebook?

Well, this is an excellent way of getting more shoppers on your website—yet if you’re spending money on digital marketing, you need an impressive, well-built website.

This is where we can come in. Our hardworking and diligent web developers can often design most of our brochure websites in less than three weeks from start to finish. (That’s as long as the web developers are given copious amounts of coffee!).

 

We can offer you the complete package.

So many businesses, from start-ups to well-known established brands, come to W&P because we offer the full range of digital marketing services.

We have SEO consultants who know everything about optimising your business’s on-page and off-page search engine optimisation.
Then, we can also design a brilliant, well-designed, impressive WordPress website for your business.

So, why not give us a ring so we can start building a brand new website for your company?

 

What tasks does a web developer complete?

Date: 05/10/2024

A web agency should have a mix of highly talented people who help bring businesses’ visions of how they want their websites to look to life. Now, there are some roles that are more creative than others. A technical SEO expert cannot really get that creative, other than designing their Excel spreadsheets.

Yet, UX designers, web developers, and web designers can get creative, whether initially when designing the wireframes or right at the end when deciding where the social media icons should be placed.

Here at W&P, we are a full-stack web agency based in the wonderful city of Cardiff. We have web designers, developers, and highly skilled SEO experts working for us. Many businesses know, for example, what a social media manager does on a daily basis, but not many know about the work that a web developer does on a daily basis.

So, we thought we would write a question-and-answer blog post to help people understand the type of work a web developer completes on a daily basis.

 

What would your web design agency say the biggest challenge that web developers face?

So often the hardest projects to complete, in terms of web design, as you might expect would be the ultra large e-commerce websites. Simply because there’s so many product pages, and a lot of web designers just copy product descriptions from somewhere else, but this shouldn’t happen.
Because of the Google Panda update, any copy-and-paste text will mean that the website could incur an algorithmic or manual penalty from Google. So, it’s better to manually write the work and design the page so that all the content marketing is high-quality but unique to that website.
So, often, the most challenging part of a web developer’s job is simply designing e-commerce websites, with, say, over one hundred pages, which will need the help of front-end web designers, copywriters, U.X web designers, and graphic designers to start forming the company’s brand guidelines.

So, please walk us through a typical day as a web developer working for a web design agency.
So, often, it involves the web developer working directly with the client. Overnight, there might be emails where the client has had a change of mind, doesn’t want the footer to be so large, or, let’s say, wants a new page added to the website.

A web developer might then move on:

Writing basic blocks of code to add to the CMS
Most of the content management systems we design for businesses in Cardiff use WordPress CMS. Sometimes, custom blocks of code are needed to ensure that the website has the customer’s desired functionality.

Ongoing maintenance to keep things running smoothly

Just as a car needs maintenance or the engine may seize, so will a website. Well, a website won’t seize, but it might go down. The shopper may then be greeted with a message such as “critical website error” or “404- page not found”- these problems must be fixed.

Problem-solving

A website can run flawlessly for years and work like a Swiss watch, doing everything that you want the website to do. But then, suddenly, the CMS can run updates, making the website incur a glitch. Only one line of code might go wrong, but this could be enough to cause the website to incur a significant glitch, which means it goes offline.

So, a lot of the work that a web developer does is often figuring out where the glitch is and how to fix it.

How does a web developer’s job integrate with the other staff working at a web agency?

So, often, at a web agency, the client will meet with the company director or sales staff. Often, the first designer who works on the site is either the staff creating the brand guidelines or the designer creating the wireframes.

Often, a UX designer needs to state what hex codes to use, how the main navigation should look, and how the footer is going to be designed, for example. Then, it’s up to the web developer to start writing the code and designing the website.

 

Ongoing work

Often, a web developer will work directly with the client. For example, there are often a lot of e-mail exchanges and phone calls during the design stage. But the work is also often ongoing. For example, the client will often pay extra for their website to be backed up on a monthly basis.

Sometimes, for example, in an e-commerce website, the client will work with the web design agency to improve the business’s search engine optimisation on an ongoing basis. This often involves improving the website’s design and UX. To improve the user experience, a web developer is usually needed for split testing, for example, to see if a new main menu helps lower the company’s bounce rate.

 

What types of websites does W&P build?

So our web developers are constantly engaged with various websites that need building for our clients in Cardiff.

On Monday morning, after a nice fresh cup of coffee, designers and developers could be working on a relatively straightforward website design for a construction company. At our web design agency, we design many websites for construction-related businesses, like demolition firms, builders, plasterers, electricians, and plumbers.

Yet we have worked on websites for dental practices and huge national e-commerce websites. So, our work is very varied, and our web developers could work on a range of different business websites in one single day.

Plus, the work that the web developers complete is often massively varied. They could be carrying out routine maintenance for a client in the morning, say, backing up a WordPress website.

In the afternoon, they could be designing and writing code to create a custom main menu for a client. Therefore, no two days are ever the same, and our web developers will have a lot of varied work to complete to design unique websites for our clients.

 

How much does your web design team cost to design a new website for my business?

So, most of our clients are located in the city of Cardiff.

We also now work with businesses based all over the United Kingdom.

The cost of designing a simple brochure website starts from just £950.00 per website, which is for a website with just seven pages.

Yet our web developers also work on designing much more complex websites, for example, a brand new e-commerce website. This could cost upwards of 10k to design. Therefore, our PHP designers are busy designing many different types of websites for our clients.

 

What type of websites do your web developers specialise in designing?

We can use any website for any business.

Yet, over the years, we have accumulated much experience working with lawyers and solicitors all over Wales. We have also designed and built many websites for businesses in the construction sector.

 

We often design websites for the following businesses:
– Law practices
– Construction businesses
– Dental practices

Do you need to hire a web developer?

We are often chosen as the first port of call when a Cardiff business needs to get a brand-new website designed.

We are notorious for designing amazing, well-designed websites that look great but are offered at a competitive price point. This allows everyone from start-up companies in Wales to larger businesses to come to W&P to get a new website designed.

We can also help your business by offering the following services:

– Organic search engine optimisation
– Local search engine optimisation
– WordPress web design and web development
– Web design services

Call us for a free no-obligation quote:

If you need a website designed in Cardiff, do not hesitate to contact our web design team today. If you want a brochure website designed, we can often offer you a quote there and then over the phone.

If it’s a more complex design, for example, a new e-commerce website, we can often offer you a quote within 48 hours. We have web developers, designers, U.X designers, and white hat SEO consultants working for us, so why not call our web design agency?

 

How does your web design agency see digital marketing agencies evolving in the future?

 

Date: 04/October/2024
Subject: Digital Marketing Agencies

 

Introduction

They say you must “adapt to survive, ” which applies to most business. Of course, some rare products of exceptionally high quality don’t change as time passes.

Working in digital marketing is not just a profession that you can let the grass grow under your feet, it’s a dynamic field that demands constant change and evolution (you need to be very much on your toes). It’s not just about keeping up with the latest trends but also about being astute and adaptable. This adaptability is not just a skill; it’s a necessity that keeps us ahead of the curve in our field.

 

For example:

– Google’s algorithms are constantly changing so SEO consultants must adapt
– Websites are getting more and more complex, so highly skilled web developers are needed to code ever more complex websites
– Social media posts are needed in abundance, so social media managers must work their cotton socks off!
Understanding the best ways to market a business, identifying the target market, and maximising the marketing budget are all part of the game. As digital marketing professionals, we’re always ready to adapt and evolve, ensuring we deliver winning solutions for our clients.

 

Forward-thinking

As digital marketing agencies, we must be forward-thinking and innovative. Whether it’s creating excellent social media posts, writing evergreen content, or designing a brilliant website, we must demonstrate our ability to create something fantastic within our marketing budget.

Demonstrated expertise & Google E-EAT

There are a million and one web design agencies to pick from; however, ever since the emergence of the Google E-EAT updates, you must pick a web design agency that can demonstrate your business’s expertise in terms of whatever you are writing about.

This could be the text applied to the main pages, publishing a YouTube video integrated onto each page, or infographics that your business produces. You need to demonstrate your business’s strong expertise in your business sector.

This will do several beneficial things to your business’s SEO, namely it will help to reduce the bounce rate. It will also demonstrate to Google’s algorithm that your company knows what your talking about. This will, therefore, improve your business’s organic search engine optimisation.

Therefore, the point you’re trying to make is that in the future, we can see more and more digital marketing agencies being chosen where they can design a fantastic website. Yet, they also have in-house copywriters who are experts in that particular business sector. Whether it be the automotive business sector, construction or perhaps the pharmaceutical industry, we can see digital marketing agencies which are highly

specialised working in business niche.

 

Growth in specialised marketing agencies / web designers

We think there will be growth in these marketing agencies that operate in just one business sector, such as construction for example. We say this because there are two major Google algorithm updates: “The Google Helpful Content Update” and the “Google E-EAT” update.
Therefore, Google’s algorithm is most definitely looking at placing content marketing on the first page of the SERP’s, that can demonstrate that the author has real expertise and knows what they are talking about.

 

Faster pace

It used to be the case that, say, a business located in Cardiff would work on improving its SEO once a week.
As we all know, the Google Business results have significantly reduced, often down to 3 packs of business results And also, the organic listings, it’s now fiercely competitive to get your business listed in the organic SERP’s.

Therefore, businesses will need to partner with digital marketing agencies which know the stuff in terms of SEO, but can also have the capability to implement the work at a faster pace.

 

WordPress will get even more popular

As a very highly experienced web design company, we have seen various content management systems come and go over the years. Some companies have had huge marketing budgets to promote the new launch of a new CMS, yet they may not be around for that long. Sometimes the up-take is just not there, and these CMS systems, then fail.

We think on the other hand businesses will choose more well-known content management systems, such as WordPress, in the future and go with a CMS that’s proven, popular and just simply high quality.

What we mean by that is that WordPress is proven and trusted; therefore, we think many businesses realise that they don’t want to put their faith in a CMS that is just starting out. It might struggle to get regular updates and might be full of glitches- so people instead are turning to more well known CMS like WordPress.

This is why more and more company directors insist on our designers using WordPress, which has become a reliable and well-known content management system.

 

Original thinking

Artificial intelligence is great, but many web designers are saying how freethinking is it in reality?

So, for example, if its writing about the same topic, you could argue that its stating the same thing or similar text to different users, just using slightly different wording.

Original thinking is not just a valuable asset in digital marketing; it’s a game-changer. Businesses with an excellent organic SEO can leverage highly experienced copywriters to write work that shows orginal perspective.

 

 

A.I

As we all know, artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionising website design and content marketing, including social media posts. This technology is a handy marketing tool and a game-changer in the digital marketing landscape.

Some businesses might heavily rely on artificial intelligence, but many marketing agencies like ours are taking a more hybrid approach.
We are learning how to use these language models but not wholly integrating them into our marketing strategies.

For example, our content is written by a copywriter (yes, we still produce blog posts the old-fashioned way!). However, artificial intelligence (AI) profoundly impacts how marketing agencies implement their work.

 

In the next ten years, we can expect to see A. I evolving to a point where it has become an indispensable tool in digital marketing. The potential of AI to generate ideas, provide suggestions, and assist in everyday tasks is truly exciting.
It’s like having a creative partner who never runs out of ideas, and we can’t wait to see how this will revolutionise the digital marketing landscape and how we design websites.

 

The human touch


Whether writing content marketing or designing a new PHP website, the human touch will still be required. Mortal humans will still be needed to truly understand the business and its customers and direct the A.I., so we don’t think web designers are out of a job anytime soon.

 

Rise in wearables

We can see the introduction of wearable glasses, which allow people to ask questions directly to the glasses, which will have artificial intelligence built into them.

 


So, for example, you might say how to make a chicken korma from scratch, then start getting the instructions through audio built into the glasses or step-by-step instructions through the glass’s lenses.

 

We think that web design will involve much more videography, and businesses also have to offer more helpful information, via YouTube, which could be replicated and displayed through, say, glasses or

 

Basic websites will not cut it.

We think your boring, bland websites are going straight out of the window; you can see many more websites to be more engaging.
We think that people’s attention spans are getting shorter. In the future, people will not want to read blog posts like this as much, so you have to combine videography to explain what you are talking about; we also have websites offering more audio.

 

What do you see as the future of copywriting?

When you look at digital marketing agencies today, many have reduced the headcount of their copywriting teams sometimes substantially. You might have gone on an SEO agency’s offices, or a website design office five years ago, and they have over 20 staff as full-time copywriters.

Fast-forward to today, the copywriting teams of these same web design or digital marketing agencies will be reduced to one or two staff members- but why?

 

Why is this?

This is because generative AI language models using artificial intelligence are used to create content marketing.

However, our best advice is this: Hold your horses. We think the copywriting, which takes much longer to write, written manually by copywriters is still much better content marketing, as it can show original thinking.

 

Engagement metrics

So, if we were to say the most crucial point of this whole article, it would be this: In the past, SEO agencies concentrated on improving a website’s ranking factors, such as building backlinks, which is still essential.

 

Yet one of the most crucial seo signals out there to improve is engagement metrics, such as:

  • Reducing bounce rates
  • This boils down to factors such as the bounce rate, time on site, and user engagement.
  • So, the algorithm asks questions such as:
  • How long does the shopper spend on the website?
  • How many pages have they visited?
  • Have they purchased an item?

Now, for those who know a thing or two about organic SEO and read blog posts about this subject daily, they will know that Google’s algorithms are already calculating engagement and therefore this is incorporating it into their algorithms (Google RankBrain).
However, the point you’re trying to make here is that we believe these engagement signals become increasingly important.

 

Helpful content marketing

If you were to sit down with some SEO agency owners who implemented SEO 10 years ago, they would say that content marketing is all about sprinkling keywords within the page.

Writing keywords into sentences to try and get the page to rank for that particular keyword is now considered basic, low-quality SEO that no longer cuts the mustard. The whole concept of writing content marketing has been turned entirely on its head.

It’s now about being as super helpful as possible. Copywriters must be diligent and write copy that their audiences can find valuable and helpful.

As we alluded to earlier in this article, it’s all about engagement—keeping that shopper on your website longer. To keep the shopper’s interest, you must offer helpful advice.

That advice must be helpful and often presented in various ways, such as video, text, and audio.

It’s a funny crossroads, so to speak when it comes to content marketing.

We would argue that attention spans are becoming shorter and shorter. Yet, there’s more and more content marketing that shoppers can read, watch, and listen to that is published by so many more online companies.

So, your content marketing is in constant fierce competition with other businesses to compete for attention from shoppers.

How do you stand out in this crowded marketplace?

The answer that you need to emerge and show yourself as the absolute expert in what you do.

USP

We think that the future of digital marketing is for marketing agencies to work heavily with companies to promote a unique selling point.

E-commerce businesses operate in fiercely competitive business sectors. Therefore, marketing agencies must consider a business’s USP and how to differentiate themselves from other brands in that sector.

For example, if you sell mountain bikes and your competitors offer a delivery time between 3 and 5 days, can your business offer delivery the next day?

If so, this needs to be heavily promoted on the website and in the meta titles to improve the click-through rate.

Therefore, marketing agencies need to consider how to get your business to stand out in this crowded and competitive marketplace.

 

superfast

Bullet trains, 5G mobile, and next-day delivery of items, the world is speeding up, and people want things done and completed faster than ever.

This is the same as your company website, its not as good enough to have a fast website, you now need an ultrafast website. This mean the business needs to be constantly looking at ways to make the page load faster, make the code lean, and instantly snap the website onto a smartphone in the blink of an eye.

 

  • SEO
  • Social media
  • Design
  • Development
  • Hosting
  • Copywriting

Wearables

We think the wearables definitely are going to become more popular, without a doubt. At the moment wearables are often used to track exercise, and offer satellite navigation on say a watch. We haven’t seen much of an uptake in wearable glasses that supply information to the person.

We think we will begin to see a massive up take in terms of wearables. We now have a 5G signal, which offers a robust Internet connection. We think we will see an uptake in wearables over the next three years.

 

Contact us for high-quality web design;

We design amazing websites at affordable prices. Most of our websites are created using the content management system WordPress, which allows us to create fast, sleek, and impressive websites.

If you want to partner with our leading digital marketing agency, contact us today for a no-obligation quotation.

 

How can start-up businesses and entrepreneurs lower their website design and development costs?

 

For entrepreneurs and start-up businesses across Wales, sometimes a significant amount of their start-up costs will be spent on digital marketing. Therefore, this does beg the question: How can a business reduce its web design costs, especially when the business might have been cash-strapped right from its inception?

With our extensive experience designing websites for Welsh Businesses, we are well-equipped to provide you with valuable insights on reducing your web design and web development costs.

Understanding exactly what your business needs

Think long and hard about what functionality your website needs when designing a new e-commerce website for your company.
Too often, start-up businesses and entrepreneurs’ hand over the complete web design process to their web designers to manage from start to finish.

Now you might think, but that’s what the web designers are paid to do- they should manage the web design process, right?
Well, to an extent, yes, but if you get a website designed, and you don’t have much input into how you would like it designed, you might suddenly realise that you are missing out on functionality, such as obtaining a responsive website, which your business will need.

For example, if the direct competitor, let’s say, has the functionality of a chat box, this might give them a competitive advantage. The artificial intelligence that runs the chat box might be so sophisticated that it is helps that Welsh business to increase its sales by over 5%.

If your business doesn’t have a chatbot with integrated artificial intelligence, you could miss out on many sales.

So, first things first, think about the functionality that your website needs, such as responsive web design and do competitor research

It’s surprising, but a lot of businesses, prior to hiring a web designer don’t do competitor research.

However, it’s well worth getting a nice cup of tea, sitting down, and scribbling down the parts of a competitor’s website you like, such as perhaps the font they have used, how the main menus designed, how the mobile version of the website has been designed.

 

For example, think about the following

  • How are the pages set out?
  • How much content marketing has been written?
  • What functionality do they have, for example, a chat box, is the website responsive, do they have a request a callback feature, and integrated contact forms on each page?

 

Carefully plan how you want your website to look and do create brand guidelines

If you were to contact some web designers, then you might get railroaded into a web design that you later wished, that you had chosen a different design. Therefore, if you have the time, perhaps it’s a wet and windy Sunday afternoon, why not dedicate that time is simply scribbling down a few ideas for a new website in terms of the following:

– What font do you want used?
– How do you want the logo designed?
– How do you want the pages set out

.
This will make life easier for your web developers and digital marketing agencies so they know exactly how to start designing your new website. They will have a much clearer understanding of how you want your website designed.

Why not use an open-source platform such as WordPress. Our web designers think that WordPress is amazing

 

Consider using an open-source platforms like Joomla! Drupal, or WordPress.

These robust content management systems can save you a significant amount of money and time, making your web design process more efficient and cost-effective.

Some businesses might also want to pick a template that can drastically reduce the time it takes to design the website. Therefore, choosing a template design can be a significant cost savings for the business.

 

Web Development

Talk to your web developers and web designers about using an agile or waterfall methodology web design method. Agile is really flexible, iterative approach that allows for changes and improvements throughout the web development process, while waterfall is a much more structured, sequential approach. Find out which one works best for your business.

 

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

Have you heard this expression before: don’t put all your eggs in one basket?

That’s because it’s true, which most definitely applies to digital marketing. Many entrepreneurs and start-up companies make the mistake of spending a lot of time and money on getting a brand-new website designed. They then have a fabulous, well-designed WordPress website that looks amazing and has all the bells and whistles that you would expect.

Then, the company might be cash-strapped, and it might not have anything in the following months after the website has been designed to start promoting it.

This means no marketing budget to promote the website on social media, no money to spend on Google Adwords and also nothing to invest in improving the business’s organic SEO.

It’s a bit like having a hyper car sitting on the drive. It looks fantastic, but there’s no engine in it! That means the car will obviously not go anywhere very fast. And this is the case for a new company website, which has invested in digital marketing such as SEO, the website simply is not going to get any visitors, unless you invest in quality:

– Local SEO
– Organic SEO
– Social Media Advertising
– Google Adwords.

In conclusion

The cost of your website design ultimately boils down to the size of the web design agency you plan to use. Consider whether you wish to hire a web design freelancer or a freelance web developer. If you’re starting a large business, you might need a large digital marketing agency to handle all aspects of your business’s marketing.

Therefore, carefully considering where you want to place your marketing budget. For example, you might want to allocate 75% to designing the website, and 25% to promoting the website over the next six months?

Many businesses, hear in Cardiff, hire us simply because we design quality websites built at competitive prices at our digital marketing agency.

If you would like a no-obligation quotation, why not call us today?

How to build and design a responsive website using PHP

 

With the rapid release of new smartphone models, it’s crucial for web developers and designers to ensure that websites are compatible with these mobile devices, which often use different operating systems on their smartphones.

To work correctly, websites must be fully responsive (mobile ready). In this article, we can discuss how dynamic websites are built using PHP to make them responsive. Plus we shall also discuss the different tools that web developers use, such as BrowserStack and LambdaTest to ensure that the websites do work across tablets and smartphones.

 

In this article, we never talk about how to design a responsive website.

PHP is still one of the most widely used languages by web developers here in the United Kingdom. The vast majority of websites are now designed using PHP- we mostly design websites using the CMS WordPress, which uses PHP.

PHP code can be written by web developers to help the website adjust to many different screen sizes and different devices. This allows for an optimal user experience (U.X) and, therefore, makes a website responsive.

 

So, what exactly is this ‘responsive web design’ we keep talking about? Let’s dive in.

Many people buy goods or services online using a range of different devices, from an Apple tablet to an Android Smartphone through a laptop. Therefore, each company website, whether it be a large e-commerce site or a simple brochure website, must adjust to the different-sized screens.
This means the web developers must design the website, so that it adjusts to different screen sizes, and so that the website fits perfectly onto different screen sizes. Web developers refer to this is making the website fully responsive.

Why do many web developers use PHP to design a responsive website?

PHP is a coding language and a server-side scripting language. It is used to design many different web applications; the vast majority of websites are now built using PHP. This type of language simply interacts with databases and is also used to create dynamic content for shoppers to see.

How to Create a Responsive Website Using PHP in 2024?

Web developers often use “grid systems”, which are referred to as “Foundation” or “Bootstrap”. These basically allow the web designer to create a flexible and responsive websites that can snap to many different screen sizes.

 

Web designers must design a fast website.

One non-negotiable aspect of your website is its speed. A slow website can lead to a high bounce rate, which is not good for business.
It would be best to consider that your website’s responsiveness is one of the most basic requirements the website needs to meet.
Many large e-commerce companies and many other companies understand that you need to invest a lot of time and effort into improving the user experience. Your role as a web developer or designer is crucial in this aspect, as you have the power to significantly enhance the user experience.
Bounce rates
One way to improve the user experience and decrease the bounce rate is to make your website super fast.

The speed of your website can significantly impact the user experience, therefore even a one-second delay in loading times can lead to a substantial increase in bounce rate for some businesses.

This underscores the urgency of optimising your website’s performance.

Therefore, many websites use ImageMagick or TinyPNG. These programs resize the images and ensure that your website runs faster.
Even your website running a second slower can increase the bounce rate, sometimes substantially, for some businesses.

Responsive design

Everything from the website’s layout, including the text and pictures, must be responsive. If the website’s version doesn’t work well on smartphones, or for example, it’s very slow, or the text is hard to read, it will create a bad user experience, resulting in a high bounce rate.

 

How to test your website’s works correctly on different smartphones

Many web design agencies will use BrowserStack and LambdaTest as tools to test different websites to see if they work correctly on different devices. Therefore, before that website design company hands the website to the client, it often checks these tools to ensure that the website loads correctly; for example, on a tablet, on a specific type of smartphone and on desktop.

This is to ensure that the website works correctly and allows the web designer to make adjustments to the design.
For example, when looking at the website’s mobile version, you might see that a block text is just too large, and it seems like too much text is applied to the page.

Therefore, the web designer can start making adjustments, not just to make the website responsive so that it works on smartphones, but also to make it look good, improving the user experience.

 

For example, a web developer should consider the following

  • Is the text simple to read?
  • Is there good design in terms of that it quickly conveys what the page is about?
  • Is the website super-fast?
  • How simple is it to use the main navigation?
  • Can you quickly critical information about the company, such as the phone number and address?

 

In conclusion

To conclude, PHP remains one of the most widely used programming languages in the United Kingdom.

It’s used to create fantastic websites that work onto desktops, and to also design websites that work on smartphones and tablets.

Web design agencies, like W& P Marketing, can design amazing websites for small and large businesses.

What makes us quite different from many other web development and web design agencies is that we offer very competitive prices, which always include making the website mobile ready.

We fully appreciate that whether you’re running a coffee shop or your online clothing retailer, you want your company website to be responsive so that it works on different devices.

This is why, as standard, we include the cost of making the website fully responsive within our quotes.

We use PHP, and our web developers often use WordPress as the content management system that we use to design websites. So, the cost of making the website responsive will be included in our quote.

 

What are some emerging technologies that can help web designers in 2025?

 

We are at a really exciting point in time. There are some massive and transformative changes happening in the web design profession. New emerging technologies now allow more innovative, creative, and better-designed websites to be designed for clients.

In this comprehensive article, we will explain some of these new technologies, how they can help web design agencies, and how they can improve the web design process.

 

The future of web development and new emerging technologies

As we are fast approaching the end of 2024, forward-thinking web design companies are looking for new innovations in the web design sector to help them design better websites. In this exciting article, we talk about everything from the rise of artificial intelligence to augmented reality, which has the possibility of changing how we shop for items online.

As a forward-thinking web design business, we thought we would write a comprehensive article detailing technologies that we believe web designers should watch out for in 2025.

 

The rise of artificial intelligence development tools

Even those readers who are not involved in the web design process on a day-to-day basis will have heard of Chat GPT. However, there are lots of other artificial intelligence tools that are becoming popular as well. For example, many website developers are using various A.I tools to help with code writing and development.

For example, a web developer might write significant code for a brand-new e-commerce website. You might use machine learning and A.I tools to spot potential issues and problems with code before it is implemented on the website.

 

Helping to reduce debugging time

When you talk to most web designers, they can say that many bugs and glitches can develop in the code, especially when you’re tired at 5 or 6 p.m. on a Friday when completing this work.

You run the code and might find some significant errors.

In the past, you would have to work through these problems, working through the code to see whether problems were occurring.
However, now, with AI-powered coding assistance, it is much more advanced and acts like a helping hand that can fix any problems with the code. This can help with the web development process, and a lot of web design agencies are using various A.I-powered coding programs to spot pictures and help with debugging a website.

 

Augmented Reality (AR)

We believe that in 2025 we can see the rise of augmented reality integrated into a lot of websites

Augmented Reality (AR) helping to make better purchasing decisions

When you talk to large online retailers, their profit margins will be effected by returns. For example, in the clothing industry, there will be a lot of clothes that will be returned because the customer doesn’t like the style of clothing.

What we think will happen more and more in 2025 is augmented reality integrated into e-commerce websites.
Basically, augmented reality is that you can create 3-D representations on the website. For example, somebody could create a realistic avatar of themselves with their face on the avatar.

The avatar’s body could be constructed to the person’s rough dimensions and scale. The person can then select clothing, such as various jeans, tops, and hats, and add them to the augmented reality avatar of themselves.

This basically allows better visualisation of products before the customer selects them. This opens the possibility of fewer returns and refunds being created because the customer can look at certain items online themselves in a virtual reality setting, which web designers refer to as “augmented reality”, this could be on the actual desktop and mobile versions of the website.

 

The rise of blockchain technology and Web 3.0

There is much conversation about Web 3.0 and blockchain technology. We think we will hear much more about this in 2025. Many web design companies are already talking about Web 3.0, decentralisation, and the different types of blockchain-based solutions that can be created.

 

Voice User Interface (VUI)

Whether shopping for a product online and asking a search engine to find a product or asking the TV to find a particular station. A lot of us are now used to the Voice User Interface. We think we will see this increasingly integrated into e-commerce shopping.

More web design agencies are increasingly asked to integrate voice user interfaces into a website’s design.

For example, in an e-commerce platform that sells thousands of products, somebody might want something very specific, like a certain brand of coffee—having to go through the main menu to find the item, potentially wasting minutes trying to find and browse to find the correct item. Instead, we can use the Voice User Interface integrated into the website.

For example, they might say, “find me, the fabulous coffee brand”, and then all of their products are instantly presented on the e-commerce website. We are, therefore, seeing more and more web developers and designers integrate Voice User Interfaces within the website.
This will mean that many companies will need to use natural language processing and improve the accuracy of the training of the different accents and voices as they ask for products on an e-commerce website.

 

Customer support and the evolution of chatbots

 

We have all used chatbots and many large companies have switched many staff members to their online chatbots to assist and offer help to the customer. Often, a chatbot is integrated into the website to help resolve the query or question before the question is handed over to a sales representative.

Therefore, many companies have found that a chatbot can answer many questions and queries before an actual human intervenes.

The human sales representative often steps in when the question becomes too complex for the chatbot to answer.

However, we believe things have gone a step further.
In 2025, our web design business thinks that we will see the evolution of chat bots, where the website is actively talking back to us. Like a live conversation with a sales representative in the shop, where you can ask questions about product, we think you will be able to this with a A.I powered avatar.

For example, let’s say somebody is shopping for a television. You might be able to click a button and start asking very exact questions about the television, such as the resolution of the screen.

We can see the evolution of online sales representatives. Virtual assistants look like real people, but they are actually telling you more about the product. They are having a realistic conversation with you about the benefits of that product.

This is very different from a chatbot, where you are just writing answers in a box asking questions

The next evolution is realistic sales representatives on the website who actually help you and guide you through the sales process.

This can also work in the service sector, for example, a highly complex service like offering divorce services. You could actually integrate a sales representative who pops up and starts to answer complex questions, which will have huge SEO benefits for the website in question. Simply because you will be spending longer on the website, and the bounce rate is likely to be significantly decreased.

 

Partner with a forward-thinking web design business

Our company is based in the heart of Cardiff, and we have always kept one eye on the future, looking for emerging technologies so that we can design unique websites for our clients.

 

How much does a website cost to build?

You might think that when looking at our web design company website, that our websites are extremely expensive; however, we can build a brand-new quality website for just £950.00.

 

Why should we pick your web design agency?

We use really popular and widely used high-quality content management systems, such as Drupal and WordPress.

The vast majority of the sites we design using one of the most popular content management platforms in the world, which is WordPress.
Then we have highly skilled copywriters and UX experts, and also have web developers working for us; we can design an amazing website for your business.

 

Have you built many websites for Welsh businesses before?

We most definitely have, we have built many websites for solicitors, for constructions business, for demolition companies. We have a lot of websites for tradesmen and for builders. We have therefore built many websites for many Welsh businesses, ranging from large e-commerce websites to brochure websites for sole traders and small businesses.

 

Are you able to design websites that have English and also Welsh translation?

Yes, we can offer to write the text in both English and Welsh.

 

Do you just design brochure websites?

No, we can also design e-commerce websites as well.

We need a website designed really quickly, so we are looking for web designers who can design a website quickly

This is no problem at all, we can design websites often in less than three weeks, this is often significantly faster than some other web design agencies.

 

Why do you recommend choosing WordPress?

We recommend WordPress for most clients, as it often meets our clients needs. It is a fantastic content management system, but don’t just take our word for it; it’s one of the most popular CMS used around the globe.

 

How much does your website hosting costs?

Our website hosting is affordable, and we offer a fixed fee every year.

 

We want a futuristic and modern website. Are you able to design it?

Yes, we can design a very modern-looking website for your business.

Website terminology: Some of the terms that you need to know about when getting a website designed

 

 

It doesn’t matter if you’re a budding entrepreneur just getting started or perhaps you run a global brand; all businesses need a well-designed website.

Shoppers today almost immediately decide whether they want to continue shopping on your website or perhaps decide to leave. Therefore, a business needs to invest in a well-designed, perfectly designed website.

It matter if you’re a one-man-band or an international conglomerate, your website must do the following:
– Must be simple to use and offer an excellent U.X (User Experience)
– Must be super sonic fast
– Must have well-written content marketing, which is written with Google E-EAT in mind
– Must be optimised in a white hat way

 

How to choose the right web designer:

 

Choosing a web designer is a big decision. You need to deliberate over and think about it for a pretty long period. Don’t get rushed into choosing a web design agency.

Picking the right web designer is crucial because, sometimes, it can make or break a business. For example, let’s say a brand new company is established in the city centre of Cardiff, and it will operate in a highly competitive business sector.

So, that particular business might be competing with at least 100 other Welsh businesses. These companies might heavily invest in SEO, so your business will invest in search engine optimisation. Your business is going to need to get a good website designed to get the foundations right.

A well-built house needs rock-solid foundations, and so does your company website. It will need a well-designed website that offers a good UX—that’s user experience. That’s why you need to take the time to choose the right web design agency.

 

Why you need to understand some of the critical terminology

So, when you start to phone around various web design businesses, you might clearly state what you want on the phone. Yet when the e-mails start flying into your inbox with various web design quotes, you might find it a bit like comparing apples with pears.

One company might say we will provide an AMP website plus a responsive version of the website, and another company might say that the website doesn’t work on smartphones and that this option is extra.

So, our point is that you need to be clear with the web designers about your business needs. This article will help you understand some of the critical terminology so that you can tell the web design agency precisely what your business needs.

 

Domain name

Let’s start with something super simple yet something you need to consider carefully: What domain name will you use?
And you might be thinking, what on earth is a domain name?

A domain name is simply a unique web address, like Nike.com or Google.com; these are examples of domain names. When you use your web browser, you can use Google Chrome. You may type the domain name directly into the box, which is then converted into an Internet Protocol (IP) address, which tells the browser where the server is and a hosting company is hosting that website.

 

Why you need to check a domain name history

So, let’s say you’re about to start a new company and launch it in Cardiff Bay. You check that the domain name you want is available, and it is.

So, you may buy that domain name immediately- but should you do that?

Well, no. You should pause and chat with an SEO consultant to see if the domain name you’re about to buy has been purchased and owned by another company in the past.

Why is it important to check if a domain name has been purchased in the past?

Many companies have purchased low-quality and spam search engine optimisation. Google and other search engines, such as Bing, may have “de-indexed” that website, meaning it has been flagged as having lousy SEO and removed from the search engine.

So, just like buying a car with a dodgy engine, this is the same as buying a domain name whose search engine optimisation has been low-quality in the past.

It makes organic SEO work much harder and slower in the future. In a worst-case scenario, websites can receive a significant algorithmic penalty, for example, for building backlinks incorrectly. Then, the Google algorithm places a Google Penguin penalty on the website—and the website gets penalised and de-indexed.

The owner of that domain name may give up trying to rectify the SEO problems; then, the domain name becomes available again for someone else to purchase. But the problem is that you, the new owner of the domain name, register it and start using that domain name because it received, say, a Google penalty in the past; you, the new owner, then inherit the SEO problems.

 

HTTPS/HTTP

What does HTTPS/HTTP mean?

So, what exactly does HTTPS/HTTP mean? Well, it simply stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol. The extras added to the end indicate that the connection is secure, and the s stands for “secure.”

If you log into a website using a username and password that is not encrypted, the information can be exchanged in plain text format, which runs the security risk of being intercepted. This is especially true if you work in an area with an open Wi-Fi connection, such as a coffee shop, or you are sitting waiting to catch a plane.

So, if a website is secure or encrypted, the connection is somewhat protected as it travels between the different hosting companies. This adds an extra layer of security, making it harder for hackers to access the information. It’s still not impossible, but having the connection made secure is much better for your security.

HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

My website designers keep mentioning HTML, CSS and Javascript- what does this even mean?

Quite put, your web browser, let’s say your Google Chrome web browser, uses different programming languages, such as HTML, Javascript and also CSS, to present the website the

What does Cascading Style Sheet or CSS mean?

What is a blog?

So, we highly recommend that whichever type of business you run, you want to add a blog section within the main menu. It would be best if you also dedicated time to regularly add quality blog posts that are well written in a white hat way.

So, you might wonder why our company needs a blog.

Why should we be routinely adding blog posts?

Well, the answer is quite simple. Businesses of all sizes, from sole traders to large e-commerce businesses, use blog posts, also known as content marketing, to help their websites rank higher in Google’s search engine results pages.

Quite put, if you regularly post about, let’s say, car repair terms, then it’s likely that your business is a garage. Let’s say that you regularly add blog posts about a particular car brand; well, your website is getting optimised for that specific car and car repair terms so that the website can start to appear higher on Google for keywords related to your business sector.

Therefore, you can improve your business’s organic search engine optimisation by adding quality content marketing, such as evergreen content marketing. This can help your business get onto page one of Google for various keywords.

 

Bootstrap

What exactly does Bootstrap mean when it comes to designing a website?

Bootstrap is simply a CSS framework that aims to make a website responsive. Because more and more shoppers purchase items off their smartphones, it is more important than ever that when calling web design companies, they design and build a responsive version of your website. Sometimes, this is called mobile-first design, and many web developers use Bootstrap and CSS to design the front end of a mobile website.

 

What does CMS mean? What is a content management system?

Regular readers of our company’s blog posts will know we like designing WordPress websites. WordPress is simply a type of content management system or CMS for short. Many Welsh businesses have chosen WordPress because it is well-known as a brilliant, well-designed, and simple-to-use content management system. WordPress is now, by an absolute country mile, one of the most popular CMS worldwide.

 

Here’s why WordPress now is one of the most popular content management systems out there:

– It has WP Dashboard, which is an absolute piece of cake to use
– A lot of SEO companies like WordPress, as you can make a lot of changes to the CMS
– A well-designed website can be designed using WordPress

 

Why does my web designer keep talking about “mobile first design”?

For many businesses, organic visitors and visitors they get through Google Adwords and social media will be shoppers using their smartphones. This is why web developers now need to make a website responsive yet well-designed and straightforward. Therefore, mobile-first design is essential.

 

The website must be responsive, but more than that, the website must be:

– Simple to use
– Fast
– Must work on Apple I-phones and also Android devices
– Must also work on tablets

What exactly does front-end development mean?

A web designer can design the front end, where you often use various design languages, such as HTML, CSS and sometimes Javascript. This is to create everything shoppers see and can click on, such as the Contact Us forms or simply the main menu. It’s now more important than ever that you hire web developers who create websites that offer a good UX, that’s user experience.

Many digital marketing agencies think that Google uses RankBrain to see how shoppers approve or disapprove of your company website. For example, they use time on site, or dwell time, to determine how much time shoppers spend on your company website.

If the average shopper spends long browsing your products and services, this is an extended dwell time. Using your company’s Google

Analytics account, you can check your business’s dwell time, also called time on site. Log in and look at the dwell time for each page.

Yet many marketing companies know that if they offer an excellent UX user experience, shoppers will want to browse more items on the website and spend longer looking at the products. This tells search engines like Google and Microsoft Bing that the shopper is interested in this business and what it offers. This means that your company provides a good user experience so that the business can rank higher on Google.

In a nutshell, if your business wants to offer a good UX, then the front end of the website needs to be well-designed. So, you need to hire a local web design agency offering a good UX.

 

What exactly does full-stack development mean?

Full-Stack Development

So, full-stack development is simply a method used by web designers to design both the front and back ends of the website. Now, you might see web design businesses refer to the front of, say, a WordPress website as the client side and the back end as the server side. Many companies are looking for staff who have knowledge of building both because they can basically build the entire website, both the front and the back end.

It doesn’t matter if it’s a Drupal website, a Joomla website, or another type of content management system. Web developers, regardless of which language they use to build the website, build the front end, which is the screens the shoppers see on their browsers. The back end is the server side, and that’s the part where the web developer uses it to make changes to the coding, such as PHP.

 

Wireframe

Why do my web designers keep talking about wireframes? What are wireframes used for in the web design process?

When you initially sit down with your website designers, they may say that they will build and design wireframes at the start of the web design process. This sounds technical, but it’s not really. It’s simply a two-dimensional rough sketch of what the website will look like, not in terms of its finished design, but roughly where the picture, the text, and the footer will go, for example.

Your website designer may use a “low-fidelity” design, where they set out essential boxes, which is often the starting point of designing a brand-new website. Then there’s “high-fidelity” design, where the more final elements, the finer brush strokes, so to speak, are added, which gives us a much clearer idea of what the website will look like once finished.

You know, when an excellent oil painter is painting on canvas, they often make a rough sketch before they start adding the final detail. Well, this is the same when using wireframes; it’s a rough sketch of what the website will look like, and it allows the client to have a meeting with the web designers to make changes and amendments to the website. This is much simpler and quicker to do during the wireframe design stage.

That’s because amending or changing a finished design is very hard. A relatively simple change like changing and redesigning the footer might take well over one hundred hours on a large commerce website. Yet, if the change is made, say, to increase the footer width or add more buttons during the wireframe stage, well, this is much simpler to do.

So, it allows the client to make adjustments and edits during the wireframing stage, and making amendments at this stage is much simpler.

Hosting

Website Hosting

Huge international companies sometimes own their own servers. Yet purchasing web servers can be super expensive. So, many businesses put their websites on hosting companies’ servers.

However, whatever type of business you run, make sure your business purchases lightning-fast, speedy hosting. That’s for two main reasons. Number one, the website needs to be fast because shoppers like a fast website; it offers a good user experience. The second reason is that

Google gauges how fast your website is; does it all load quickly? If so, your business has an SEO advantage. If it is slow and clunky to load, it will hold your business search engine optimisation back.

So, when getting a website designed, make sure it’s super-fast. The web designers offer good-quality, fast, and reliable hosting. You most definitely don’t want your website going offline for too long because Googlebot won’t be able to crawl and index it, which basically means you start dropping down Google’s ranks.
So you need your company website up.

User Experience (UX)

How can my company improve our U.X user experience?

This is a really difficult one to answer because it boils down to this: Do your shoppers like using your company website?
So, you often have to do a lot of split testing, which some web developers also call a/b testing. It’s basically a process of constantly making rather small edits to the website and perfecting the design.

This doesn’t ever end because you can constantly find areas to approve, lower the bounce rate, and keep shoppers on the website for longer. So, it’s a process of continually improving the design so shoppers find it more straightforward. When Google’s algorithms see that shoppers are spending a long time, visiting many pages, and also buying from you, the algorithms will start to see that your website is well designed, shoppers like it, it offers a good user experience, so your business will begin to rank higher.

Yet, as any good SEO consultant will tell you, improving the U.X. by lowering the bounce rate, increasing the time on site, and improving organic SEO takes a lot of time simply because you have to show Google’s algorithms that your website offers good user experience.

 

How to go about creating a wireframe for your new website, a step-by-step informative guide

 

When a brand-new company website needs to be designed, many stakeholders often have different opinions on how it should look.
The company directors might choose a more traditional and professional website, while some of the management might want a much bolder and more striking design that looks more modern.

So, how do I start creating a rough outline—a sketch, if you like—of how the website could look?

Well, quite simply put, you construct a “wireframe”, which is like the website’s skeleton. This can set up important features such as text blocks and pictures, and you can also begin to sculpt your website.

As this article explains, wireframing is a collaborative process that brings together all the different stakeholders, including the directors, the marketing team, and the management. It allows everyone to contribute their ideas and vision for how the new company website should look, making them feel integral to the design process.

However, you haven’t fully built the website at this stage; its just providing a rough sketch, which makes it much quicker to design.

 

First things first, what on earth is a wireframe?

We fully appreciate that you want a new professional company website designed right now. You don’t want to hear technical jargon that will give you a massive migraine as you leave the web design agency offices!

Our approach here at W&P to simplify the process, cutting through all the technical jargon and explaining clearly what these marketing terms mean. This reassures the customer so that they can understand and participate in the design process with confidence.

 

So, without further ado, what is a wireframe?

Different web developers will use different wire-frame design tools, but a wireframe is where you set out where you want a slider, where you want the pictures set out on the page, and where you want the text.

It’s brilliant because you can get your client around your Apple MacBook Pro, and start to set out how the website should look.

 

But why use wireframes? Why not just jump straight into designing the website?

Create a picture of a car designer sculpting a car out of clay, making the car look like a super car, and they are designing it in a large factory to make it look ultra-realistic

You know, when a car designer is designing a car, the company specifies the type of vehicle that needs to be designed. Is it an SUV? A rugged 4×4? Or a city car built for ease of parking, and designed for fuel economy?

So, before the car designer starts, they often have a rough idea of how the vehicle’ should look. They don’t jump straight in, designing the dashboard with buttons and all the other finer details right at the start- instead its about getting a sense of what the outline of car will look like.

They therefore start with a rough outline of the car’s design and proportions and consider how the engines will fit in the car.

This is the same for web designers. They need to start by carving down what the customer wants- moulding and sculpting how the website should look. For example, does the customer want a lot of text homepage? Do they want an autoloading video?

So, before they get to the finer details get designed, and the code written, the web designers start by designing wireframes to get a rough outline of the website’s appearance.

 

Don’t get bogged down in the finer details right at the start

If you’re building a brand-new home, we often don’t approach the interior designer and say you want the skirting boards to painted a particular cream colour as soon as you meet the designer.

Because this is very specific, very exact, often people don’t care too much about what colour the skirting boards are painted. Instead, they’re likely to give an overall view of how they want their home to look: ultramodern, contemporary, or perhaps traditional farmhouse style?

These are like the broad brush strokes at the start, giving the interior designer a taste of what the client likes. The same is true when you’re getting your website designed.

Your not likely to approach a web design company that ask straight away that you want a bright purple footer but has no idea how it want the overall website to look. Again, this is very exacting, very precise.

Instead, somebody will likely approach a local web design company, and what a modern WordPress website built, or lets say a professional website for a solicitors practice.

This then allows the web designer not to get bogged down in the finer details at the start, and to start putting forward some ideas based on the overall style of website you think the client wants. This is done using wireframes.

So, before our web developers crank up the coffee machine and start designing wireframes, they often ask the client the following questions.

 

Functionality

If you like high-performance vehicles, your not going to be shopping around and buy a one litre city car with no guts and can’t get up the hill too fast!

Just as a high-performance vehicle needs to be carefully chosen, a website’s functionality is a key consideration to make when designing the wireframes.

If you’re about to launch a new e-commerce business, you must think about speed, design, and reducing bounce rate to offer a positive user experience.

 

Do you need a brochure website?

You may need a website where people can click a button to book a meeting room, the coffee they want, and the fruit juices they want and then an option to pay via that page.

So functionality is critical; what do you want the website to do?

This will dictate how the wireframes are designed.

Use annotations to ensure everybody is on the right page: you might sit down with your web developer for an extended period explaining everything you want, yet this might get handed over to a WordPress web designer who’s never met you to start designing the website.

So, it’s essential to make annotations, on the wireframes and small comments about what the customer wants when constructing the wireframes.

This allows the design to start to be constructed and sculpted. Still, anybody working on that account, whether it be a PHP web developer, a WordPress developer, or a Drupal developer, will then have a really good idea of what the customer wants when they start to read the notes.
It might just be a small note left in the footer. A customer might want a map they can click on, help to show on a Google Map where the local bakery is.

If the note was not left in the wireframe, the following web designer who works on the website design might not know about it. So, it’s important that these notes are left so everybody is on the same page when designing the website and wireframes.
Create a picture of a web designer designing a main menu using Photoshop and an Apple MacBook Pro, and make it look ultra-realistic

 

Navigation

When you start to sit down with your web designers, perhaps to eat a nice pastry, a nice bagel or something like that, you might begin to discuss the navigation you would like.

  • How do you want the main menu to work?
  • And you want a burger menu?
  • Do you want to drop down many boxes?
  • There is so much to think about. Wireframes allow you, the web designers, to understand what you need.

How do you even begin creating wireframes?

.
Create a picture in a web design office in Cardiff with two people shaking hands and make it look ultra-realistic

 

An initial meeting

If a client stipulates that they want wireframes designed, then we can do this and build a bespoke website for them, we would need first to arrange a meeting. The wireframes will not start to get designed in this initial meeting, but we will gain an idea of what the customer wants so we can begin to design a brand new company website for the business.

 

Competitor research: who are your direct competitors?

What functionality do they have on their website?
For example, they may have accelerated mobile pages; you may therefore want to work with your web developers to see your competitors’ functionality and whether you need the same functionality for your new website.

You might want to incorporate some of the same functionality into your website. For example, if you run a large e-commerce store, let’s say that you sell fashion items and accessories such as perfume and nice shoes.

Your direct competitors might have offered the customer the option to sort the items by price and whether they are in stock. They might also have allowed them to enter their e-mail addresses for the items that are currently out of stock and get a notification when they are back in stock.

This functionality will require coding, and a web developer may spend hundreds, if not thousands, of hours coding these different elements into the website.

Therefore, it is essential that you state the functionality your business needs, so this is incorporated into the design. One way of doing this is to look at an established competitor. If they’re the front-runner you may need to take some design inspiration from them in terms of the functionality you may need.

 

Create a basic layout

The whole purpose of creating wireframes is to create a basic page layout. This so we can get the client back into the web design studio, say, “look at the wireframes we have created for you; what do you think of the layout of this website”?
They might say instantly wow, and we start to build our website using WordPress. They might say they want some amendments made to the wireframes.

This is excellent for both the web design agency and the client to get this feedback immediately because wireframing is relatively quick to do.
So, it’s much simpler to make these changes right at the start when you’re designing the wireframes.

Refining make it better and better

Whiskey makers working in the Highlands of Scotland are often constantly perfecting their craft.

They’re continually looking to buy the best oak barrels, ingredients and highly skilled staff to help craft that whiskey.

This is precisely the same with web design. You want to craft, sculpt, and make it the best possible design you can. For this to happen, you must work with the client to create wireframes. We hope that our web developers have done a good job, in explaining what wireframes are, and why they are essential to the web design process.

Do you want a fantastic website designed within the city of Cardiff?

Your business might need a fabulous website designed by highly skilled web designers; why not contact us today?

We have extensive experience designing WordPress websites, so why not come to us for a quote? We can then start creating a website for you.

 

Why you need to make the mobile version of your company website really simple to use

 

As we all know, more and more people are buying goods and services online. When you’re looking to get your company website designed or redesigned, you might think that it’s just a matter of making the website “responsive.”

However, a mobile version of a website can be responsive, yet it can also offer a bad customer experience. In web design, we describe this as bad UX.

So, a company website needs to be fast on both desktop and mobile phones. In this article, we will explain some of the things you should consider when designing the mobile version of your company website.

 

Speed and Efficiency

Make sure it’s super-sonic fast. It’s really important that when hiring a web design agency, you ensure that the business designs a fast website and that the website hosting is also fast.

As most good web designers will tell you, shoppers are becoming increasingly impatient, meaning they want a website to be fast and straightforward. The bounce rate will increase if an e-commerce website sells clothes or even holds the customer up for a few extra seconds.

You can monitor your bounce rate using your company’s Google Analytics account, and we highly recommend you do this.
Other absolutely superb SEO tools, such as Ahrefs and Moz Pro, can provide tips on how to lower your website’s bounce rate.

Make sure that the website that you have designed is straightforward to use

Sure, you will need the website to be responsive and mobile-ready so that it works on Apple iPhones. You’ll also need fast hosting.
Yet, when people are shopping on their phones, it’s important that your company website is designed to be fast and simple to use. For example, you might have been in a low-signal area where the connection to the mobile phone network is weak. This may cause the website to load more slowly, and if it’s too slow, this will increase your website’s bounce rate significantly.
So, make sure that you have a responsive website and that it’s well-designed. The web designers should also ensure that it is fast.

 

Think about using CSS media queries, scalable vector graphics and flexible grid layouts

So, your website is responsive.

It works on all Google Android devices

It works on Apple iPhone devices

Yet, is it designed with speed in mind?

Sometimes, the customer may want all the bells and whistles, such as an autoloading video on the top section of the website. They may also want a lot of text, infographics, and a chat box that instantly opens and asks if they need any help.
Now, this is all great if the websites are fast, but if they’re slow, then this could increase the bounce rate because the websites are too slow.

 

Excessive or unoptimised JavaScript and CSS can severely impact mobile page load times. Techniques such as minifying CSS and JavaScript files, which involve removing unnecessary characters from source code without changing functionality, can reduce file sizes and speed up loading times. Additionally, loading JavaScript asynchronously helps prevent it from blocking the page’s rendering, improving users’ perceived load time.

Talk to your web developers about minimising unnecessary JavaScript and CSS.

When you meet with your web developers, asking them how they will ensure your brand-new company website is fast is a good idea. One way of achieving a super-fast website is to minimise the use of JavaScript and make the website quick through fast hosting and good web design. Do talk to your web developers to see if your business could benefit from an AMP website as well.

As an excellent SEO expert will tell you, to get any business onto page one, that’s in the organic results on Google; the website needs to be fast.

 

Are you looking for a web design agency in Cardiff?

This article concentrated on describing why your business needs a fast and well-designed responsive version of its company website.
Well, this is one of the reasons so many businesses come to W&P web design. We also include in our quotes the cost of making the website responsive. Now, a lot of web design agencies actually charge extra to make the website fully responsive; however, we always include this in our quote.

And considering that our website design service starts from just £950.00, it’s clear to see why so many businesses flock to W&P when they need a brand-new website designed.

 

 

 

The SEO advantages of embedding YouTube videos to your company website

 

YouTube

Author: W&P

Date: 23/09/2024

Bounce rates

Your website may have a sky-high bounce rate. It might be through the roof at this present time? Yet you are now looking for ways in which you could bring that bounce rate right down. Let’s say, for example, that you have set a goal to half the bounce rate on the homepage over the next 3 month and you’re going to use Google Analytics to monitor this reduction.

 

How to reduce bounce rates

Your local web designers may have recommended that you have a well-designed WordPress website designed, and now it may look amazing. Yet the bounce rate is so high because you haven’t added YouTube videos or a slider to help increase the dwell time, and try to keep those shoppers on the website for as long as possible.

So let us run through some ideas of how you can start to lower that bounce rate

Bounce rates, dwell time and Google Analytics

Here at this web design agency, we have found that embedding a YouTube video onto your homepage can decrease the bounce rate, improve the time on site (dwell time), and improve your organic search engine optimisation if you keep shoppers on your website for longer.

So, by keeping shoppers on your website for longer you can:

– Improve sales
– Reduce bounce rate
– Improve dwell time

One way to do this is to add a YouTube video explaining the benefits of choosing your business.

 

User experience and conversion rates

When you walk into a shop selling clothes, you’re not just buying clothes; you would like a good shopping experience as you walk around and purchase the items you want.

Perhaps the sales staff are super friendly and helpful, and this creates a pleasant environment to walk around and look at the different clothes.

When buying items online, you will want a good “user experience,” or UX for your shoppers, which many web design agencies call the website’s “U.X.”

This means that your website must offer a good user experience, be simple to use, and offer helpful and valuable information.

To offer a better U.X to your customers, you may want to:

Get a well-designed responsive version of your company website

Use split testing to make gradual improvements

To also monitor bounce rates and try to reduce these as far as possible:

 

Let’s examine some of the main advantages of embedding YouTube videos to your company website:

So, let’s say someone searches on Google for a service they don’t buy all that often. Let’s say they require the help of a local solicitor, for example a family lawyer. Now, if the first four websites have a lot of text on the homepage, that person might not want to read paragraph after paragraph of the text as they may not have the time.

This is where YouTube videos can be used to convey main selling points quickly

Yet, suppose you were to add a YouTube video introducing the company director or some solicitors are instantly presenting what they can offer the customer.

In that case, this is likely to engage a shopper more, possibly leading to more enquiries as the shopper spends longer on your company website.

After a long day at work, someone may want to watch a very quick 3-minute video of a lawyer explaining the benefits of choosing that solicitor’s practice, as they can get an idea if that solicitors practice is right for them, rather than reading large blocks of text to find if that’s the right company.

 

So, embedding YouTube videos has the following benefits for your business organic or local SEO

– Able to hold the shopper’s interest for longer (improving dwell time). That’s if you offer valuable and helpful information via your companies YouTube channel
– Embedded YouTube videos may allow you to lower the bounce rate
– Able to convey your company personality and the staff’s personality, a lot better than just asking a shopper to just read the “meet the team” page

Able to convey complex ideas and services

So, let’s say you’re looking to buy a fairly technical item, let’s say solar panels for your business or home. This is not the type of product that’s bought every day, so the customer is likely to have many questions that they would like answered before they purchase the product or the service from the customer.

So, sure, you could, let’s say, ask the web designers to add an accordion (FAQ) to the homepage or the main pages on your WordPress website.

Yet, again, many people may not want to read a lot of text. So, many web design agencies are now recommending that you embed a YouTube video to explain why shopper should choose your business.

So, for example, simply introducing the staff and allowing them to state the services that your business can offer and telling them a bit more about the business. This can help build rapport with the customer.

 

Help to generate more sales.

So, we think that an excellent video explaining the benefits of choosing your company can have the following benefits for your business sales and SEO.

– Help improve conversions
– Help improve dwell time
– Reduce bounce rate

 

Help improve sales

So, just as in any good shop, you will have good salespeople. They will help the company to generate more sales by simply answering any questions that the customer might have. Well, YouTube videos embedded on your website’s main pages and product pages can help explain the benefits of choosing that product or service.

For example, a blender is an object that some customers might think is pretty generic. Yet, when you start to explain the many different features that some blenders can have, such as making smoothies etc, and explaining the benefits of owning the product in a video, you will be clearly showing the customer the benefits of owning that item, so they may well be more persuaded to purchase the item from you.

So, it’s your opportunity to:

– Advertise and promote the benefits of purchasing that product
– You can offer an in-depth explanation of why you should choose that product or service
– Allows to explain unique selling points; for example, you might offer an extended warranty period longer than your direct competitors?
– You can keep shoppers on your website for much longer, improving time on site, which, as any good SEO agency will tell you is now a good way of improving your business’s organic search engine optimisation

Dwell time and Google Rank Brain.

The huge e-commerce businesses will have teams of staff who are dedicated to A/B testing so that they can improve the SEO in the following ways

– Time on site
– Reduce the bounce rate
– Improve conversions

So, for your business to rank higher on Google.co.uk and Google.com, you must improve what SEO companies call the U.X and the engagement metrics.

Now, to do this, often you will need to do gradual split testing (A/B testing) to see when, let’s say, for example, you may make a slight improvement to the main menu design, whether this helps improve sales or not?

So, with split testing, its about making gradual improvements to the websites design. Then the web design company must see if that change helped improve sales, the company will keep that change, if it has the opposite effect, the business will revert the change back.

So, often, substantial e-commerce retailers do a lot of split testing, also referred to as A/B testing, to see if they can improve their organic SEO. To do this, they often have to improve the U.X, and to that, they often have to do the following:

– Make the company website faster
– Make it more straightforward for customers to find the product or service they want
– Offer a good U.X for example, making the main menu simpler to use
– Keep the shopper on the website for longer (improving dwell time)
– They often have to make sure that a good well written product description is added to help the customer to work out if that’s the right item for them
– They have to make sure all of the SEO work is white hat
– They also have to make sure that all of the text that the copywriters write meets the standard of writing set in Google’s E-EAT advice

An explainer video

Some products and services don’t need explaining because they are self-explanatory- such as lets say a 100% organic chocolate bar.
However, some products and services are much more technical and therefore require more explaining and clarification on the benefits that the product can bring to the customer. For example, if you’re hiring a web designer, you may have never hired a web design agency before, so you may want to know how the service works.

Therefore if the digital marketing agency was to have say their main web developer explain the process from start to finish, this may retain a shopper on the website for longer. This may result in more sales, as the video may answer questions that the shopper may have.

 

Why we recommend adding an explainer video to your website

Adding an explainer video’s always a good idea whether you’re a dentist or a builder.
Yet we would highly recommend supplementing the explainer video with text. That is plain text that Googlebot can crawl and index, so that this can help improve your businesses SEO.

You can add a title to your YouTube video. This gives Google (Alphabet) a good idea of what the video is about. So, for example, if you were to title it “Family Lawyers—how to Start the Divorce Process,” Google will then know that you are likely to run a family law practice and therefore are offering some helpful tips to couples about to embark on the divorce process.

Yet, at the same time, you might have someone answering this question for, say, well over 30 minutes, yet Google will not know other than the title what the video is about.

This is why we recommend supplementing every video with text below so Googlebot can know exactly what that video is about.

 

Add a summary below the YouTube video to explain what the presenter is saying:

So, if your web designers were to add text, to explain what the video is about, what could happen then is that “Googlebot” would crawl and index the text.

If Google’s algorthim deems the information as good quality, then the content marketing can help enhance your business’s organic or local search engine optimisation.

So, when adding YouTube videos to your company website, we recommend doing the following.
– Write text to offer further helpful advice, which Googlebot can then index
– Bullet point some of the answers so that you offer a summary of what the text is about

In summary

We think it’s an excellent idea to embed a YouTube video on your main pages and blog posts, where you especially where have evergreen content marketing and on the homepage. Often, when you look at Google Analytics, the main product or service pages usually be the pages which have the most organic visitors. Therefore, for your business to rank higher in the organic search engine results pages, we recommend improving the dwell time and reducing the bounce rate by embedding YouTube videos.

For example, why not have a member of staff who’s an expert on that particular product or service explaining the benefits of choosing your company.

This can help improve time on-site, also known as “dwell time”, and reduce the company’s bounce rate.

You might embed a YouTube video onto the following pages:

  • The homepage
  • The About Us page
  • Company History
  • Meet the team
  • Main product pages
  • Main service pages

 

How we can help:

We are a web design company; we have highly experienced web designers working for us. We can offer the following services:

 

WordPress web designers

We are able to quickly ascertain how our customers would like their websites designed. The vast majority of the websites we design are built using the content management system WordPress.

Seo (organic and local)
If your business needs to improve its organic search engine optimisation, why not call us?

 

 

What would your web design company say are the main benefits of choosing WordPress CMS?

Author: Ryan Walsh
Date: 20/09/2024

Many web design agencies recommend different content management systems when shopping around for web design quotes. Some may recommend Drupal or HubSpot.

Yet, there are a massive number of web design businesses that specialise in building WordPress websites. This article will explain the main benefits of choosing a WordPress website for your company, whether you want a brochure or an e-commerce website built.
For those who are in a bit of a rush, here are our main seven reasons why we would recommend WordPress:

– Simple to use WP Dashboard
– Simple to find a specialise WordPress web developer
– Huge number of plugins that the customer could later add to their website
– Cost effective
– Widely used by a considerable amount of Welsh businesses
– We can design WordPress brochure websites quickly for our clients
– Some large global brands have also chosen WordPress as their CMS because fantastic websites can be built using WordPress

 

WordPress can be used for most types of businesses

Whether a construction company or an online luxury clothing retailer, you can often use WordPress as your CMS.
WordPress is widely used by millions of businesses globally.

So, a simple one-page website can be built using WordPress, or you can create a massive e-commerce website with 1000+ pages if you want to.

 

Simple text changes

So, before you had a website designed by, let’s say, an extensive website design agency that built its very own bespoke CMS, plus it offered no log-in details, you might have had to go through the web designers for all of the amendments, no matter how simple.

However, now with WordPress, what’s possible is that you log in with the admin details, and then there’s a super simple WordPress dashboard where you can edit the text without having any coding knowledge. So, it lets you own a dental practice; you change location but keep the same phone number. Someone in the dental practice with no coding knowledge or knowledge of PHP can log in, select the “page” icon, scroll down to the “contact us” page, and often use the built-in editor to change the text.

Many WordPress websites use two prominent editors: Elementor and WP Bakery Builder. Both are super simple to use, and you can change the text even if you have no coding knowledge at all.

Simple to use

One of the main reasons companies all over Wales use WordPress is its built-in text editor, which is a piece of cake to use. Once the websites have been designed, says a local web designer, you can log in to the WordPress Dashboard with the login details. This is super simple to use, and on every page, you can open the in-built text editor.

With the built-in text editor, you can edit the main text, the titles, the alt text, the meta title and the meta description. You can also return to old blog posts and update them; for example, you might have written “the best ten e-bikes of 2023”.

That article might have accumulated many good-quality backlinks and organic traffic, yet because it’s now out of text, you might want to use the same URL extension and web address but update the article for 2024. That way, you are offering the reader up-to-date information, and because the shopper knows that the information is more up-to-date, that can help reduce the company’s bounce rate.

So, when you hire a search engine optimisation company, they will often write top-quality content marketing, and the author should know about Google E-EAT. I also learned about Google Helpful Content Update. This way, they should write good-quality SEO work, but at the same time, it’s essential that the author goes back and updates the work to ensure that the job is up to date while also aiming to keep that bounce rate as low as possible.

 

Very versatile

So, what’s important to know is that bloggers do not just use WordPress; it’s also used as a brochure website, and many millions of e-commerce businesses have been built using WordPress.

 

Plugins

Let’s say the customer wants to add a feature on the contact form to help reduce the amount of spam. So, they use a honeypot spam filter. Well, instead of paying, let’s say, a local web developer to spend hours building a bespoke spam filter, there are thousands of free plugins on WordPress that you can use. This helps the business save money.

So, instead of hiring a local web developer, log into your WordPress Dashboard, go into the Dashboard, select plugins on the side menu, and click Add new plugin. Then, you can search for the plugin you need, whether a new Contact Us form, a slider, or a plugin to help you back your company website.

So, thousands of free plugins are available, which can help the business save a lot of money. In contrast, if it was a bespoke website built using a content management system that the web design agency had built, then all of the changes you want, such as adding a spam filter, because it was a 100% bespoke CMS to that web design agency, you need to have all the changes made by a web developer. So, something as simple as adding a spam filter to the contact form might be rather expensive.

 

A lot of SEO agencies, like WordPress

When you talk to many SEO agencies, one of the first questions they will often ask the business is, which CMS is the website built on? The reason for this is that some CMS are simple to make changes to, say, URL extension to on-page SEO elements such as H1-H6 tags, meta description and alt text, while some other CMS can be glitchy and problematic to make changes to. So, we included many different web design agencies; they like to work with WordPress because it’s so simple to use and it’s been around for a long time, so just like a good bottle of whiskey, it’s got better and better and better.

 

Are you planning on managing your WordPress CMS yourself?

If you plan on managing your WordPress CMS yourself, you will find a tremendous amount of support out there. There are countless

YouTube videos from WordPress experts who can help you fix everything from problems with your meta descriptions to
So, WordPress is straightforward to use.

 

The mobile version of your company website

So, your company website must work well on Android and Apple iPhones. For this to happen, your web designers must design a responsive version of the company website. This is simple to do if you want a WordPress CMS website built. Our web designers can, therefore, design a responsive version of your company website that will work perfectly on tablets and smartphones.

When calling around web designers to obtain a quote for web design, it’s essential to make sure that the price to make the website responsive so that it works well on, say, Apple iPhones or, let’s say, your Samsung Tablet, for example, is included in the quote.

 

WordPress is affordable

Some content management systems can be pretty expensive. For example, they might not be chosen by start-up companies because the cost of some CMS might be pretty high. Yet with WordPress, it’s very affordable, and the CMS itself is free. So businesses of any size could select WordPress as their content management system, plus there’s no ongoing subscription.

Some content management systems can sometimes have high monthly costs, yet with WordPress, you don’t get this. So, besides the price for the web developers to build and design the website, WordPress doesn’t have any ongoing fees. Many businesses like this because some content management systems can be rather pricey. For example, they could be £75+ a month for some CMS.
Many businesses use WordPress because there are no ongoing costs.

Many businesses also heavily advertise their company, products, and services on social media like Facebook. So, what some businesses do, let’s say a construction business, is their social media feed, which is then fed to a page on the WordPress website. This keeps the page updated. For example, a construction company might be carrying out a large loft conversion, so that page gets updated with pictures of the loft conversion, updating the shopper on the latest construction projects the business manages.

 

How can our business reduce our bounce rate?

 

Why is important that you work with your web designers to reduce your websites bounce rate?

 

What exactly is a bounce rate?

If you were to search on Google for local web designers, you would be presented with Google AdWords results, organic results, and Google

Business results. Now, let’s say you’re shopping for a local accountant. You might visit three business websites, visit the homepage, and return to the main results—this is called bouncing off the website.

You may have thought that the business is too far away, that the company has an old website, or that the industry doesn’t offer the services you want, so you didn’t click on another page. This means you bounced off the website.

 

Use Google Analytics

We recommend installing Google Analytics. It will provide you with information on each page’s or blog post’s bounce rate. We recommend that you pay particular attention to the homepage’s bounce rate, as this will be the most important page on your website in terms of getting the most organic visitors.

Working with your web designers

Many companies want a website designer to design a brochure website that may then stay the same, unchanged, for the next few years. However, businesses that really want to improve sales often partner with SEO companies, and part of the SEO agency’s work is to reduce the company’s bounce rate. If the homepage bounce rate is too high, and this is across many pages, it could be because the website is too slow.

Although there are many reasons why a website could have a bounce rate, here are some of the more common reasons:

– The hosting is slow
– The mobile version of the website is complex to use
– The main menu is complicated to use
– The website doesn’t offer much useful information
– It isn’t easy to sort items, i.e., whether they are in stock or by price.

 

How to reduce your website bounce rate:

First things first, purchase good quality hosting
You want your company website, whether it’s a brochure or an e-commerce website, to be as quick as possible. If the website keeps shoppers waiting, even if it’s for a relatively short period, they will leave your website, causing the bounce rate to increase, and the organic SEO will then be negatively affected.

 

Google Optimise and split testing

A lot of businesses use something called split testing; it could be that an SEO agency or a local web designer has built a lot of links and written a lot of quality content marketing, yet what they spot is that the more organic visitors, the website, gets, the more the bounce rate is increasing.

Therefore, web developers may use A/B testing, also known as split testing, to redesign the site. This doesn’t mean writing masses of PHP or JavaScript. Instead, the changes are much more gradual, so the web design agency can monitor improving the bounce rate and wants to increase it.

The web designers may spot a redesigned mobile main menu, reducing the bounce rate by 10%. Then, this is something that the web design and the client would want to keep. Then, they may notice that switching hosting companies and paying for much faster hosting might decrease the homepage bounce rate by another 7%. So, it’s about making these gradual changes to lower the business’s bounce rate.

 

Install Google Search Console

Use Google Search Console to see which keywords your website ranks for and which keywords could use improvement. If you notice that the more organic visitors you obtain, the bounce rate increases, then work with your web design agency every month to try to bring that bounce rate down.

Work on improving your mobile design.

You could have just had your website designed by the local web design agency. In the meeting, when they showed you the finished design, you may have been pleased with the finished design. Yet the web designers may not have spent as much time designing the mobile version as they have the desktop version. This means you may have a basic mobile version of the website, offering very little information about the business, meaning the bounce rate increases.

As a general rule of thumb, over 50% of organic traffic comes via smartphones and tablets for most businesses. For some businesses, the percentage can be higher, so it’s important to compare the bounce rate of your website’s mobile and desktop versions.

Your web design agency should, therefore, design a well-designed mobile and desktop version of your website. You should also work with your web designers to use split testing to reduce your bounce rate over time.

 

How we can help

If your business requires a website designed, do call us. We have extensive experience working with a wide range of businesses, including many construction companies, the automotive business sector, and solicitors. We design amazing websites at affordable prices, so why not call our web designers today?

Which Content Management System will your company choose?

 

It’s important that your company takes the time needed to choose a content management system, or CMS for short, that is right for your business. Your company’s CMS is a bit like the engine of a car. It’s what you use to create pages and manage them, and it controls the dashboard. There are many different content management systems to choose from. In this article, we’re going to discuss some of the most popular and widely used content management systems.

 

What should our business consider when choosing a CMS for our company?
Simple to use:

You will need a CMS that’s simple to use, so for example, when your company wants to add a new blog post / news article, that you can do this in a matter of a few minutes and simply. Some content management systems make this process difficult, so make sure you use a CMS that’s simple to use, when adding new pages or perhaps a new blog post.

Widely used:

We would recommend using a widely used CMS, like Magento, WordPress or Drupal.

You can update:

Choose a CMS that with just a click, you can update it.
You can make back-ups

Choose a CMS where you can make back-ups.

Great looking website offering a good U.X can be designed using this CMS:

Choose a CMS where you

 

Things to consider when choosing a CMS for your business:

You find it super simple to use

There’s no point in choosing a content management system that you find difficult to use. That’s because most businesses often have to add blog posts, update plugins, and make regular backups of the CMS. You don’t want to log into the admin area and find that it’s super difficult to use, and you have to phone your web designers every time you want to make a simple change, such as adding a new blog post.

 

So, what you should look for when choosing a content management system for your business:

– Simple to use
– Widely used, so you can also find a web developer who has experience designing websites using that CMS
– That you can make back-ups yourself, so if the website does go down, you can restore a backup

 

Popular CMS Options

WordPress

There is a massive number of businesses right around the globe that have chosen WordPress as their CMS. In fact, WordPress is used by quite literally millions of businesses globally. Many different businesses use WordPress, from PLC, massive household names, to people running personal blogs about their hobbies and interests.

Therefore, you could have a multi-billion-pound brand that has chosen WordPress for their leading site, right through to a runner who blogs about their running adventures across the United Kingdom.

Here at this web design business, we would say that most of our websites, which our web designers, web developers and SEO consultants work on, are WordPress websites.

Drupal

Drupal is another very popular content management system. It’s an open-source CMS that is widely used by many well-known companies, such as Tesla and NASA.

Magento CMS

A lot of businesses right around the globe use Magento. It’s a brilliant e-commerce platform, and it’s used by giant multinational companies and smaller businesses as well. It’s a brilliant e-commerce content management system.
How to make the right decision

Your business should most definitely take its time to choose the suitable CMS. We have worked with many companies that need help with their search engine optimisation and, therefore, have their websites designed by other companies. Sometimes, the CMS is built by that individual web design agency, and it can sometimes be difficult to use, full of glitches, and may cause the business many problems.

Therefore, don’t rush into choosing a CMS. Our best advice is to use a content management system that’s widely used, used by millions of businesses. The reason we say that is simply because if it’s one of the world’s most commonly used content management systems, like

WordPress, then it’s widely used because it’s perfect and brilliant at what it does.

We can help your business.

Whether you’re starting an e-commerce company or a local coffee shop, we can design an amazing website for your business. We mostly build quality WordPress websites, yet if you would like a website built using Magento or perhaps Drupal, then we can help.

What are the different types of web design companies?

Introduction

When a business is starting up, it will often need a website up and running as soon as possible. Yet, something usually baffles and perplexes many business owners: Why does the price of a brochure website vary so much?

Why does one company offer a super low price, yet another charges ten times the price for what seems to be the same?

So, getting a website designed is different from buying many other services or products. Today, shoppers are very price sensitive. If you sell a pair of trainers slightly more expensive than another major retailer, that £3.00 price difference could drive thousands upon thousands of shoppers directly to a competitor’s website.

So shoppers are very price-sensitive, yet businesses, when looking to get a website designed, are not so price-sensitive. The reason is that for some companies, the quality of the website can be make or break.

A good website could mean the difference between clinching that sale and someone going elsewhere. This is why your national household brands spend millions, split testing that’s A/B testing their websites, making small gradual changes constantly to improve the design, the U.X the search engine optimisation.

So, let’s cut to the chase: what are the different types of web design companies out there?

 

Web design companies that design websites using one CMS

So, what’s a CMS?

A CMS is like an engine to your car. It does all the mechanical stuff; it drives the vehicle. A CMS drives your website; it’s what powers it and what your web developers will use to make changes. It’s important. British businesses’ central content management systems are WordPress, Magento, Shopify, and Drupal. The list is endless, yet these are some of the main ones.

 

Do you want web designers who specialise in your industry?

There will be web design agencies that only work for, say, estate agents, the automotive business sector, estate agents, etc.
So, this could have its pluses and its drawbacks.

The pluses are that web designers specialising in that industry are likely to better understand your business sector than some other web designers. However, the drawbacks are that if you have a company serving the same business sector and they have three estate agents who are all competitors in the same area, this could be a conflict of interest if they are working on improving the company’s online marketing.

For example, working on improving the SEO of three businesses in the same area, where they’re all competing with each other, could be a conflict of interest. So, you do have some web designers/ SEO companies that will only work for one company per city, so they are not working for the businesses’ direct competitors.

 

Responsive website design

Let’s say you use good-quality SEO tools, such as Moz Pro or Google Analytics, and you spot that most shoppers come to your website via mobile devices such as tablets or mobile phones. You then spot that over 75% of the organic traffic is coming via Android and iPhone devices, in which case you might want to hire a web design company that specialises in responsive website design.

A responsive website design company will often pay close attention to the following:

– How fast your company website is
– Making it as simple as possible to use
– Making sure it has good design
– Working to reduce the bounce rate

 

Marketing agencies that offer the full range of marketing services

Many company directors won’t have the time to manage an SEO business, a web design company, a social media management company, and possibly a company that’s also managing the business’s Google Analytics.

So, to help you save time, you may wish to hire a digital marketing company that can offer all of these services under one roof. These companies are often referred to as digital marketing agencies, and they can often provide the following services:

– Web design
– Responsive mobile design
– Organic SEO
– Local SEO
– Management of your business social media accounts, such as on LinkedIn, X, and Facebook

 

 

How we can help:
We are a web design company that can also improve your business’s local or organic search engine optimisation. We specialise in designing WordPress content management systems. We can design a brilliant, well-designed CMS WordPress website for a starting price of just £950.00. We have been designing WordPress websites for over 10 years.

 

We have experience of working with the following business sectors:

– Dental practices
– Automotive companies
– Construction companies
– Solicitors
– And much more

Website Design: Key areas to think about when designing a new website

 
Website Design: Key things to think about

There’s so much to think about when designing a brand-new website, such as writing content marketing, choosing a website hosting company, and creating a memorable and well-designed company logo. There are a million and one things to think about, so you do need to hire designers who walk you through the process and help you think about each part of the web design so that, in the end, you end up with an awe-inspiring, well-designed website.

 

A quick word on SEO

A lot of businesses hire us because, quite simply, we have fantastic SEO consultants. Website design is often just one of the services the company hires us to design. Then, just as the website is finished, the company sometimes hires us for ongoing work, such as improving the company’s organic and local SEO.

Therefore, if your business is going to use SEO to generate more customers, you have to pay attention to the following when designing the website:

– You need a fast website, so you’re going to need fast hosting
– Well-written content marketing
– Content marketing is written with Google E-EAT in mind
– White hat SEO must be applied

 

So, how do you create a well-designed company website that stands out from the crowd?

We believe you shouldn’t skim and save on a website. Sure, many web designers offer cheap prices, but as the old saying goes, you often get what you pay for. Usually, the website will look cheap, essential, and thrown together, and because of that, your customers won’t get the wow factor; they may click off the website and visit a competitor’s website.

 

Think about colour schemes

The first thing a shopper will see is the colour scheme of your new website. Have you opted for black and gold, producing a luxurious feeling across the website? Have you opted for white and a lot of spacing to make the site feel less cluttered? Have you chosen a bright colour scheme that sticks in your mind and produces memorable company branding?

 

Designing a good company logo is very important.

A company logo is not just a company logo; it should be eye-catching and memorable. You should be able to recognise that logo. If you see it on a company van, shop front, or a website, you should instantly be able to identify it. Many company logos today are not that memorable; you might forget about them quickly after you have seen them.

So, instead, you need a well-designed, unique company logo.

Many web design agencies, including ours, don’t include logo design within their quote for a new company website. That’s because sometimes it takes many hours to design a company logo. Often, the logo has to go through many revisions, so this is why many web designers, including ours, charge separately to design a company logo for a business.

 

Spend time creating a well-designed main menu.

Have you ever been on a website that looks amazing and well-designed, yet when you use the main menu, it’s challenging, and you can’t find the products you want? Instead, finding the right page and the product you tried to buy takes longer than you wanted.

You might even get annoyed that you can’t find the right product, so you leave the website, which increases the bounce rate.

A high bounce rate can cause business to drop in Google’s ranks. So, for example, let you run a website that sells car parts, and there’s a section that sells car exhaust systems. Now, if the exhaust section of the website has a very high bounce rate, many shoppers are landing on that page and leaving quickly.
This means that Google will know that the page has a very high bounce rate and may decide to rank it lower in Google’s SERPs.
Therefore, offering a good user experience is essential when designing your company website.

 

Here are some of the areas you may wish to consider to offer your customers a better U.X

– A main menu that’s simple to use
– The website should be fast
– A homepage designed to take a shopper to a page as quickly as possible; for example, if you’re an electrical retailer, and the main selling item is fridge/freezers, you should have a picture of a large fridge freezers customers can click on
– Make the mobile version of the website well designed, simple to use
– Use split testing to reduce the business bounce rate gradually

 

Good photographs

So, let’s say you run a dental practice. Customers want to see pictures of your staff and the inside of the practice. This will instantly give them a sense of what your business is like.

Therefore, hire web designers who offer good photography so that they can design a website that instantly communicates what your business offers. A good slider on the homepage could show the inside of the business premises, the principal dentist, and perhaps an award you have won. This is great. Complement this with well-written content marketing, and shoppers are likely to want to spend longer on your company website, reducing the bounce rate and perhaps increasing conversions.

 

Typography

A boring font can mean a shopper doesn’t want to read the font longer. A boring font may deter the shopper from reading another page, yet a good font can say something about your business; if it’s a modern font, a nice Google font, then this can enhance the website, combine this with a good company logo, good well-written content marketing, and this can make a website look much better, increasing the dwell time, that’s how a shopper spends on the website.

So, when choosing a font for your new company website, think about the following:

– If you are a business that wants modern branding with bright colours, go with a more contemporary font; ask and make sure with your web design company that the font works across multiple different browsers
– If you run a more traditional business, such as a solicitor’s practice, choose a more conventional font.

 

Mobile Friendliness

So, whether it’s an e-commerce website or perhaps a brochure website for a local business, the website must be mobile-friendly. It must be responsive and work on Apple iPhones and Google’s (Alphabet’s) Android operating system.

Your company website must be mobile-friendly, but you also need to hire web designers to create a well-designed mobile version. It should be simple and fast, so ask your designers about designing an accelerated mobile page for your business.

 

Make sure that you own a fast company website

Your company website should be fast

How fast is your company’s website?

So, we highly recommend using GTMetrix or Google’s tools to see how fast your company website is. Google will use how fast your company website is as a ranking factor, meaning you can rank higher if you have a super-fast website. However, with that said, Google’s algorithms will use over 200 ranking factors to determine how vital your business’s SEO is and how fast your company website is just one of these ranking factors.

However, talk to any good web designer, and they will tell you that to lower your business bounce rate, you often need super-fast hosting, and the website needs to be fast.

So, when hiring a web designer, choose a business that offers fast hosting.

We offer our clients free hosting for the first year, another reason so many people hire us to design their websites.

 

The colour scheme

It’s really important to think for a long time about which colours you want to use for your new website. It’s often popular to go with a white background and keep the design simple so that the page doesn’t look overly cluttered.

However, a new company starting up might be operating in a very competitive business sector, so it may want to stand out and create very distinctive branding. Therefore, the branding needs to be different, perhaps using bright colours and a really well-designed company logo, and therefore, the company branding becomes memorable.

So, therefore before you even hire a web designer, you might want to get a set of company brand guidelines created.

Sometimes, a different company is hired to do this work, and you can create a company logo, choose different fonts, and create a colour scheme. Then this can massively help your web developers because, instead of having to spend time with clients discussing colour schemes and hex codes, they will know which colours to use and can start to design the website.

 

The brand guidelines should, therefore, stipulate the following:

– Which hex codes should be used
– What the company logo should look like
– Also to state which fonts should be used, such as font size for titles and a different font for the main paragraphs
Regardless of which CMS you choose, the brand guidelines will be super helpful to your web designers. If you choose WordPress or Drupal, you can select the right font and the company logo and start to design the website according to the brand guidelines. So, before you hire a web designer, we recommend hiring the same company to create a set of brand guidelines or simply hiring a marketing agency to develop a set of brand guidelines for you.

 

How you want the homepage to look

The homepage must be well designed, and your web developers, whether the site is made using Drupal or Joomla or, let’s say, WordPress, that the homepage is well designed. The homepage is often the page which gets the most views, so you want the bounce rate to be low, you want the dwell time to be high, you want to have CTA on the page so that you gain the customer’s e-mail address and phone number so that you can increase your business’s chance of making a sale.

 

How much you’re willing to spend

So, the cost of a website can increase sharply when you start adding different functionality. For example, you may want an AMP version of the website, you may want to hire copywriters to do the work, you may want to hire a photographer for the day, or you may want to hire an SEO company. So often, a lot of different staff will be needed, and therefore, the cost can increase.

So, having an obvious idea about your budget would be best. Then, you should allocate your marketing budget to cover your web design and copywriting and work on improving the business’s search engine optimisation. The reason we say that is simple: You could splash all of your marketing budgets on getting a website designed and then not have any money left to promote the business, say, on social media or to improve the company’s organic SEO.

So, sit down from the outset and make sure you allocate enough money to cover what you want to spend to promote your business.

 

How you want the mobile version of the website to look

We highly recommend that you get a well-designed responsive version of the website when you hire a web developer. This is because more and more shoppers buy services and products on mobile phones. So, make sure your company website is mobile-friendly, simple to use, and offers a good U.X.

 

Text: Will you write the text or be a copywriter?

So, when you think of a 10-page website, let’s say a brochure website, if you were to add all of that text into one Word document, it could be thousands upon thousands of words. This would take the business a very long time to write. Sometimes, the directors or company employees would not have the time to write all of the business’s text.

This is why they hire copywriters. Some web design businesses employ copywriters directly, and some use external copywriters. Regardless of which copywriter writes the text, it must be of good quality and written with Google E-EAT in mind. That means that the text must show experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. The work must be well written.

 

Social media accounts

So, when the web developers are designing your website, often they will need to know which social media accounts, such as Elon Musk’s X, formally known as Twitter, Facebook or Instagram, which social media accounts your business will be using.

Then, the web developers can add the social media account buttons to the header, and perhaps you want these added to the footer as well. What they do is allow a shopper to go straight to your business’s social media accounts. They may wish to follow your company before they make a purchase. This is your business’s opportunity to then advertise to the shopper about new products and your company’s services.

 

Contact forms

Adding a contact form to each main page is a good idea, making it super simple for a shopper to ask a quick question. For example, you may sell cars, and the customer may send a quick question, such as enquiring whether air conditioning comes standard; this then presents an opportunity for a sales staff to call customers to help them further. This may result in a sale; otherwise, if you didn’t add a contact form on that page where the customer could quickly ask a question, the shopper may have just left without asking your business a question.

 

How many pages do you require?

This is important to work out at the beginning of the web design process. It helps the web design agency form an accurate quote. What can sometimes happen is that the customer states they want a 7-page website, but when you sit down and plan how you want the website designed, you might actually need to double that number of pages. Therefore, the initial web design quote will increase in price.

Therefore, to get an accurate cost for a web design company to build a brand-new website, you must know how many pages need to be designed. We recommend using a large whiteboard. Start with the essential pages, such as the homepage, about us page, and contact us page, then write which other pages you need and create a site map. This will help you contact your web design company and state how many pages you need to design.

Your web developer will find the site map very useful; it will help to set out the pages. Using that layout, they can design the main menu in WordPress. It will also help the web design agency get back to you with a quote much quicker because some businesses only require a one-page website, whereas some solicitors may need a 25-page brochure website built. Therefore, the quotes for WordPress website design will be very different.

One of the first questions a web design agency often asks when you call them to get a brochure or e-commerce website built is, “Do you know how many pages you need?” This gives the business a very rough idea of how much work is needed to design your new company website.

 

Site map

We highly recommend that you add a site map to your new company website and regularly update it.

We recommend adding a site map to your company website to help Google index new pages. This can help improve your business’s search engine optimisation by getting Googlebot to index all of the blog posts on your site, so that if there are any improvements made to the pages, Google will pick up on this.

 

Cookie Policy

You will need to add a cookie policy to your website. Your web designers can help you with this. Often, a link to this page is added to the footer.

 

How we can help:

We have been designing quality, well-built websites for a wide range of businesses based in Cardiff. We offer very affordable prices and aim to turn websites around as quickly as possible.

If you would like to obtain a quote for our SEO services or web design, then why not call us today. So if your looking for a website design company why not call us?

 

Things to think about when choosing a local web design company

How well your website is designed can sometimes strongly influence how successful your business is.

You might think that is a bit of an overstatement, but is it?

When you stop and think, how do your customers find you?

Or how do you want to market your business?

Sure, some customers may come via word of mouth; perhaps your business gets 10% of its business from recommendations.

However, many businesses rely on digital marketing, whether their website, SEO, Google Adwords, or advertising their business on social media, for example.

So, a company website and which web design company you hire is something you should mull over and carefully consider which web design business you want to hire.

 

Here are some things to think about when choosing a web designer:

What funds do you have available?

So, when writing articles like “10 things to think about when hiring a web designer,” some web design businesses often go around the house. This means they make recommendations but leave out an important part—that’s brass tacks, what the client has to spend.
How much your business has to spend often dictates whether you hire a freelancer, an agency or a full-hog digital marketing agency.
Yet, regardless of your marketing budget, you need to obtain good value, so with that in mind, there is some of the things we think you should ask your web designers, regardless of whether you are spending 1k or 100k on getting your website designed:

– How many pages will get designed for my fee?
– Who’s writing the text?
– Does the quote include getting a mobile version designed?
– How much does hosting cost per month or year?
– Who’s making the website back-ups, the client or the hosting company/website designer?
– Who is supplying the photos?

So, if you have a brochure website designed, these are some of the questions we recommend you ask. Of course, there are a million and one other things to think about, yet these are just some of the things we think you should ask.

Is your plan to rank high on Google and higher than main competitors if so SEO is needed

If you bring a donkey to a horse race, you’ll lose. It’s as simple as that. The donkey may try its best, but it’s going to be a non-contest up against trained horses, ready to gallop faster than some cars.

This is the same as when you go to the bargain basement, get the cheapest website design, and then want to rank high on Google.

So, if you plan on drawing in customers via SEO, that’s organic or local search engine optimisation, the website needs to be designed from the ground up with SEO in mind. so what do we mean by that:

– Good page structure; each service has its page
– Well written content
– The web designers need to understand Google E-EAT
– Need Google Analytics or Google Search Console integration
– Need strong backlinks
– All the on-page and off-page SEO must be white hat and top-quality

 

Keep things simple

If you visit a web design agency and they give you a headache after every meeting, they are not very good at what they do. Even for the most significant web design projects, we think web designers should aim to keep everything simple. There’s an art form in simplicity.
We don’t mean the customer needs to obtain a fundamental, rubbish website, no, no, no.

What we mean is that everything needs to be carefully planned, time spent on planning, everyone on the same page, and then a quality website is built, with marketing jargon such as Javascript and PHP kept to a minimum and talk about AMP kept to a minimum.
Please keep it simple. Design a website that your customers will be amazed by and find simple.

Maintenance

A kitchen or a car soon becomes a mess if not maintained. Well, the same is true for a company website. It needs maintenance, or it will not function correctly and possibly allow a hacker to access the site.

So, websites need maintenance. And even if website maintenance is lacking, things go wrong, websites go down, things get hacked, and things don’t work as they should. So make sure you hire a web design company that offers website maintenance, good customer service, fast replies to e-mails, etc, so that you feel you are getting the right level of support from your website designers.

Call us for a quote:

If you want a quote, call us to get a new website designed. We have built quality CMS websites in central Cardiff for over ten years.

How much does it cost to design a solicitor’s website?

Designing a solicitor’s website is no different than creating a brochure for any other type of business. Therefore, web designers often ask the same questions that they would ask if they were designing a website for a hairdressing saloon: how many pages are required, who’s writing the text, and have you got photos ready for adding to your website?

Prices typically vary, with our web design agency charging anywhere between £ 950.00 and £5k, depending on how much functionality is needed, how many pages, whether we are writing the text, and how many service pages need to be added. Therefore, often a meeting is needed to gain a very clear understanding of what the customer would like.

The price to design a solicitor website, therefore, is often calculated on the following basis:

How many pages are needed

What functionality is needed, i.e. does a mobile version of the website need to be designed?
Who’s going to be writing the text? The client or the web design company?
Does the client need help improving the business’s search engine optimisation (SEO)?
How many pages are required?

You can actually have some solicitors’ websites that just have one page; these are often much quicker to design. On the other hand, you can have large law firms that offer multiple different services, and these all need their own page and text written for every page that is designed. Therefore, the cost to design a new solicitor’s website is often based on how many pages the customer requires.

Functionality

Some law firms may require just a brochure website to be designed; however, other businesses may want web chat, a mobile version of the website, and CTAs, such as the ability to enter a mobile/phone number on each page.

Content marketing

Ever since the Google E-EAT update and the Google Helpful Content update, it’s more important than ever that the content marketing is really well written. For large solicitor websites, often a lot needs to be written. This could potentially take hundreds of hours to write and proofread, so therefore, the cost to design, say, the new WordPress website for the solicitors will be dependent on who’s writing the text.

 

How intricate is the design going to be

Just as you can buy an essential car, on the other end of the spectrum, you can buy a hypercar, which is possibly a thousand times the price; this is also the same for website design. You could have a simple 7-page website, or you may want a mammoth website built that’s very intricate, where web developers, SEO consultants, U.X designers, WordPress designers, management, copywriters, and social media managers may spend hundreds of hours to help design a website.

Therefore, a meeting between the web design agency and the solicitors is often needed to understand the amount of work required. Usually, an excellent place to start is to create a site map; determining how many pages are necessary is a beautiful way to determine the amount of work your web designers need.

 

Does your business need help to improve its search engine optimisation?

It is worth knowing that sometimes, a web design company can design a brand new website for your business in less than one month. However, businesses based in Wales and worldwide often need an SEO company to get the website to the first page of Google. This requires ongoing work to build links, write content marketing, improve the on-page SEO, and improve the technical SEO.

So, if your business requires help improving search engine optimisation, we recommend hiring a web designer or a web design agency that offers this service. Some freelance web designers may not provide SEO services because they require much time. So you may find it better to hire a business that offers both services. Usually, these are your larger agencies, perhaps with 10+ staff, because with SEO, you need link builders, copywriters, and technical SEO experts, so often you need multiple staff to improve a business’s organic search engine optimisation. Therefore, larger agencies commonly have a large team of SEO staff.

 

What are some of the ongoing costs that our business needs to be aware of?

 

Hosting:

Website hosting can vary massively in cost; there’s the cheap hosting, and then there’s the super-sonic hosting that large companies offer. We recommend paying for top-quality hosting because Google will rank websites higher in Google’s SERPs, which is faster. The company website needs to be fast on mobile and desktop, so talk to your web developers about their website hosting options. Plus, chat with your marketing agency to see if they can design an AMP version of the website.

 

Who’s going to be making backups?

It’s essential to make regular backups of your company website because it could get hacked, a plugin could cause a glitch, or simply a change to a part of it could cause it to no longer work. This could cause the shopper to see a 404 page not found error, which could impact your company’s sales.

Plus, if your website has too many 404-page errors, this could damage your company’s organic search engine optimisation.
So, often, you need to hire web designers to help with regular back-ups of the website and offer ongoing support. You may, therefore, want to hire web developers/web designers who provide a monthly package that includes ongoing support, help if needed, and regular back-ups, say once a month. This is because if the website does develop a glitch, you can restore that backup.

 

Does your business need a new website?

We have worked with countless businesses to design amazing websites, starting at just £950.00. Many businesses hire us simply because we can handle the whole web design process from start to finish. This means we can write the text, offer photography for your company website, and offer SEO services. Prices for our brochure websites vary between £950.00 a month and £ 3k.

We can design websites for any type of business and can also design a brand new website quickly. So, for example, let’s say you are starting a brand new business and need your website live as soon as possible. Often, our web designers and web developers are able to design a new brochure website in less than four weeks. Other websites, such as e-commerce websites, can often take longer for us to design.

 

Why should we choose your company to design our brochure website?

We have been designing quality, well-built CMS PHP WordPress websites for over ten years. We are simply the bee’s knees when it comes to obtaining a quality website here in Cardiff. Plus, because we have also offered search engine optimisation services for the same length of time, we have vast experience getting companies onto page one of Google.

So, if you want to hire a local business that offers web design and search engine optimisation services as well, why not give us a ring today?
How much does your website hosting cost?

Most web designers we know charge between £ 40 and £ 70 per month for quality website hosting. We offer some of the best prices in Cardiff. For the first year, we often offer our web hosting for free. Then, after that, we offer a fixed yearly price of £140.00.

 

How much does it cost to get a WordPress website designed by your website designers?

We can offer to design a WordPress website for £950.00, which is for seven pages. We can also design larger brochure websites and e-commerce websites.

 

Can you write the text for our new website?

Yes, whether you run a solicitor’s practice or any other type of business, we can design a quality website for your company. We can also write the text for your business, helping you to save a lot of time. Even a simple brochure website, with seven pages, can sometimes take a long time to write all of the text. So we can do this work for you. This is another reason why so many businesses hire W&P to design their quality websites.

 

Why should we hire your digital marketing agency to help improve our local/organic SEO?

We have some of the best SEO minds working for us in Wales. That’s because we have been improving our clients’ organic and local search engine optimisation for over ten years. This monthly service has a minimum pricing of £500 PCM. All businesses considering investing in this process need to know it’s a long-term process that requires the business to be aware that it can take several months to get onto page one of Google.

 

Do you have experience working with lawyers?

We have worked with law practices to improve their websites for over eight years, so we have experience working with solicitors’ practices based in Wales.

Why is my company website not appearing on Google?

 

Introduction

Many start-up businesses, especially, face the problem of spending all of their digital marketing budgets on getting a new website designed.

Now, you are probably thinking, well, since we are a web design agency, surely we would strongly recommend spending as much as possible on getting a new website designed, right?

Well, not really, because here’s the thing: If you’re an electrician, you’re going to compete with hundreds, in some cities, thousands of companies. So, a website alone is not going to cut the mustard.

You must think about how you will promote your website; otherwise, it will not attract any visitors.

 

So, are you going to:

  • Spend on social media advertising?
  • Are you going to invest in SEO, that’s search engine optimisation
  • Are you going to spend on Google Adword advertising?

So, if you have, let’s say, typically a business has around 5k for a start-up business to get their digital marketing rocking and rolling, and you spend all of this on getting a website designed, well, how are you then going to promote it?

This is why, here at W&P, we design brochure websites suitable for start-up companies. We can build these for a starting price of £950.00. Then, we can offer fixed monthly SEO packages, which vary in cost depending on how much competition your business faces.

For the purposes of this article, we will discuss why your company website may not be appearing on Google.

A common question that many businesses ask us is whether SEO is included when our website is designed so that our company websites appear in Google’s results.

The simple answer is SEO is omitted.

So, SEO, which stands for search engine optimisation, involves a massive effort on behalf of an SEO consultant/ agency to get that website on the first page. The reason for this is as follows:

  • SEO takes a considerable amount of time
  • Your competitors may have invested for donkeys years before you, so you need to beat that standard of work
  • SEO is hard, in terms of it needs constant work every month

 

So, is SEO included in our web design quotes?

The short answer to this question is no; it’s not included. A lot of web design businesses say that “basic SEO” is included in the quote for the website to be designed; this often only means the following:

  • They will send the website for indexing
  • They will add basic onsite SEO, such as page titles and meta descriptions

This is often not enough work to get any business on page one of Google. In fact, when Google first indexes a website after the web designers have built it, it is more than likely going to be beyond page 10 of Google. So, this is where the work starts in terms of moving the website forward towards page one.

Now, bear in mind that depending on the level of competition, this can take anywhere between 6 months and over a year. So SEO moves at a snail’s pace, but in our experience, if the work is done correctly, that is, white hat, it does take a considerable amount of time.

 

Here are some of the tools that our web design business uses when we are tasked with improving a business’s local or organic SEO. Please note that search engine optimisation is a separate service that we charge separately for, separate from the web design work.

We use Google Search Console practically every hour of the working week. Namely, it’s a tool made by Google, so the SEO information, such as the incoming links, which pages are indexed, and the average position information for keywords, is 100% accurate.

Yet, Google Search Console is how we communicate with Google; for example, if our web designers have just finished building a website, we need to say to Google, “Hey, we have just built a new website; can you index it?”

You need to link your business’s Google Search Console account to your website to do this. Now, your web designer should be able to help you with this. This is a crucial first step, as you can request manually that some pages get indexed. This tells Googlebot to crawl and index this page now. This is essential because if Googlebot can’t crawl and index the page, then it will never appear in Google’s results.

So, to get a page or blog post indexed, you manually request that it be indexed. We recommend that you use Google Search

Console for this. If the page cannot be indexed, you should get a reason why, such as leaving the no-index tab on.
As you can imagine, if the website is brand new, you may have a number of issues stopping some pages or blog posts from getting indexed. These must be fixed if you want your website to be indexed by Google.

 

So, with Google Search Console up and running, you can find out the following information:

Have all of the pages/blog posts been crawled?
Are there crawl errors?
Are there any redirect errors?

Contact your web developer if there are any crawl errors:
When you first get your website indexed by Google Search Console, there may be crawl errors. This must be fixed if you want those pages to appear in Google’s organic results.

 

Is duplicated content marketing holding your business back?

We have met with businesses that have spent a fortune on having their websites designed, yet the phone does not ring, the SEO is extremely weak, and there are no sales coming via the website. Sometimes, this could be because all of the pages, such as the blog posts, have duplicated content marketing.

This could be text copied, let’s say, from a direct competitor or, let’s say, a supplier, yet this can massively damage your business’s organic search engine optimisation. Google does not like duplicated content marketing; on your website, it’s to be well-written, high-quality information.

 

Google E-EAT

If the web design agency you hire is writing content marketing, they must understand the advice stated by Google E-EAT. This means that if you want your company website to rank high on Google, then you need text that shows that you are an expert in what you are talking about.

 

Is your website mobile-friendly?

We highly recommend using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test because if your website is not mobile-friendly, it will not appear in the mobile results. Now, when you think that over 50% of shoppers, when they are looking for a business, use their smartphone, then if you don’t have a mobile version of the company website designed, making the website mobile friendly, you could be halving the number of visitors your website is getting.

So, the website does need to be mobile-friendly.

 

Could low-quality backlinks possibly be holding your website back?

Some businesses, after they have had their website designed, sometimes try to improve their SEO themselves.

Sometimes, they just hire the wrong SEO company that builds low-quality links. This can be disastrous for a company’s search engine optimisation. Building spam links can be problematic because the business can get a link penalty.

A link penalty can mean the website is taken off Google’s results.

This is called a Google Penguin penalty—it must be avoided at all costs, as it can cause long-term damage to a business’s rankings.

 

Why not hire us?

There’s a reason so many companies based all across the city of Cardiff have hired us: we build unique, quality websites at very affordable prices. The other reason is that if a company chooses to do so, they can partner with us over the long run so that we can start to improve the company’s search engine optimisation. As we alluded to in this article, it is worth noting that SEO is a slow and lengthy process, so businesses need to keep in mind that they could be investing for a very long period before the sales increase.

Yet there’s a reason why companies have hired us for over eight years to improve their SEO: when SEO works, it can generate many sales for that business.

So, if you need a new website designed or help improving your company’s organic SEO, why not call us?

How should we know which web design agency to hire?

 

Date: 03/09/2024

Topic: Web Design

Contents:

  • Why it’s so essential to hire the right web designer
  • How the web design process works
  • Suggestions for things to think about when picking a web design agency

Introduction

So, there are many things that businesses do every day that are crucial for the day-to-day running of the business but often are not deemed that important.

Yet, having a website designed or redesigned can be a make-or-break situation for some businesses. That’s because some of the company directors we speak to say that 100% of sales come online. A well-designed website could potentially open up new avenues for your business, reaching more customers and increasing sales.

So, if they hire the wrong web designer and make a mess of it, they could be losing out on business.

So, here is some food for thought: here’s why you need to hire the right web designer

So, web design is not just about web design anymore; that’s because when you talk to the top web designers here in the U.K., well they will tell you web design is now a balance of the following:

– Offering a good U.X
– Keeping the bounce rate as low as possible
– Writing and adding content marketing that is written by Google E-EAT
– Must be fast, so that you will need super fast website hosting
– Must be mobile-friendly
– Must have good local SEO
– If a national business, you will need good quality national SEO

Here’s how our web design process works. The web design process is a crucial aspect of creating a successful website. It involves several stages, from initial planning to final implementation, and ensures that your website is not only visually appealing but also functional and user-friendly.

So, as with most web design agencies, you will be in the initial stages of the design and, throughout, need to work with the company’s web developers and web designers. Now, it might be that as soon as the brand new websites are designed, you might want to start pushing up Google’s ranks so that an SEO consultant might be involved from the outset as well.

 

Conversations will need to be had about the following:

– The website’s navigation, for example, do you want a burger menu?
– Who’s writing the content marketing?
– Have you got photographs ready to add?
– Which content management system do you want to use?

– How long it will take the web designers to build the website.

 

Good web designers stop you from getting bogged down in the detail

Running a business, any business, is hard. It doesn’t matter if you’re a retailer of items or you run a gym; price pressures imposed by suppliers, managing staff, and unhappy customers are massively time-consuming.

So, when you’re having a new website designed, you often don’t want to get bogged down in the details. You don’t want a web developer talking at length about JavaScript the next day about a PHP glitch that’s been encountered. You just want a well-designed website that you like and that your customers like.

 

In our experience, the excellent digital marketing agencies focus on one thing: your customers.

They ask:

– How can we make their lives easier? Could it be a staff member explaining that product on a YouTube video?
– They ask how they can make the main menu simple to use
– Does the website look brilliant on a smartphone

So, a good web designer asks all these questions. They should then start creating a fantastic website for your business without giving you a headache about the technical side of web design, such as why you need an AMP website.

A good web designer can quickly get to grips with the functionality your business needs. They should also keep an eye on the competition; for example, if they have a CTA stating input your mobile number, one of our sales team will call you back the same day; this functionality should be suggested for your business.

 

So, a good web designer, we believe, has the following charismatics:’

– Good at knowing exactly which functionality/features your business will need
– Suggests functionality you may need based on competitor research
Choose a CMS that best suits your business needs now and in the foreseeable future
– Can also offer an SEO, that’s search engine optimisation service if later required
– Offers clear pricing
– Offers affordable yet very fast website hosting

 

Make sure you’re on the same page

So, when you are shopping around for web design quotes from a local web design agency, you might write an e-mail that goes a little bit like this:

“Hi, Bob Jones
We need a new website designed for our dental practice to help improve our rankings on Google. Can you please give us a quote for a brochure website and a monthly quote to improve our organic search engine optimisation as well?
Kind regards
Karen”

So, that sounds fair, right?

Well, yes, but what’s going to happen here is that you’re going to get wildly different prices from each web design agency and perhaps stupidly low prices from businesses trying to grab your business.

 

So, instead, add the following details:

– How many pages are you going to need if you are unsure have a look at a competitor’s website, to get a rough idea
– Do you need help to improve your SEO?
– Do you need a mobile version designed? Most of the time, the answer is yes. But you guessed it, often web design agencies exclude this cost in the initial quote
– Do you need hosting?
– Do you need the web designers to buy the domain name?
– Have you got photos ready to use?
This will then provide your web design agency with much more information, and they will be able to make a much more accurate quote based on your business needs.

 

The problem with some web designers

Some web designers offer what seem low prices, yet when you add on the cost to get the web designers to make the website responsive, to get fast website hosting, plus for them to write the content marketing, well, that initial quote of, say £500.00 is likely to turn out closer to £2k very quickly indeed.

 

Check out the web designer portfolio.

This will give you a good idea of the quality of the web designers’ work. You might also spot that they have worked for similar businesses or even companies you may know in Wales. For example, you might be a groundworker who knows the owner of a plant hire company. Then, it’s just a matter of you asking that company director for their opinion on using that well-known web design company.

The portfolio can give you a sense of the type of websites the web design business is building. Are they modern or look a bit dated? Do they all look unique and built for that business, or do they all look, well, rather much the same, just with a few different photos?

 

Do the web designers state they want content marketing for the business?

If so, what’s the quality of the content marketing? Is it good? Does it match the business’s style?

Does the text appear professional, informative, and engaging if it’s a serious business, such as an accountancy practice?

Is the tone of voice different if it’s a new business offering clothing?

Read reviews about the business.

Often, web designers have a Trustpilot or Google Business account and are also members of a web design award website. There, you may see feedback that previous customers have made. Of course, you must deliberate whether you want that business to build your new company website.

 

Look at their website.

So, a web designer’s website is like the outside of a florist’s, your place to show off how good you are, how creative you can be, and how good you are at your craft.

Yet, so many web design companies have dated websites.

So, you might want to skip to a company that uses the latest web design trends and has a well-designed website because then you know that those features can be added to your company website.

 

Do also ask the following questions:

 

Do you have SEO experts in house:

So, a website without SEO is a bit like a bacon sandwich without bread. It’s not even a sandwich.
Well, a website is a bit like this because if you don’t invest in quality search engine optimisation, nobody—and we mean no one—will be able to find it online.

That’s unless you’re lucky enough to have a business that’s super non-competitive, so you jump straight onto the first page of Google’s organic results within a month, which, let’s face it, is unlikely.

It’s unlikely because, in a major city, you often face stiff competition. So, this is why you need a web design company that also offers SEO.

Now, you might want the web design agency to refer you to a “trusted partner” company and the designers working with them because, well, they might be making a profit from just referring you.

So often, businesses want a web design company that has SEO experts in-house. That’s precisely what W&P has. We have some excellent web developers and search engine optimisation consultants, so we can offer both services in-house.

 

Who’s going to be managing the website hosting?

Good website hosting is essential. Without it, the websites will not be live, meaning shoppers will get greeted with a 404 page not found error if the server goes down. So you need good website hosting, and as with everything else in life, you do get what you pay for.

There’s the super cheap, which often means the hosting is slow and annoying. This could potentially result in you losing sales, as your business is offering a poor user experience.

Then there’s the super-fast, more reliable hosting, which is more expensive but a must, in our opinion. It’s just like buying super cheap engine oil for your car—why would you do it?

Your engine is essential, so you will want to buy top-quality engine oil. Well, take this same mindset when purchasing website hosting. You want the hosting to be reliable and quality, so do purchase cheap hosting from a hosting company that has servers based close to your customers.

 

Make sure the website is responsive.

We have heard of local web developers charging 750 to make a brochure website responsive, yet the customer may have initially thought this

was all included in the initial quote. So, we include this cost, that is, to make a brochure website responsive, in our quote. So our customers get a great deal when they pick W&P to design their website.

How to design a perfect website for your construction business

 

 

We at this web design agency have an extensive amount of experience designing websites for the construction industry. Yet, as you already know, the construction sector is extremely competitive. Whether you’re a plant hire company, small builder, or massive construction business, you will face a huge amount of competition.

So, how do you stand out from the crowd?

Well, you do need a professional website. However, your web designers need to think carefully about the following:

– Company branding
– Which font will you use? We highly recommend Google Fonts
– How will your company logo look
– Which colour scheme, so hex codes, will you use?
– Videography

 

Colour scheme

Many construction companies opt for yellow and orange colours when they have a new website designed. This seems to be the default position when designing a website for a demolition company, construction business, or roofing business.

However, for your branding to be memorable, you need to stand out from the crowd, have distinctive branding, and have a good shade of purple accompanied by a good company logo and an auto-loading video on the homepage.

When you look at some of the top construction companies here in the U.K., they have often gone to well-known marketing companies like ours, which tells them to stand out from the crowd, to be different, to use good fonts such as Google fonts, to have a well-designed company logo, and also to have good construction videography.

 

Typography

So, here are some of the fonts that we would recommend for your construction website:

All the fonts mentioned are all Google fonts

– Anton
– Roboto
– Work Sans
– Oswald
– Bebas Neue
– Montserrat
– Poppins

 

Hire a good web designer who can offer videography

So, let’s say someone is shopping to add a brand new extension to their home. Well, imagine on the homepage that some excellent drone footage was taken of the large property and the extension you built.

For example, the web designers may have added an autoloading video onto the homepage that shows the time elapsed while your construction company was building a new extension.

That instantly tells the customer about the service your business offers; it’s also likely to grab the shopper’s attention. So much so it could positively impact your business search engine optimisation in the following ways:

– The time spent on site could improve
– The bounce rate may decrease
– You may get a shopping visiting more pages

 

Don’t get an essential website; get a website designed to impress your customers.
Just for a second, how will you gain more customers?

Via social media?

Via Google Adwords?

Via organic search engine optimisation?

This is all well and good, but where do all those customers end up? Well, that’s one place: your company website. You could spend a small fortune on advertising your business, let’s say on social media, yet if the customer visits your website and is disappointed due to bad design, then your company’s bounce rate could be sky high.

So, when you spend a lot on promoting your business, say, Google Adwords, it’s crucial that the website is well designed. Whether it’s a construction business or any other type of website, your web designers must ensure the following:

– The website is responsive, so it works on Android and iPhone devices as well as tablets
– The website should be fast
– The website has a font that’s simple to read and works on all browsers, such as Mozilla
– The website should have content marketing written by a highly experienced copywriter who understands Google E-EAT
– The text should be well-written and never copied
– The website design agency should understand white hat search engine optimisation methods
– You want a quality CMS, such as WordPress.

Do add a lot of calls to action

So, regardless of the type of website that we are building, whether it’s built mostly using HTML5 or perhaps the web developer is building a WordPress website for you, what’s important is that the page has a lot of calls to action.
So, for a construction company, you may want to add the following CTA

 

1) Add on social media, such as on Facebook

Now, hiring a builder, let’s say, to build a 70k extension onto your home is a considered purchase, that’s for sure. So, by the web designers adding social media icons and a CTA saying, “Why not follow us on Facebook?” you may increase the number of engaged followers that you get on social media.

This allows you to show your latest work and your latest construction projects. What can happen is that the construction website may only have the projects you completed, let’s say, six months ago.
Yet if the shopper adds you to their social media account, they are much more likely to see your more recent work.

 

2) Request a callback CTA

Your web designer’s code to write code so that embedded into the actual page is a call-back feature.
So it might simply say, “Would you like us to call you back.”

Then, the shopper can leave their name and their phone number. The web developer can then design the contact form so that you know the shopper left that request for a callback on the page which sells loft conversions. Then, you can have a sales team member call that shopper back.

 

Have a well-designed company logo.

So, what’s really important when you hire a web designer is that they can also offer to create brand guidelines. This is so that your construction company can get a well-designed, bespoke company logo. The marketing agency should also specify which font to use and what colours to use.

 

How much should we expect to pay for a new construction website to be designed?

The vast majority of the websites that we build are for construction-related businesses. So, for example, our highly skilled WordPress PHP designers have designed websites for roofers, construction companies, and demolition contractors.

Now, the cost that our web design agency charges is calculated after asking the following questions the client:

– How many pages do they require to be designed?
– Will you be writing the text in-house or with us?
– Do you require ongoing help to improve your business’s search engine optimisation?
– Do you require hosting
– Do you own the domain name, or would you like us to purchase it?
– Do you require videography services?
– Do you require a company logo to be designed
Once one of our sales team members has gained an answer to these brief questions, we aim to write back to you with a quote. Often, construction websites will range from 1k for a small builder, yet we have also designed websites for construction businesses over 10k, so it comes down to asking the above questions. A member of our sales team can calculate a cost very quickly.

 

Does your company offer website hosting?

We most certainly do, and our website hosting is fast. This is another reason so many construction businesses hire us: when we offer you a quote for our web design services, we can offer a low price to host that website for you.

Does your web design agency have SEO consultants working for you?
We most certainly do, yes.

Many construction companies hire us because we have organic and local SEO consultants. This means that our web developers can design a new construction website, and then, once built, we can start improving the organic search engine optimisation.

So, we could design a WordPress website, and once built, we could hand it over to our SEO consultants, who could start working on improving its SEO.

 

How long will you design a website for our construction business?

So, if a company hires us to design, say, a 7-page brochure website using WordPress, the cost is often around 950.00.

Yet often, the business will want us to write the text, design a logo, or design the company branding. This will cost a lot more. We would need to offer you a quote based on your business’s requirements.

 

How do we obtain a quote:

Sometimes, we can offer a quote after a quick telephone conversation. However, sometimes, we need to meet the client and discuss the options we can offer, such as the different content management systems, whether the client requires SEO, and whether they want us to write the text.

Why not call us today:

Why not call W&P? We are a highly experienced web design agency

 

How long does it take in total to build a brand-new website?

 

 

It’s one of the questions our designers get asked the most.

You guessed it, how long will it take for you to build our brand-new website?

And there’s good reason for that. Every year, we work with many start-up companies. These businesses might be construction companies, solicitors, or, let’s say, a new dental practice opening somewhere in the fantastic city of Cardiff.

Now, even though all of these businesses are different because they are start-up companies, the directors often go through something similar. That is finding offices, having them redecorated, hiring staff, finding suppliers, and yes, hiring that local web designer or digital marketing agency so the business can sing from the rooftops about what services or products it is selling.

So this is where we step in. Often, we are told that doors open on a new shop or business venture in just over a month, and there’s a rush to get a new website designed. This is where we can step in. With highly talented web designers and some of the best SEO experts in Cardiff working for us, we are well-placed to start promoting your business for you.

 

 

So, in this article, we thought it would be an excellent idea, to elaborate on some of the factors that determine how long it takes our web designers to build a brilliant, brand new website for your business:

 

So, let’s jump into it: how long does it take to build a brand-new website?

 

Content marketing

 

So, what’s one of the slowest parts of the web design process?

Are you designing the responsive mobile version of the website?

Are you designing the homepage and using JavaScript?

Is it adding the video that automatically loads on the homepage?

Nope. From our experience as highly experienced web designers, it’s the writing of the content marketing. Even if the website is, say, ten pages in total, when you add up the word count on every page, the cookie policy, the legal page, and the main page content, you’re looking at sometimes in excess of 4,000 words even on a small brochure website.

And because the company director often has one hundred and one things going on at that time, when they first launch the company, they often don’t have the time to write the content marketing.

But do not worry; this is also where we can help.

We can add the text to your WordPress website for an additional fee.

 

 

So, how many pages does your business require?

Sometimes, we can design some PHP WordPress CMS websites from start to finish in less than four weeks for a client. However, on the other hand, a large business selling thousands of product lines may need an e-commerce website. Now, this might have well over one hundred pages, which means it will keep our web developers busy for at least six months.

 

The reason for this is:

The client may want us to:

–            Add on-page SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)

–            Add pictures

–            Add text

–            Alter the wireframes

–            To add functionality, such as contact us boxes

–            So, the more pages, generally the longer it will take our web developers, SEO consultants, web designers and managers to work on the website

 

How much coding time is needed?

If we are coding a website, say using HTML5 or Javascript, the website will be really complicated because, let’s say it’s an e-commerce website with 100 pages, and the customer wants the ability to sort whether items are in stock by low to high prices and also by brand. All of this requires a lot of coding.

So, when a business in Cardiff approaches us to get a new website designed and built, we have to work out how much coding time is needed. How much functionality the client wants- for example something that may seem simple, as sorting items by whether they are in stock or not, is not that simple from web design perspective. There’s often a lot of coding that’s needed, so if we are coding using HTML5 or Javascript, it will take us a lot of time and increase the web design cost.

How many web design/marketing companies are involved?

Sometimes, a business in Cardiff will want to hire one company to improve the search engine optimisation, a separate web design firm, or another company to manage the business’s social media.

So, there’s a lot of separate companies involved, there’s a lot of input from separate companies, all working to complete the website, this can slow the web design process down sometimes a lot. That’s simply because often one company will be waiting on the other, a web design company may well be waiting on a copywriter. The social media company may well be waiting on the copywriter to publish a piece of content marketing so that they can promote on say the businesses Facebook page.

Branding

Sometimes, the company does not have any brand guidelines created. Often, they need to create a company logo, know which font to use, and create a colour scheme for the business.

Then, our web developers will know which hex codes to use when designing the website. Also the company logo can then be added to the website. Then, the same font can be used on, say, the business website, the company business cards, as well as also say on letterheads.

So, we need a website designed, but where should we start in terms of planning?

So, you need to think of your brand-new company website a bit like how you would plan to build a brand-new structure.

When planning a new building, you often hire an architect to design it and draw up a set of plans. Those plans will be used throughout the construction of the structure.

This is the same for your website; you need to create what is called a “site map.”

Now, if you have a brochure website designed for solicitors or a business offering a service, we recommend getting your team around a whiteboard.

Then just begin to scketch out the pages which are needed.

You will begin to see, in the layout for main service pages, that you need an about page, a cookie policy page, and a page for your company terms and conditions.

And then you can start to think, well have we left anything out?

A staff member might say, “Well, we were thinking of expanding our range of services. Shall we add those pages now?” So, sitting down with your team and brainstorming how you want your new website to be designed will help you think about how you want the site map to look.

 

The site map will help your web developers.

Whether your hiring a freelancer working from home, or a huge, national web design agency, what’s for sure is a site map, provided right at the start, will allow them offer you a much more accurate costing for how much it will cost to get that website designed.

This is a really good idea because sometimes a business, let’s say one located in Cardiff Bay, might get a quote from a web designer, and they say that for that 7-page brochure website to be designed, we would estimate it would be 2k.

Then, once the web design process gets underway, you might start to require new pages, because you see that you have forgotten you want extra pages, such as meet the team, company history page, and also pages which expand into allowing to talk more more your staff, and the skills they have.

A 10-page website may initially be what you think you need, but as the meeting progresses with your web developers, you soon see that you need more pages added, and the web design cost may double or even triple.

So, this is why it’s a good idea to get that whiteboard out, create a site map, get your staff to say around bean bags, and ask them if they require more pages.

 

 

Do you require a website to be designed and built here in Wales?

We work with a lot of Welsh businesses every single year. From garden room companies to solicitors, we design unique websites.

Here’s why so many companies, hire us to be their web designers:

–            We build websites fast

–            We can also help improve your company’s organic SEO

–            We are WordPress experts

–            We have been building WordPress websites for over 10 years

 

How much does a new website cost for you to build?

We can design an amazing, well-designed website. Our prices start from just £950.00. There are other web design packages available. Most websites we build cost £ 2k. Larger websites, such as a new e-commerce website, will cost more.

How much does your website hosting cost?

So, we are quite different from some other Cardiff web developers. The reason is that here at W&P, we often offer the first year of website hosting for absolutely free. This is a massive saving for some businesses because other companies might charge between £40 per month and £70 per month for fast website hosting.

If you get a website designed by us, for say £950.00 and there’s free website hosting, then this is a massive saving for the customer.

 

Can help to improve our companies SEO once the website has been designed?

Yes, we can. SEO takes a considerable amount of time, depending on how much competition your business faces. For example, it’s much more straightforward to get a local dentist on the first page of Google organic results than getting a car insurance company on page 1 of Google.co.uk nationally.

So if you face, say, ten competitors who are investing in SEO, then it’s much simpler to get that business on page 1 when compared to, let’s say, a car insurance business, which is up against thousands of companies.

So, our monthly fee for our SEO services is dependent on how much competition your business faces.

Do you design WordPress websites, if so how long do these take to build?

So, the vast majority of the websites our web designers build in Cardiff are WordPress website.

We think WordPress is the bee’s knees. It’s an amazing CMS, and that’s why you have thousands of web design agencies that specialise in and build WordPress websites. They know that it’s a really good CMS, and many company directors insist on using WordPress because it’s widely used globally, has been around a long time, and has proven itself as a brilliant content management system.

So, we would say most of the new brochure websites that our designers design every week, whether for a construction business or a solicitor, let’s say, use WordPress. Often, the company also hires us to manage hosting to improve the company’s search engine optimisation.

 

 

 

 

Can you tell us exactly how your web design process works?

 

Introduction

Some things businesses buy the same items on a routine basis, such as a stationery order, yet for businesses, a website might be something that they purchase, let’s say, once every ten years.

Therefore, the company director may know that the current website looks a bit tired and dated and is in need of replacing.

The company may, therefore, want to redesign the website, yet not know how the web design process works exactly here at W&P.

Some people may say the web design process is straightforward. It is surely just a matter of explaining what you want and letting the web designers get on with the work.

However, most websites require a range of different people and skill sets to design and build the website. You might need new copywriters to write all of the text, a videographer to make the video from the autoloading video on the homepage, a web developer, a web designer, and a U.X, that’s user experience expert all working to build the website.

 

What type of web design company do you require?

Therefore, how many people you require will often dictate what type of web design company you will need. For example, do you need a freelancer because you have a rather restricted marketing budget?

Would you need the whole hog, everything from a web developer to an expert SEO consultant? If so, you may need to hire a web design agency.

So the first thing we would say is that you have to think about whether the company you wish to hire has all the skills you need to design the website, and whether other companies will need to be brought into the mix.

So, first things first, consider the following:

– Do you need a photographer?
– Do you need a videographer?
– Do you require a copy writer?
– Do you require an SEO expert?

 

Why do so many businesses come to W&P to get their website designed?

The simple answer is we are a recognised name, a trusted brand, and a trusted set of hands to design the website because of our long standing within the web design industry. With over 10 years of experience, we’ve been designing websites for a very long period, building a rock-solid reputation for quality.

So, in a nutshell here’s why so many companies hire us:

– We specialise in designing WordPress websites
– We also offer SEO services
– We offer very competitive pricing
– We can take care of writing all of the text
– We aim to offer fast turnaround times, whether it’s a brochure website or a large e-commerce website we are building

As an agency, we not only design quality websites at speed but also offer long-term partnerships. We can work with you to improve your organic and local search engine optimisation, ensuring your website continues to grow and evolve.

 

Do set timescales

So the next thing we would encourage you to think about before the web design process even begins is to ask how fast the company can design the website. If your waiting an eternity to get a brand-new website built, well, you may have wished you had gone else where.

And sure, there are web design agencies quick to send you the link to make a deposit payment, but before you do just that, do enquire how long it will take to complete the wireframes or the design.

As we have heard of companies waiting over 6-months for a basic 10 page brochure website to get designed and built.

Now, it’s all good to get a website designed for as cheap as chips, but if the website is put on the back burner for, let’s say, multiple months, it’s worth paying a bit more for a company that can design the website faster?

Well, we think so, this is always why, when our web designers get super busy, which normally is during lead up to Christmas as the peak of summer, we always honest and transparent with customers, before taking a deposit. We always try to honestly estimate how long it will take us to complete the website, rather than those web designers, where sales agents on commission and just want to take a up-front desposit, then having you hanging waiting for months for website to be designed.

 

Speed and quality

Then you have to balance speed and quality; the last thing you want is an overly basic website, so you need it designed fast, but don’t settle for an over simplistic website.

 

Kick-off meeting

Sometimes, a relatively simple website needs to be created; let’s say there will be an up-coming event in Cardiff, or a famous comedian is coming to town, or a music event; therefore, a rather simplistic website is needed to promote the event.

In this case, the client might state to our web designer over the phone what they want, and with a few emails, they can start writing the code that PHP to design a fantastic website for that business. So sometimes, we don’t need multiple meetings for the more straight-forward type websites.

However, more often than not, a much more intricate website is needed, a website this going to have to last the test of time, let’s say, the next 10 years it may well be serving that business. So often, they need to be a kick-off meeting, and when we say that we’re not talking about football, we’re talking about starting to whittle down what the client wants in a meeting with our web designers and the client.

So, in this meeting we often talk about typography and how many pages will be needed, the site structure, and brand guidelines, as well as discuss who will be writing the content marketing for each page.

Design the website

So often, before the designer even starts to write one piece of code or add a paragraph to the website, a lot of conversation is going on beforehand to make sure us web designers and the client are singing from the same hymn sheet.

Again, if it’s a rather simplistic website and sometimes our web designers can get on with that after, let’s say, a phone call or a few emails.

However, if the website is more technical, with many pages and complex features are needed, then many meetings will be needed. We’ll need your input and feedback at every stage. Your understanding of your business and your audience is invaluable and this will need to be incorporated into the design, and we’ll work closely with you to ensure the website meets your expectations.

We will also need to talk about which CMS, that’s short for content management system is right for your business
There is a huge range of content management systems out there. You’ve most probably heard of Squarespace, WordPress, and Drupal, to name a few?

So, there needs to be a conversation about which content management system you want, which will work best for your business, what will suit your businesses needs now, and in the foreseeable future.
Often, most brochure websites we build, so that’s a website that doesn’t take online payments, normally most of the time we recommend WordPress.

With that said, WordPress is now so well known, that many company directors will have owned several WordPress websites, and want the same CMS used. Often this is because, they find the WP Dashboard really well designed and laid out, plus, often the business may have had this CMS for say the last decade, so they now want WordPress again, as its served that business well.

 

Hosting

One of the next conversations is about hosting, as hosting prices can vary quite massively depending on the website’s speed.
So, depending on the budget, we can recommend different website hosting we can offer. We would recommend paying more for fast, reliable hosting.

Low quality, cheap hosting, we think is a false economy. If the hosting so slow, it is holding your businesses organic SEO back, well, we think this is not good, and the business should pay more for better quality hosting.

 

Copywriting- who’s going to be writing the text?

A considerable part of the web design process is getting the text right- or as web designers call it adding the content marketing. This too much text can be off-putting to the shopper, so much so that they leave the website and are overwhelmed by large blocks of text, this causes a sharp increase in the companies “bounce rate”.

However, on the other hand, if you don’t provide enough text information, which might not answer the customer’s query, leading to a high bounce rate again.

So its about getting the balance right, not too much text, its over whelming too the reader, not too little, that it doesn’t answer the customers questions.

 

Google E-EAT

So, because of the “Google E-EAT” update, copywriting, that’s the content marketing needs to be written by an expert, and we here at W&P are a web design businesses like ours work closely with the company to ensure the content marketing is high quality.

 

Final design
Once you’ve added the content marketing, added the photos, and worked with the videography company to the homepage,

it’s often then time to hand a temporary link to the customer.

A temporary link will then show what the website looks like, and the customer can request any adjustments they may want made.

 

Sign off and then the new website goes live

After the customer is happy with the final draft of the website, and then it’s just a matter of launching a website and placing it live so your customers can see it.

This means our web developers can then put the website live on that domain name.

 

Have you designed many websites?

With over ten years of experience, we’ve been designing content management systems for many local businesses, for a very long period of time.During that time, we’ve accumulated solid organic SEO skills, making us a reliable agency to work with.

In terms of designing websites, we’ve worked on a huge variety of websites ranging from large online retailers, retailing product lines in excess of 1000 products, right through to working with smaller construction-related businesses.

 

I haven’t got much time. Can you handle most of the web design process with little input from us?

This is a question that is really important to answer because it’s a situation that a lot of company directors find themselves in. Often, when you need a brand-new website designed, the website needs to look absolutely amazing, but it is often needs to be designed at a time when a director is starting their business, so they haven’t got much time.

The company director might, for example, be looking for suitable office premises, interviewing a lot of staff, or just setting up a shop and adding stock to it, which can be hugely time-consuming. So, this often comes a time when they deal with everything from shopfitters through to estate agents.

So often, the customer hasn’t got the time to work that closely with the web design company to finalise the design or even be able to write the text. Therefore, the client needs a web design company that listens carefully during an initial meeting or phone call and then can translate that into wireframes of designs the customer can look at and improve.

Thankfully, at this business, we pride ourselves on our ability to quickly grasp your business, its DNA, and its culture and start to come with design ideas.

Many clients like this because they are often so busy with other tasks that they want a web design agency like W&P to start making decisions and implementing ideas without going through multiple meetings.

Meetings are often needed, such as a kick-off meeting and multiple other meetings, if we designing larger e-commerce websites, using WordPress and Woocommerce.

 

What about website hosting and updates? Who takes care of this?

Here at this web design company, we can offer managed hosting via A2, we can charge a monthly or yearly fee for this service. We recommend managed hosting because we can make regular website backups, but this is more expensive than just regular hosting.

Again, the customer needs to carefully consider how much they’re willing to spend on website hosting.

 

How long an average does it take to design a brochure website from start to finish?

So, somebody might be just taking the plunge into self-employment or starting a new business venture, and often, they quickly learn that a lot of web design companies, they often make them wait a minimum of three months to get the website designed.

Often this is due to back-log of work, or that the company hasn’t got enough web developers in, to work on starting your website.

However, because we have such highly skilled PHP web developers working for us, we can sometimes, and this is more often than not, design a website in less than four weeks from start to finish.

 

What CMS does your business use the most and comes highly recommend by your web designers?

Like many web design agencies, we highly recommend WordPress. We’ve used this type of CMS for a long time now, so we have an excellent working knowledge of how WordPress works.

 

How much does a seven-page website cost?

We can offer a quote of £950 to design a seven-page website.

Does writing the text cost extra?
Yes, we can write the text as part of the where design process, but this does cost extra. Generally £75.00 per page, where our copywriters are required to write the main pages.

 

What type of businesses have you worked with in the past in Cardiff?

We work with everything from leading dental practices to well-known solicitors to construction companies. We work with a massive range of businesses because we’ve been designing websites for over ten years and have worked with diverse companies in that timeframe.

 

If we want amendments made to the website later, is this possible?

Most definitely, we charge a fixed hourly fee to amend the website if needed at a later date. For example, the customer might want a new product page added, so we can charge a fixed hourly fee and offer an estimate before we start any work.

 

Are you able to design an e-commerce website using WordPress?

Yes, many e-commerce websites use WordPress and Woocommerce, we can design a quality WordPress site for your business.

 

Why should we choose your marketing agency?

There are hundreds of different web design businesses located all across Wales. These businesses may well be freelancers, right through to an agency employing more than 80 staff. The reason why so many people choose us is because we aim to make the web design process as simple as we possibly can for our clients.

We keep things simple

We know that many companies use a lot of marketing jargon, which clients often don’t like. Many businesses also don’t like it when an agency hides extra charges within the fine print, such as making a website responsive or charging high costs for monthly hosting fees.

So, there are two main reasons why people choose our business: we make the web design process simple and straightforward and are very transparent with our prices.

For example, our website hosting costs are some of the most affordable available in Wales, and then there’s the fact that we design all of our websites for a fixed price and we always make them responsive for that set fee. This is quite unusual because many web designers charge extra for making the website mobile friendly.

 

So, break down the web design process into four simple steps for us?

The first stage is a kick-off meeting

This is to understand how many pages are needed, who will write the text, which website hosting you want, and then get a good idea of the design you want.

The second stage is for the designers to start designing the website

The designers can begin adding the text code and new pages to design the website

Can you create a website and write the text in Welsh?

We are often asked by the client who wants a combination of the English language and the Welsh language translation added to the page. Therefore, we can add the Welsh language to any page you like, and you can do this for everything from the About Us page to writing the legal text at the bottom of the website.

 

Have you worked with many large Welsh businesses?

We most certainly have are working with some well-known companies and brands right here in Wales.

These brands work across the U.K and are, therefore, national companies, and we have experience working with them.

 

Do you have experience improving a businesses marketing from start to finish and helping it grow over a sustained period of time?

We most certainly have taken businesses which have more or less started as self-employment-type business structures to help them grow over a very long period.

Therefore, we pride ourselves on partnering with the business in the long term to help it grow. Web design is a stand-alone service, yet what often happens then is often the company wants to come on board with us for us to improve the companies organic SEO, we can offer this service, which is charged monthly.

 

How can we obtain a web design quote?

We can provide you with a web design quote quickly. We often aim to turn around quotes within three working days. For a brochure website, we can usually offer a quote immediately on the phone.

If you would like to obtain a quote for any of the following services, then do contact us today:

  • Local SEO,
  • Organic SEO
  • Web Design

Websites for start-ups and entrepreneurs

Introduction

Business is hard!

We know that’s quite a statement, but getting any business off the ground takes grit and determination.

Yet, many businesses we think fail simply because they go to the wrong marketing company in the very early days of the business’s starting up. They either get a cheap website built that says nothing about the company or the brand, or they get their search engine optimisation is not done right; the company might use what’s called “black hat” methods, which means sooner rather than later, the business gets what’s called a “Google algorithmic penalty”- which basically means, often it gets de-indexed, removed from Google altogether on the organic search engine results pages.

So, with that said, how can our web design agency help you:

Branding and website design

We know that most start-ups and entrepreneurs are strapped for money at the start, but does that mean you need to choose an overly simplified, basic, and rubbish-looking website?
Well, we think not.

That’s because there are web designers out there who will give you a website that’s so basic, bland, and boring that the bounce rate will be super high.

But we are not like those businesses. We design high-quality WordPress websites with up to 7 pages, are well-designed, and offer a starting price of just £950.00.
We are sure you will agree that at that price point, it’s an amazing price that most start-up companies can afford.

Help to improve your company’s Search Engine Optimisation

So, we are not one trick ponies here at W&P- why do we say that with so much confidence?

The answer is simple: We have SEO consultants with over ten years of experience. So, you could hire one of our super-talented web designers to design a fantastic website for your business.

Then, as soon as all the pages have been designed, the logo put on, and images and text added, our SEO consultants can start working on improving your company’s ranking on Google.

 

Is SEO a fast process?

The answer is no.

SEO is slow, very slow. Now, that’s not to put you off; here’s why. Stay tuned.

If done right, SEO can place you on the first page of Google, which, for some businesses, is a massive competitive advantage. However, we can overemphasise the phrase “if done right” because it needs to be done in a white-hat way that follows Google’s WebMaster Guidelines.

 

How our web design agency can help:

Well-designed websites starting from £950
Start-up businesses often have many things they need to purchase, such as office premises, stock and hiring staff.

Therefore, we recognise that some companies will want a website set-up that looks amazing but may not want to fork out thousands of pounds. This is why we can design and build up to 7 pages for £950.00. Most websites we create are built in less than one month.

So, whether you are opening a hairdressing saloon, a new restaurant or an accountancy practice here in Cardiff, we can design a fantastic WordPress CMS website for just £950.00
SEO packages available from £550 PCM

Many start-up companies and entrepreneurs know that most of their customers will come via Google.co.uk.

A lot of businesses hire us not just because we have really good web designers working for us but also because we can help improve your business’s search engine optimisation. For example, we can help get your company onto page one of Google here in Cardiff. We have worked with many businesses based right here in Cardiff. We offer our organic SEO services, which are white hat, starting from £550.00 per month.

 

Help to promote your business on social media.

So, let’s say one of our copywriters writes a long article, say 3,000 words, and it helps to improve the business’s organic search engine optimisation. We can also promote that article on social media, such as Facebook, to get even more visitors, generate more brand awareness, and help improve your company’s digital marketing.

Why choose our web design business?

Why not call us if you’re about to start a new business? We can design quality content management system websites starting from £950.00. We can then help to improve your organic and local SEO, with starting prices for our white hat

SEO, starting from £550.00 per month.

If you want to know more about our web design and SEO packages, call us today.

 

How to create well-designed landing pages

Hiring an excellent web designer to create well-designed landing pages is crucial for several reasons. The main reasons are that the web design can help reduce the company’s bounce rate and convert visitors into sales.
So, what constitutes a well-designed landing page:

Well, here at W&P, we think a well-designed landing page is one:

– Follows the advice of Google E-EAT
– Is helpful
– Simple to use
– Works well on smartphones and tablets
– Has a low bounce rate
– Google Analytics shows the page has a high dwell time
– A lot of quality do-follow backlinks are leading to that page

 

It must have a clear purpose.

When many businesses are looking to hire a Cardiff web designer, they might think, “We only need a one-page website, or let’s say a three-page brochure website.” Actually, however, we believe it’s worth paying more for your new website so that each main service or product category has its own page.

So, for example, let’s say our designers this week are designing a website for a new solicitor’s practice that is about to open in the Cardiff Bay area. Well, we would recommend to them to add a page for each different service they offer, not to group all the service descriptions onto one page.

So, you should create a landing page for each leading service you offer.

And why do we recommend this?

Well, it’s simple: Google algorithms will crawl and index each page on your new company website.

Google uses something called “Googlebot” to do this. Now, if you have created a landing page for each service you offer, it’s much clearer to Google what services and products you offer.

 

That’s because of the following:

Each page is likely to have its own:

– Page title
– URL Extension
– Anchor text
– Alt text
– Content marketing
– Page titles H1 through to H6
– Meta title
– Meta description

So, in a nutshell, you’re sending a much clearer signal to Google about what services/products your business sells, making it much simpler to later, if you so wish, improve the search engine optimisation for that page.
So, how much will it cost to get all of these extra pages added?

The good news is that some digital marketing agencies in Wales charge in excess of 2K to get a 10-page website designed, plus the monthly hosting cost and the cost to make the website responsive. Then, the web designers are likely to charge extra to write the content marketing and supply the stock photography.

However, the reason so many people come to W&P is simple: We have a starting price for a 7-page brochure website, starting from just £950.00. So, it’s clear to see why our web designers are so busy throughout the entire year.

 

CTA

CTA stands for “call to action”- a simple box saying “Would you like us to call you back?”- could have just a brightly coloured box. In that box, someone could leave a name and number, and a sales representative will know, for example, that the box filled in was on the page for a BMW M3 car.

The sales representative can then simply call the customer back. So, having boxes and calling CTA helps you contact the customer.

It hasn’t got to be the customer leaving the phone number. It could be:

– Asking the shopper to follow your business on Facebook
– To sign up to a monthly newsletter
– Go to web chat and ask customer service a question.

 

Your website must be responsive.

A good landing page design must be responsive. Your web designers must ensure that the landing pages they create are responsive. This is for two reasons. One, Google switched to “mobile-first indexing” some time ago, meaning Googlebot crawls and indexes the mobile version of your website before it indexes the desktop version.

So, this is one reason you need to design a mobile-friendly website.
The next reason is that many shoppers will find your company website on a smartphone or tablet, so the website must be “responsive” to work on that smartphone.

 

How we can help:

If your business, based in South Wales, needs a new website designed, why not call us? We can design and build a brochure website for just £950.00. If you would like a high-quality website designed, do call W&P Web Design.

 

Meta title:
How to create well-designed landing pages
Our web designers explain how to design well-designed landing pages.

Are the websites you build “mobile friendly”?

 

 

It’s more important than ever that your company website is “responsive,” yet this is often not at the forefront of some people’s minds when they are having a new website designed by local web designers.

Often, a director or a self-employed person will fire off a few emails, asking local web designers to offer a quote for a 7-page website. Then, you might sit back, have a slice of lemon drizzle cake, and drink tea while waiting for the replies.

Then, automatically, a lot of people are drawn to the price: what the various web developers charge for designing a basic brochure website.

It’s also common for marketing companies to attach a lot of sales literature explaining why you should pick them.

They may waffle on forever and a day about previous brands and businesses they have helped. Yet what often gets lost in that, say, 25-page PDF document about the web design company waffling about how good they are is how much the web design essentials cost.

 

Such as:

What is the ongoing hosting going to cost?

– How much will the domain name renewal cost for that business?

– How much will it cost for the web designers also to do the copywriting work

– And yes, you guessed it, how much do you need to make the website mobile “responsive”?

 

So, let’s jump straight to the good part, where some web designers in Cardiff might charge, let’s say we have heard £750.00 to make an essential brochure website “responsive”- well, here at W&P, we are different.

 

How are we different?

We are different because every single one of our websites, whether it’s a brochure or an e-commerce website, is always made to be mobile-friendly. Even if a business here in Wales comes to us for a quote, and not once in meetings or on the phone does it mention making the website “responsive,” we know they will need it.

So, just like a car needs fuel to move forward, it’s essential. We know that over 50% of your organic traffic from Google.co.uk is going to be from a mobile phone or tablet. We also know that Google has introduced “mobile-first indexing”—meaning Google’s algorithms want to crawl and index the mobile version first.

Google also will not rank a business high in the SERPs, the organic results, unless the website has a mobile version designed.

Google doesn’t want thousands of shoppers who are shopping for an item on an iPhone or Samsung Android phone to have the website not work and “snap” to the screen size.

So, Google’s algorithms now use whether or not your company website is responsive as a ranking factor.

 

What are Responsive Websites?

 

 

Having a responsive website sounds technical, right?

Well, from a customer’s perspective, it just means the page layout fits the screen, and you can leave all the complicated web design stuff to us. But from a shopper’s perspective, they just want the page to load on a smartphone or a tablet and for it all to work, and that’s exactly what our web developers can do for you.

 

 

Are you thinking about investing in SEO?

U.X

If you want to improve your company’s search engine optimisation, then your company website must offer a good user experience. Here are some of the ways that you can improve your companies U.X:

–            Have a responsive website

–            Reduce company’s bounce rate

–            Improve dwell time.

Do you need a new website designed?

If you own a business here in Cardiff, Wales, and you would like to improve your company’s digital marketing, here’s how we can help:

–            WordPress web design

–            CMS web design

–            Local search engine optimisation

–            Organic search engine optimisation

–            Social media marketing

 

Why choose W&P?

We have been designing top-quality, well-designed websites for local businesses for over 10 years. If you would like a website designed, contact our highly skilled web designers today.

 

Why today your business should have a “responsive website.”

Web Design

 

Sometimes, when you get a quote from a web design agency, they will send a detailed breakdown of what they can offer as a business within a PDF document. Sometimes, there can be so much jargon, saying that they can offer super fast hosting, a well-designed content management system, and a responsive website.

Therefore, often, the company director’s eyes quickly switch to the quote and may go with the company that seems to be offering the best deal.

However, sometimes, low web design quotes exclude a lot of what you need as a business. For example, in the fine print, it might state that they charge extra to make the website responsive.

In our view, this is a bit like a car dealer specifying a price yet then saying, well, later on, that price doesn’t include the wheels or tyres on the car. Just as tyres are essential to a vehicle, having a mobile-responsive website designed is crucial as well.

 

What is a “responsive website.”

The great Steve Jobs designed tablets, and now many people use smartphones to find local businesses and products they want to buy. This is more convenient for the customer, yet from a web design perspective, web designers globally must now also make sure that the website works on tablets, desktops, and smartphones with different operating systems, such as Android and Apple iPhones.

The phone must “snap” and be responsive to the size of various screens, from a small iPhone to a tablet or a giant desktop screen. Therefore, the website must be responsive and “mobile-ready.”

 

Google’s Mobile First Indexing

Google’s brilliant algorithm made the move to “mobile-first indexing”—sounds complicated, right? Well, it’s not really. It just means that Googlebot, the bot that does Google’s crawling and indexing, crawls the mobile version of your website before the desktop version.

So, we are making a point that Google’s algorithms now prioritise mobile indexing. First, the website must be responsive. Still, more than that, excellent web designers, UX designers, and developers must constantly improve the user experience, making the website faster and simpler to use.

This often means that for large e-commerce businesses, hundreds of hours of “split testing” are needed to refine the design and improve it.

So it’s a bit like a whiskey maker; they have to perfect their way of distilling whiskey to get the taste, well spot on. This is the same with a website; you can spend hundreds of hours designing it and writing Javascript until you are so tired you fall off your chair sideways, yet what matters is what your customers think of the website. Do they find it simple to use? Are they spending a long time on your website because they like the products and the valuable information you offer? Or is the bounce rate sky-high? Because your web designers have made the website difficult to use?

 

So, here are some of the reasons why your company needs a well-designed mobile version of your company website:

Improved User Experience

UX is now an important part of search engine optimisation and web design. Google uses something called “Google’s RankBrain”—artificial intelligence—to decipher how well your business is answering that query.

For example, is the shopper spending a long time on your website? Is the “dwell time” therefore very high?

What’s the bounce rate like?

Was your business the last company clicked on in the search engine results pages (SERPs)? Therefore, did you answer the customer’s question or provide the customer with the product that they wished to purchase? Or did the customer return to

Google’s SERPs to have to go to another business to find the item they wanted?

Google’s RankBrain uses this data from hundreds, if not millions, of shoppers who use Google Chrome and Android devices to decipher how happy shoppers are with your website.

 

Better Conversion Rates

If your website is more straightforward to use, for example, a shopper shopping for an item well on the train on the way home from work can find what they want quickly, they are more likely to purchase from you.

If, on the other hand, it’s challenging to find an item or the website takes a very long time to load onto a smartphone, the bounce rate may increase. So, it’s not just about having a responsive website; it must also be straightforward.

 

Faster Load Times

Whichever web design agency you hire must design a website that is super-fast. This means that the website must be fast whether the shopper is shopping on a desktop, mobile, or tablet.

Increased Engagement

If expert web designers have designed your company website well, they will know that a well-designed website will have a higher dwell time. Plus, also the website will have a lower bounce rate. This means that because the website is so simple, shoppers will continue shopping for longer. However, if the website is poorly designed by your web designers, for example, it’s slow, or the main menu is just complicated to use, then what can happen is the business will rank lower in Google’s SERPs.

Improved Analytics

If your company website is well designed, you will help shoppers get to the products or services they want much more simply. If your website is a piece of cake to use, then this can improve dwell time, which many SEO consultants and web design companies believe has a positive impact on the company’s organic search engine optimisation.

 

How we can help

We are based in Cardiff’s city centre, in South Wales. We differ from many other web designers in offering quotes included in our fee to design a responsive and mobile-ready website. So, where some web design agencies can charge more than 1k to make a brochure WordPress website responsive, we actually include this within our fee.

Our websites, therefore, offer Welsh businesses amazing value for money. We can design a 7-page high-quality WordPress website for as little as £950.00, so it’s clear why our U.X designers, web developers, and WordPress web designers are busy throughout the year designing high-quality, amazing websites for local businesses.

We also have some of the best SEO consultants working in-house, meaning that once your brand new CMS website has been fully designed, we can start work straightaway on improving your business’s organic and local SEO.

 

Why the success of your business SEO is directly connected to how well your website has been designed

 

As with all things in life, you get what you pay for, a cheap mattress equals a bad back, cheap shoes often equals discomfort, and a cheap website can usually mean, well, corners get cut.

What we mean by that is that often, the website will be relatively essential if you pay a pittance for it. This has knock-on effects on your business’s search engine optimisation, meaning more work—sometimes vast amounts of work—is needed because proper SEO work can start.

 

And what do we mean by proper SEO work?

Low-quality spam marketing may need to be rewritten, duplicate content removed, alt text changed, on-page SEO improved, and spammy anchor text. Hundreds of hours are sometimes required, not to improve a business’s SEO but to get the website to the point where the website is not deemed spam by Google.

So, if you pay cheaply, you often have to fork out more to improve the website later on down the road. That’s if you want to improve your business’s organic search engine optimisation. You may want to; you may be happy with no organic traffic and just direct shoppers to your site by word of mouth or, say, a business card.

However, most businesses want to rank highly on Google and to do so; your website must be well-designed.

Website design and your business SEO are interconnected and here is why

 

U.X

You need to create a positive user experience; to do that, the website must be well-designed. To be well designed, you need to offer helpful information written with the guidance set out by Google E-EAT in mind. Plus, the website must provide a good user experience, so be fast, responsive, and simple to use.

If the website, on the other hand, has a low dwell time and a high bounce rate, the website will rank lower in Google’s results.

So, for a business’s organic search engine optimisation to be a success, these are some of the attributes the site must have:

– Be super fast
– Be mobile friendly
– Needs well-written content marketing
– Be simple to use
– Must have quality backlinks
– Work well on mobiles and tablets, as well as desktops
– Must be a white hat

 

The content marketing needs to be of good quality

It’s well worth paying extra for a really good digital marketing agency, such as ours, to write the content marketing for you when the website is initially being designed. So, ask your web designers if they have copywriters.

If they do, hire the best copywriter to write the content marketing, as this can get your business’s SEO off on the right footing from the very start. It simply means Googlebot, when it first crawls and indexes your website, will see that each page should be well written, helpful, and written in accordance with Google E-EAT.

Then, Googlebot will tell Google’s algorithm that the website has good quality, white-hat content marketing. This simply means that your website should be indexed by Google in a higher position.

So, if your web designers do not have copywriters working for them or do not offer the service of writing the text, consider choosing another web design agency.

If they do have copywriters working for the agency, ask whether the content marketing will be written in accordance with Google E-EAT. This is absolutely essential.

Only hire web design agencies that write content marketing using white hat methods in accordance with Google’s

 

Webmaster Guidelines and Google E-EAT.

It is well-designed but also keeps technical SEO in mind.

Sure, the website must look good; otherwise, the bounce rate will go sky-high. However, with that said, you must consider the website’s technical SEO. So make sure the site architecture is good, all pages can get indexed, and you have good website security in place.

 

In conclusion, here’s why you should choose W&P.

We have designed WordPress websites for local Welsh businesses for over ten years. We have also been offering SEO services, so we are well placed as a business to create a fantastic website for your company and help improve your company’s organic SEO.

With web design prices starting from £950.00 and SEO packages starting from just £600 a month, we have a digital marketing agency to call.

We can also offer to design a website for your business, with WordPress web design packages starting from just £950.00.

We are the Cardiff web design business to call. We have two WordPress designers with over ten years of experience designing high-quality WordPress websites, so call us today.

 

What are the best WordPress contact forms? Which plugins does your web design agency use?

 

When you think of one of the most important elements of any website, it is undoubtably the contact form. Without this, your customers could not send you a message to enquire about the products or services you sell.

We have used WordPress contact forms on numerous websites that we have built. Often, the customer wants them placed in the footer or the side of every page. When they have a brochure website built, some customers sometimes want a Contact Us form on the Contact Us page.

 

So, what exactly is a WordPress contact form plugin?

A contact form is simply an embedded form on the page, and web designers can design as many fields as possible. For example, you may have a field for contact number, name, and e-mail and a drop-down box to direct the message to the right person within your company.

How to protect your new WordPress website contact form from spam messages

It’s important to note that even if you use the most sophisticated honeypot systems and anti-spam filters, your contact form is not impenetrable. Spam bots, the really good ones, can often still work out ways around the spam filters and then send you messages.

 

reCAPTCHA

this is one of the oldest but still one of the best methods of trying to minimise the amount of spam messages a business gets. That’s to use reCAPTCHA messages to stop spam. What reCAPTCHA asks the shopper to complete a quick task, such as “click on the pictures of cats”- this is simple for us humans, but some spambots will struggle to complete this simple task.

 

Honeypot trap.

So, a honeypot trap occurs when a spam bot fills out a hidden contact form. The spam filter knows that it’s a spam message because it is not visible to the shopper.

 

Contact form 7

This is only one of the most commonly used contact forms on WordPress. It currently has well over 5 million active installations, so this is one of the reasons why our web design company regularly uses Contact Form 7: It’s one of the most popular contact forms, and it has regular updates as well.

There is even a free version of Contact Form 7 for your business to use.

 

WordPress WP Forms Lite

This is another free or paid-for plugin that’s really good. WordPress web design agencies across the world use it. It’s light, brilliant, and very simple to install.

Forminator

A very good plugin used by many web developers is Forminator. It’s very simple to install. It’s brilliant, and if you want to upgrade to the paid version, it doesn’t cost that much to do at all.

So, which WordPress contact forms does your marketing agency frequently install on your customers’ websites?

 

Ninja Contact Form (WordPress)

Like most WordPress web developers, we use Ninja Contact Forms. It’s a great contact form that is simple to set up and install.

 

Gravity Forms

We also highly recommend trying Gravity Forms. It’s simple to set up, and there are many different options for altering the form’s functionality.

 

We highly recommend WPForms

On the vast majority of brochure websites we build, whether for a used car dealership or, say, a carpet shop, WPForms is excellent because it suits most businesses. It’s very simple to install, has a range of really useful features, and even comes with anti-spam filtering.

 

Do your research by reading blogs like this.

Read articles like this to learn about the different available contact forms.

Choosing the correct contact form for your business is essential because if you make it too hard for a customer to contact you, you will likely abandon filling in the form altogether. This contributes to a higher bounce rate, meaning not only could you be potentially missing out on sales, Google’s algorithm will pick up on the high bounce rate and low time spent on the site, and Google’s algorithms are likely to rank the website much lower on Google’s organic ranks over time.

So, instead, make sure that your company website offers a good UX. One way to do this is to ensure that the Contact Us forms are super simple.

 

Customise the form.

Then, it’s time to customise the form. You want to capture as much information from the shopper as you need, yet you don’t want to make the form too time-consuming for the customer; otherwise, the bounce rate is likely to increase.

So, make sure you capture only the information you need with the minimum number of boxes. For example, if you sell cars, just a phone number, e-mail, and the vehicle’s model are all a sales representative will need to make the call and clinch the sale.

 

Make sure that you set up some protection.

We recently worked on a customer’s website. They had a WordPress website to serve their business, which operated in Newport and Cardiff, which is in South Wales. We worked each month on improving the business’s search engine optimisation, so for those who do not know, the business simply wants to rank higher in Google’s organic results.

Yet the web developer didn’t set up a spam filter on the website, so we found that the customer was getting a spam message every 10 minutes.

This flooded the business’s inbox, so much so that it filled the whole inbox with spam. So, as you can see, unless this is fixed quickly, and we did fix it, the customer could have missed out on sales. Plus, the customer is likely to have received a “failed to send” automated reply, frustrating the customer.

So, do talk to your web designers and say that when they design the website, whether it be using Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, or any content management system, make sure that they set up anti-spam, whether it be honeypot or a different kind of anti-spam such as reCAPTCHA.

Do you own a Cardiff business and require web design services or help improve your company’s search engine optimisation (SEO)?
If so, do call us. We have been building WordPress content management systems for many different Welsh companies for over ten years, so we have experience working on everything from dentists’ websites to construction companies’ websites. Our websites are high-quality, well-designed, and affordable, so call our web designers today.

 

Are excessive amount of WordPress plugins potentially damaging your website’s organic SEO performance?

 

When you initially build a new WordPress website, you might be over the moon with the design and pat the web designers on the back saying “great job”. However, a lot of unnecessary plugins installed within WordPress CMS might be installed.

This in the long run, could hamper your business’s SEO performance. This can significantly hold back the website’s organic visibility because Google’s search engine algorithms might will rank your company website for slow loading times which cause a poor U.X (user experience). A slow website can deter potential customers and affect your business’s online presence and the success of your businesses search engine optimisation.

 

Page Builder Plugins

Which page builder plugin do you have installed?

We would say it’s widespread, and very common for many WordPress CMS websites to be built with a page builder plugin. This is not necessarily bad thing, but it does depends on which page builder is used and how light it is.

Some page builders could hamper the page load speed, or is it quite a light page builder, allowing it to load effortlessly and quickly?

 

Google’s Core Web Vitals and why this is important

When you consult with a top-notch SEO professional or a reputable web design agency within Cardiff, they will stress the importance of page load speed. They are also likely to mention “Google’s Core Web Vitals” and “GT Metrics” page load speed. These experts can guide you in understanding and enhancing your website’s performance. In simple terms, do you want your website to be a high-performance machine like a sports car cruising down the highway at high speed, or a sluggish, outdated vehicle in the slow lane?

The choice is yours, but it’s crucial to prioritise making your website fast and efficient. This is why so many Welsh businesses, come to us, to get a website designed. We have two web designers that now have over 10 years experience building WordPress websites.

So, significant consideration needs to be paid to making your website ultra fast. If, for example, an excessive amount of JavaScript is used, or too many plugins are bloating the website, or the web designers say the page load speed is bad, then this could negatively impact the business’s organic SEO for sure.

So, do make sure of the following:

  • Your company website loads fast
  • You use Google Core Web Vitals to make improvements
  • Use GT Metrics as often as once a week to make sure your website is fast
  • Purchase very high quality website hosting
  • Make sure the website is balance of good design, that’s ultra fast
  • Talk to your web designers about getting an AMP version of the website designed
  • Talk to your web design agency about the different hosting they can offer, and what’s the fastest they can offer you

 

Delete and remove redundant WordPress plugins

It is possible to still have installed a WordPress plugin, within the backend of your WordPress CMS that you no longer use or need, that is contributing to your company website having extremely slow load speeds. If you have a WordPress plugin that that you no longer use, for example, a map within a page you’ve removed, it’s best to delete it to avoid unnecessary bloat and improve your website’s performance.

.
Should we delete plugins which slowing the website down?

Hold your horses, therefore, just a second. Even though plugins can slow your website down, they are sometimes crucial to its design and construction. Thus, if you start to remove them all, the new website may go haywire and break and no longer function!

Therefore, you need to think of plugins a bit like fuses within your car; that’s if you start to remove them, and then the car’s electrics will not function as you want. These are the same for WordPress plugins for a brand new website;if you begin to remove them when they are crucial to the design, and then the website might no longer function as expected.

Therefore, you have two options: using WordPress plug-ins, which could potentially slow down the website, or hiring an expert web developer to start writing unique code for your website.
The web designer / web developer might need to write PHP code, JavaScript, or perhaps another language to get the functionality and design you want.

Therefore, plugins are often used because they are free and quick to install; however, hiring an expert website developer for weeks on end is something that some businesses can’t do because it can get expensive for some companies.

 

Do you require a brand-new website to be designed?

Businesses from all across Wales flock to W & P Web Design for a straightforward reason: We design fantastic websites that impress you and your customers, and our professional web design services can significantly improve your online marketing.

Whether you require a website designed using Drupal, WordPress, or another content management system, we can often create a fantastic and stunning website for your Welsh company, often in less than one month.

With prices starting from just 950, you can quickly obtain an excellent website designed by our expert web designers.

How much does it cost to get a brochure website designed in the United Kingdom?

Introduction

Perhaps you’re an entrepreneur about to launch a brand new business. On the other hand, you might be an established company that’s been operating in Wales for over 30 years. We have a wide range of businesses contact us for our web design services.

One of the most frequent questions is why web design quotes vary significantly.
Customers sometimes feel like they’re comparing apples with pears when one e-mail quotes £1k for a 7-page website while another business quotes over £ 5k.

So, it’s hard for some businesses to decide which web design company to choose.
However, as highly experienced web designers, we can help explain why web design quotes differ so much here in Cardiff.

 

Would you like a freelancer to design your new website?

Freelancers by a country mile are often the cheapest option when designing a new website for your business. The reason for this is simple: usually, the large agencies have such high overhead due to fancy offices in an inner city area, and often, they will have admin staff, front of house, and also many other costs.

With a freelancer, you’re taking all the costs away, especially if the freelancer works from home. So, what you’re getting is a website that can be well designed and often look brilliant at less cost.

The downside is that web designers often get very busy at two periods during the year. Those timeframes are during Christmas and the build-up to it and also before the summer. Often, these are key times for, say, construction businesses or e-commerce businesses in the lead-up to Christmas.

A freelancer can often get overwhelmed with too much work and enquiries, so the turnaround time to complete the web design might sometimes take too long. However, this becomes much simpler to manage with an agency of ten-plus staff.

Also, some freelancers might be one trick ponies, meaning they only design websites in WordPress, Drupal or Wix. However, when you pick a web design agency, they will often have multiple web designers who are highly experienced at designing websites using various content management systems.

 

Small agency

A small web design agency often offers the best of both worlds. You often don’t have to wait as long to get a website designed as you would if you were to pick a freelancer.

At the same time, a small web design agency with, say, seven or fewer staff doesn’t have the same overheads as a web design agency in Cardiff city centre or Cardiff Bay, which employs 50+ staff. Therefore, it has massive overheads. Regardless of the design, the brochure website often has to have a minimum pricing structure of 5k before they agree to design a brand new website.
A large agency

Some businesses often have no option but to choose a large agency. The reason is that if they are a medium to large company, they will often have fierce online competition. For example, an online electrical retailer will face massive competition, and a few leading brands might dominate the market.

Therefore, a company that wants to compete with these often needs help with its digital marketing, such as improving the business’s organic search engine optimisation, helping with the company’s branding, and using split testing, sometimes called A/B testing, to refine and improve the website.

Therefore, in large web design agencies, you often have SEO consultants, web developers, web designers, social media account managers, account coordinators, PPC or Google Adwords experts, and managers to keep everything on track. So, as you can see, these web design businesses often can’t even come close to the cost that a freelancer can offer to design a website.

 

In conclusion

We hope that this article clarifies why web design costs can vary so much here in South Wales. As highly experienced web designers, we can assist you if your company requires a brand-new website.

We design the following websites:

-Drupal website
– Joomlas websites
– WordPress websites

 

Why not contact us for a free and no-obligation quote:
We have an amiable team of staff on hand to help you if your business needs help to improve its search engine optimisation or if you require a brand new website to be designed.

 

A guide to choosing the right platform for your new business website

 

Most websites designed by web designers these days are built on what web designers call a “content management system.” This tool empowers business owners, allowing them to make simple changes to their website without the need for coding experience or web design knowledge.

You might think, well, is that not like us web designers shooting ourselves in the foot?

Why would you offer a CMS where businesses can edit the design themselves?

Well, the answer is simple. Most businesses in Cardiff want a quality website built, which often takes many weeks. This often involves many people, web developers, web designers, and sometimes SEO experts as well. This is where all the “heavy lifting” is done, so to speak.

Then, often, the business wants a CMS so that they can make fine adjustments or change, let’s say, the companies’ addresses themselves.

Most content management systems allow that and make it a piece of cake.

 

WordPress

WordPress, a content management system we frequently recommend, is a popular choice among businesses in Cardiff. Its user-friendly interface and versatility make it a top pick for many.

WordPress has been around for donkey years, and in that time, it has evolved into a masterpiece. It’s well-designed and simple to update, and brilliant company websites can be designed using this CMS.
In fact, it’s so good that we don’t often have to recommend WordPress to clients. They say to us that they want this content management system. Often, they have been familiar with its Dashboard and simply want a redesign or a brand new website designed using the content management system.

Plus, if you’re thinking of improving your company’s search engine optimisation and looking for a CMS that offers a lot of functionality, such as making it simple to update meta titles and descriptions, add internal links and anchor text, and edit the alt text, then we often recommend WordPress.

 

Wix

Wix, launched in 2006, is known for its user-friendly drag-and-drop system. This feature makes it a preferred choice for businesses, especially start-ups, who want to design their websites with ease.

Often, this platform is used by businesses, such as start-ups, that may want to design the website themselves.

 

Joomla

Joomla is a very popular content management system countless web design companies use worldwide.

It’s an open-source platform, and it’s offered for free. It’s a bit like WordPress in that it’s open-source software.

Joomla, a popular choice among web designers and businesses, is known for its robust security features. These include regular updates to address any vulnerabilities, providing users with peace of mind.

 

Drupal

Many businesses use Drupal, which can be used and scaled with any company. You can also build completely bespoke websites using Drupal.
Plus, the great thing about Drupal is that there’s a considerable amount of dedicated Drupal web developers who offer a massive amount of helpful advice if you ever need it.

Always have a long chat with your web designers before making a choice

When you visit your web designers, they will most likely have designed websites using various content management systems.

They may have designed websites using WordPress, Drupal, Wix, etc., so ask the following questions before choosing a CMS for your business.

 

Dashboard

Ask to see the Dashboards of different content management systems to see which one you find the easiest to use and best matches your business’s requirements.

So, for example, plan on doing a lot of blogging?

Blogging and adding new company news updates is essential for improving a business’s search engine optimisation. Some businesses, say, a solicitor’s practice, may well be adding a long article every single week of the year. So, do ask to see the dashboard on different CMS and see if your staff or you, the director, find the process of adding text, such as new blog posts, simple to do.

If you were to ask us which CMS we often recommend to most of our customers, we have to say WordPress. We say that because the Dashboard is so simple to use.

Why are so many businesses choosing a WordPress website that’s “headless”?

Written by: Bob Hoskins
Date: 01/08/2024
Topic: Web Design Cardiff

 

WordPress as a headless CMS might sound like a mouthful, but trust us, it’s a game-changer. If you’ve been using WordPress for blogging, you’re missing its superpowers. Let’s dive into what a headless CMS is, why WordPress rocks in this role, and how it can supercharge your website.

So, there’s a bit of a buzzword among web designers at the moment: design a “headless” website. And, well, it’s a game-changer. We shall explain why having a well-designed “headless” website could benefit your business.
What is a headless CMS, anyway?

So, what exactly is a “headless” content management system?

So, we will have to get a bit technical here but bear with us as we elaborate. Quite put, a headless website is a type of content management (CMS) for short, where the front end, the part the shopper sees, is decoupled from the back end, which is the part web developers use to design the website.

What this means, in a nutshell, is that you display your website on apps, websites, etc.

Are you still confused?

Let us elaborate a bit more.

What are the main benefits of going headless for your WordPress website?

Here are the main benefits of gaining a headless WordPress website for your business:

You can use different designs for the front end; for example design used Vue.js

Faster, well, it can be supersonic to be fair

Excellent web developers can deliver your content through some things web designers call an API. This means that this increases how fast the website is; therefore, opting for a headless WordPress website can help to improve the website’s UX user experience.

So, how does a headless website work?

Step 1: Obtain a WordPress website

Your web developers will need to enable Rest API. It’s important to know that WordPress actually comes with a built-in Rest API. In layman’s terms, this means that content, such as the homepage, can be fetched using JSON data, which can be used anywhere.

 

The next stage is to choose your front end

So, often, a web designer will use either React, Angular, or another popular option, Vue.JS, which then allows the web developers to start designing the front end of your new headless website.

You then fetch the content via an API

Your web designers can then request the API fetch the content; for example, many web design agencies rely on REST API to pull the content directly from WordPress.

Display the content

Then, using the REST API, you can directly place the content onto front-end technology. Therefore you will then gain a headless WordPress website.

React. app

Many businesses globally are using WordPress to gain a fast e-commerce website managed by WordPress, yet because it’s headless, you can use React—app to display your products.

 

In conclusion

There’s one thing for sure: Customers and web design companies alike will be talking about headless CMS websites for a very long time to come. You will be able to use WordPress CMS, which web designers all over the world like using, yet now you can get the front end to display on apps.

So whether you want a headless website to improve your SEO performance, gain a faster website, or perhaps improve security, we can help you gain a headless WordPress website and improve your web design.
With prices starting from £950.00, it’s clear why our web designers work their socks off throughout the year. Every month, our web developers design brochure websites for many well-known Cardiff businesses. They come to us because we offer unbelievable value for money.

So, if you’re on Google now looking for “Cardiff web design businesses”, do call us; we have a range of packages available. Do call our expert team today.

What is SearchGPT, and how could this change web design and SEO forever?

Date: 31/07/2024

Written by: Bob

Okay, so it’s still in the prototype stage, yet as we all know, A.I Technology is moving at a rapid pace. So, if your SEO team is solely focused on optimising your website for Google (that’s a full-time job in itself), well, you also have to consider when SearchGPT comes along.

So, what is SearchGPT, and how will it change search engine optimisation, web design, and how shoppers shop for products/services online?
First things first, what is SearchGPT?

So SearchGPT? It is still in the prototype stage, yet it’s a hybrid between a standard search engine and A.I., so it will provide real-time answers. For those who don’t know, the Chat GPT you’re using at the moment, even if you’re paying a monthly subscription for the latest version, is trained on a language model. This means, well, the information is from a few months back, so ChatGPT doesn’t know about, say, today’s news.
Yet, with SearchGPT, well, that’s all about the change. It will have the latest information.

 

Human testers

So, we always think of search engine giants such as Google as companies that are all mathematical formulas and AI. But Google and Microsoft use human testers to test things out, and their feedback is normally what’s used to design the search engine around what shoppers want.

So Chat GPT has reportedly asked 10,000 people to test this service.

 

What’s all the fuss about- what’s new?

So, RankBrain is thought to monitor shoppers’ interactions with a website, including the bounce rate, dwell time, and whether they visit another website.

With this information, Google can monitor “engagement metrics.”

Then Google is thought to reshuffle its results accordingly, based on how interested the shoppers are in that business. After all, let’s say the business sells kitchen sinks; if most shoppers leave after just 2 seconds flat, it’s clear that the website is not doing an excellent job at selling and advertising that product.

So, ChatGPT A. It is different; it’s not there solely to monitor user engagement.

It’s there to form an answer to a question and then to basically have a conversation with the shopper so that they can ask whatever they want about that product.

 

For example:

“find me a car under 25k.”
– Okay, make that an electric car
– Okay, now show me an electric car with the best safety rating
See what we mean? So, instead of starting a new search, ChatGPT Search knows that you’re asking more and more questions to find a car that best suits you.

Source Credibility

SearchGPT: OpenAi has stated, “We want SearchGPT to provide fast and accurate answers while clearly citing the sources used.”

By clearly citing credible sources, SearchGPT aims to boost their trust and reliability, giving users instant access to high-quality information.

 

Show sources

It’s been reported that SearchGPT will show its sources. So, for example, if it says this is the “safest electric car on sale in 2024,” it might point to a car review website or, let’s say, a car crash test company. So, basically, the shopper is also reassured of knowing where the facts and information have come from.

 

How could this change web design?

So, good web designers and digital marketing companies are often hired by their clients to improve their search engine optimisation, which is usually abbreviated to just “SEO.”

So, if you go to a bargain basement and get a cheap website designed, well, it’s close to sure that the web design agency can’t spend that extended writing white hat, ever-green content marketing that’s original. Google E-EAT may flag it as low quality, then if that search engine doesn’t think the work is high quality, then so may Bing and, therefore, SearchGPT.

So, instead, you must invest time or a bigger marketing budget to ensure the text is high-quality, super valuable for your shoppers, and well-written. Think about being as helpful as you possibly can.

Answer each question in as much detail as you can, hire good copywriters, and make sure that you hire web design businesses that can design a website so that you can offer helpful content marketing to your shoppers. However, the website should also be designed so that there isn’t too much text in huge, massive blocks of text, as shoppers often don’t want to read long paragraphs.

So, you must blend good web design with offering information shoppers will find helpful:

 

Top tips from our web designers:

– Don’t overwhelm the shopper with large blocks of text; split the writing up into manageable sections
– Answer questions your shoppers often have
– Make sure the work is well written and follows the advice of Google E-EAT.

 

What is SearchGPT, and how could this change web design and SEO forever?

Our web designers, based in Cardiff, explain how SearchGPT could change SEO and how companies design their websites.

Web design vs web development-what is the difference?

Introduction

What can sometimes be perplexing to some people is when their web design agency starts to talk about technical jargon such as mentioning “JavaScript” and “PHP” and also designing an “AMP” version of the website.

To somebody who’s never had a website designed, well all this technical language can get confusing, so much so that you may be reaching for the aspirin during your meeting with the web designers.

But do not worry; we are committed to simplifying the web design process at this agency. We’ve dedicated a whole article to explaining the main differences between web design and web development because these terms differ in terms of what they mean when designing a new website for your business.

 

Web design concentrates on the aesthetics and the U.X, which is short for “user experience”.

Web design, the aspect most customers understand, and something they often type on Google when they want to obtain a new company website.

Web design is primarily about the aesthetics and the UX. However, its not just about how the website looks but also about how users can interact with it- this is what web designers call the U.X, and this needs to be carefully considered, in order to lower the businesses bounce rate and improve the organic search engine optimisation.

A well-designed website should look stunning and prioritises user experience (U.X), making it easy to navigate.

This unwavering focus on user experience ensures that your customers will interact positively with your website, what we mean by that is the dwell time should be higher, the bounce lower, helping to improve the companies organic search engine optimisation.

So, to give you an example of what we are talking about, we are web designers based in the heart of Cardiff’s city centre, and even though we’ve designed plenty of WordPress websites for various customers, we still encounter websites that are sometimes confusing and difficult to use.

For example, from recollection, we can remember a rather minimalistic website with a main menu designed to be in the top right-hand corner, which you needed to click on it, to expand the main menu, the “burger menu”- well it was very hard to find.

And this had thinking, surely this must be increasing the companies bounce rate.

So, web design is a balance by looking brilliant and also being functional.

 

Web design, therefore, concentrates on the layout of the page and the design

Therefore, web design considers different aspects, such as how the header section will look, how the footer will look, how wide it is, where the main menu is located, and where the content marketing should be placed.

 

Colour scheme (hex codes)

Web designers need to carefully consider the colour scheme (which hex codes they will use) so that it replicates the brand guidelines.

If you haven’t got brand guideline, lets say because you are a start-up business, you should carefully consider the colour scheme because it can have a dramatic effect on the look and the feel of the website; if for example you want to go after the premium end of the market, or if you want a different appearance, such being a low cost company, then often different colour scheme are used.

For example, we were recently shopping for kitchen sinks. Some retailers crowd the page with special offers, bright colours so you remember the brand.

On the other end, if you are looking for a high-end copper, hand-beaten sink, the website is often more minimalist, more luxurious colours, such as gold, black and white are often used, to show it’s an expensive premium product.

The typography is entirely different on a premium, expensive website, and often the pages are less cluttered is more about concentrating on show casing high-quality product that justifies sink being let’s say thousand pounds a sink! Wow.

 

User Experience (UX)

You want to create a positive user experience
Whether your walking into a gym, a hotel, or a fancy restaurant, a friendly, smiling face greeting you changes the whole atmosphere.

You should keep this in mind when designing your website.

Obviously a shopper doesn’t want to be greeted by a vast smiling face whenever looking to buy a product online.
What they do want instead, often is a simple website; a website thats gets them to the product or service that they wish with a minimal amount of effort; they don’t want to be greeted with main menu, that’s overly cluttered, and full of so many products, that the shopper doesn’t find what they want, which will increase the bounce rate.

Creating a good user experience should be like a helping hand, helping the shopper throughout the buying journey, offering advice about the product and assisting in terms of offering good customer service via web chat and phone numbers or offering a contact forms for them to fill out; and they should all be a breeze to use.

 

Responsive

We live busy lives, so many people are strapped for time when buying items and services. Therefore, many people are purchasing items on the move, on the bus, on the train, or on the subway.

Your website should work on smartphones and tablets and be tested extensively to ensure it works perfectly.

 

Wireframes

We recently watched a program where a famous car brand sculpted a prototype car out of solid clay.
This is similar to when your web developers wire-frame a website. It’s not the finished product, and is not usable until the web design is complete.

However the wireframing and the web developers allow for an outline sketch of the website to be created, to understand where the different elements can go, for example, where the main menu goes, and whether text can be laid out on the page.

 

Bring your vision to life without the complication

Some web designers spend forever and a day creating a website; however, we have been designing content management systems for over ten years. So, we have got down to fine art by liaising with the customer to understand what they want quickly; we can then build quality websites for them in a short period of time, often in less than a month from start to finish.

We are the company to call, if you’re looking for highly talented web designers in Cardiff. We have over ten years of experience helping businesses to improve their organic SEO and obtain high-quality websites. Starting at just £950, we are the company to call.

 

Why we recommend when you have your website designed, you should immediately obtain a Google Search Console account

Date: 29/07/2024

For many businesses, getting a website designed is just the start of promoting their business. Business owners often now know that they need to appear on page one of Google organically, and for that to happen, they need to improve the company’s search engine optimisation. You want as many shoppers as possible to find your business on Google.

Therefore, we highly recommend setting up a Google Search Console account.

The reason we strongly recommend setting up a Google Search Console account as soon as your new website goes live is because you will want to monitor the following metrics:

– Clicks – The number of times your website was clicked on in the search results
– Average position – where did your website rank for a keyword? You set a date for yesterday, the last week, or over many months so you can see if your website ranks for that keyword in Google’s organic results
– Click-through rate (CTR): how many shoppers clicked on your business result in the SERPs?

What is Google Search Console?

So, first things what exactly is Google Search Console?

Google Search Console is offered for free by Google; it’s beneficial for monitoring how well your business’s search engine optimisation is improving. A good SEO consultant will use this tool for many purposes; here what our web design agency used Google Analytics and Google Search Console for:

– Check backlinks
– When we take over the management of a website, we check to see if there are any manual action penalties
– We use it daily to see where our clients rank for keywords they want to improve their SEO.

 

Improving the business’s organic visibility

You could have a website designed by the world’s best web design agency, but if SEO is not improved, that website may get few visitors at all.
So, often, businesses want a well-designed website, yet what’s just as important is that the SEO company works very hard to get that business on the first page of Google for as many products and services as your company sells.

So, to do this, many companies use Google Search Console to check daily where the business ranks for specific keywords. When talking to excellent web designers and SEO consultants, they will tell you that, sure, they often subscribe to many various SEO tools; however, a lot of companies like to use Google Search Console because the data has come straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, meaning the SEO data, is 100% accurate and reliable, simply because its come from Google.

 

Optimise Your Content

Help to write more valuable and helpful content marketing
Google released a significant Google algorithm update called the Google Helpful Content update.
This Google Helpful Content update rewarded businesses that published high-quality, white-hat, well-written content marketing, which showed that the author understood Google E-EAT.

This means that in every piece of content marketing that the business publishes, the author should demonstrate Expertise, Experience, authority, and trustworthiness in every piece of writing they publish.

So, as web designers, it’s essential that content marketing is well-written, white-hat, and written by an expert.
You can also use Google Search Console to see which keywords have the highest impressions. So, let’s say that you’re a solicitor and offer a range of services, yet employment solicitors + name of city gets, by far, by a country mile, the highest number of searches; you can then concentrate on optimising your website to get as many visitors as you possibly can.

Use SEO tools + Google Search Console to improve your website. continually

Many local businesses in Cardiff, the capital of Wales, don’t just want to hire a web designer to design a brochure website and then that’s it. Instead, the business will often need ongoing assistance to improve its search engine optimisation. This is a long road; it often takes at least six months before a local business, such as a local solicitor, can get onto page one of Google.

Yet, most marketing agencies, ours included, use Google Search Console for two main reasons. The first is to know which keywords to optimise the website for. The second is to use this information from GSC in the SEO reporting. Many businesses like the fact that the data has come directly from Google Search Console, so it’s 100% reliable.

 

Discovery New Opportunities

Come to a highly experienced web design company.

Most of our clients come from client recommendations, yet we are also easily found on Google for both “web design” and “SEO” terms; the reason is that we are absolutely brilliant at doing both.

So, this is why many people don’t just choose the “one trick pony” web designers; they partner with us because we offer both services, which means our hardworking web designers can design a fantastic website for your business. Then, when the web developers have finished creating a tremendous website, our SEO consultants can take over. For a fixed monthly fee, we can use Google Search Console and our vast wealth of SEO knowledge to move your business up Google’s ranks.

We have helped many Welsh businesses obtain unique websites with a starting price of just £950.00.

You may also wish to hire us to improve your company’s SEO. For 950, we can design a unique, stunning WordPress CMS website for your business.

Prices for local SEO start from just £500 PCM, with a 6-month minimum commitment.

If you need a website designed or help to improve your company’s SEO, why not call us?

We can handle everything for you, from designing a brand-new WordPress website to adding a Google Search Console and Google Analytics account. Once that has been completed, our team can start to improve your company’s organic search engine optimisation for you.
So why not call us today?

A Beginner Guide to HTML

 

HTML, is the backbone of a website, is a crucial element that ensures the site functions correctly and as you would expect. While you may not see the HTML coding when you visit a website, you certainly interact with it and use it, as its what allows all of the buttons to work.

 

But what exactly is HTML? And why It’s not as complex as it may seem.

HTML is simply an abbreviation, and this stands for Hypertext Markup Language.

Our goal is to demystify the complex HTML language often used by web designers. So, grab a cup of tea and a biscuit, and let’s delve into the world of what Hypertext Markup Language is.

 

Hypertext

Hypertext is simply text that contains links to other pages or websites.

You might use a CMS like WordPress?

This has a dashboard and an inbuilt editor. This means you don’t need coding knowledge to make simple edits to the text, such as adding a page title or adding an internal link or to make the text bold.

However, it’s still important to know the basics of HTML. This knowledge can empower you, especially when you need to manually edit text a page within some content management systems.

Let’s dive straight into explaining what some of these HTML tags are. Don’t worry, it’s not as daunting as it may sound.

 

What is a H1 tag?

So we start with this simply because the page H1 tag is essential for SEO purposes and web design
Googlebot will use this to work out what the page is about; for example, if you are selling kitchen blenders, pressure washers or perhaps you’re selling a brand-new refrigerators, you will often write the brand of product and what the item is within the H1 tag.

The H1 tag, therefore, tells what the page is about.

 

<br> This adds a line break

SEO companies and web designers often use this because sometimes they will be adding a blog post management systems and formatting the text. Adding the line break text to the page allows for a line break to make the text,more digestible in paragraph form rather than it being a massive text block.

Alt text

You can add code to explain what is shown in the picture, this is called the “alt text”.

For example, if it’s a labrador dog with a bone in its mouth, you might wish to write something along the lines of alt text: “labrador dog with a bone in its mouth sitting in the garden”.

This tells Googlebot what that picture is about.

You can have can have some SEO benefits because if there are ten pages of say various washing machines, the alt text alone clearly shows that those pages are selling washing machines.

 

URL structure

Although this is not technically HTML, you should add a SEO friendly URL, for example, a page about garden fencing; use the URL extension/garden-fencing

 

Meta title Meta description

Again, you can use HTML code within the source code to label the meta title and meta descriptions; this can help to improve your businesses CTR.

 

Would you like a website designed?

You might have found all this talk about HTML confusing, but do not worry. We can design a brilliant website for your business in under four weeks, so why not call us to get the ball rolling on our designer’s designing a website for your company?
This is a brief overview of some important HTML text that can be added to a page; there are many more.
Make sure you check back for the latest web design help and advice.

Our top tips when designing a homepage for your company website

 

Introduction

Subject: Web Design
Date: 16/07/2024

When designing a website, creating the correct initial impression through a well-designed homepage is absolutely essential. Not only will this generate the right impression of your business, but it can also help improve your company’s organic SEO by lowering the “bounce rate.”

This article will explain how it can further strengthen your homepage web design and enhance your company’s SEO.
In this article, we will cover:

– Why it’s essential to have well-designed website navigation
– Why it’s important to have super-fast website hosting
– Why the homepage must be well designed to help lower your business “bounce rate.”

 

Introduction

The homepage often serves as the initial point of contact for most shoppers when they visit your company website.
Given that the homepage is usually the first page most customers are greeted with, its design and functionality are of utmost importance. A well-designed homepage not only creates a positive first impression but also facilitates easy access to the product or service pages they are interested in.

For example, someone who wants to buy a new washing machine, will want to go from the homepage, and straight to the product section which sells washing machines with the minimum amount of clicks.

This article discusses some things you should consider when designing the homepage for your company website.
Well-designed website navigation

As the world’s global brands and major retailers will know, getting a shopper to the right page is essential as quickly as possible. If you don’t, the bounce rate often increases for the homepage. People usually want to reach the right product or service page in just a few seconds of visiting your website. If they find the main menu to be confusing or frustrating, the business’s organic SEO could be damaged.

Therefore, it’s essential to have a well-designed main menu

 

Keep things simple

We have seen websites that are sometimes too minimalistic, so much so that the main menu is hidden in the right hand corner and sometimes difficult to click on.
If the button to expand the main menu is just a tiny dot in the right-hand corner then we would recommend changing it to a bigger main menu.

You have to think of your website design a bit like you are designing the layout for an airport. The airport is designed to help people get to the right terminal quickly. The same is true for your company website.

You have to design the website to get shoppers from the homepage to the right page with the minimum number of clicks so they can get to the right product page without increasing their bounce rate.

 

Calls to action (CTA)

A call to action could be something as simple as a contact form replicated on every page, and you could say something along the lines of “do you have a question or want us to give your ringback”. This is a call to action.
This is a straightforward example of what could be implemented to help increase your business’s sales.
Instead of a certain percentage of shoppers leaving the website, they might ask a question, resulting in your business making a sale.

Experienced web designers, whether they work for an agency or as freelancers, understand the importance of CTAs.

They know how to strategically place these prompts, such as “sign up to now newsletter” across your website to guide users and encourage them to take action. Their expertise is invaluable in creating a website that not only looks great but also drives conversions.

Fast hosting

So, the website must be well designed and functional in terms of everything working correctly and ensuring customers get to the correct pages as quickly as possible. This is achieved by having a well designed main menu.

The website should be supersonic fast. This can also help to reduce the bounce rate.

In conclusion, the website needs to be well designed, but it also needs to think about offering quality information.
Good web designers will know about the Google Helpful Content update. This rewards websites that offer valuable content marketing with placing those helpful pages or blog posts higher up in Google’s SERP’s.

The information on your company website needs to be valuable and helpful to shoppers. This will reduce the bounce rate and also improve your organic SEO.

This is why I never recommend buying an overly cheap website. It’s worth paying more for a quality website that explains what the business can offer in detail. You will often need a combination of excellent copywriters, web designers, and highly experienced SEO consultants to work together, to design a fantastic website for your business.

 

Come to one of the best web designers in Cardiff

If you’re looking for web designers in the city of Cardiff, Wales, whether that’s to design a brochure website has just four pages or need an e-commerce website built that has potentially over 1000 pages then you want to contact us today for a free quote?

 

Why U.X (User Experience) and SEO are directly correlated

 

You might think that having a website designed that looks brilliant and offers a good U.X (user experience) won’t exactly impact your business’s SEO. You might think that website design and SEO are therefore entirely different and, therefore, unrelated?

However, they are directly connected, especially since Google’s RankBrain is now monitoring engagement (bounce rates, dwell time) with the websites that offer positive user experience, often therefore ranking much higher in Google’s organic SERP’s.Therefore, this is often why cheap websites don’t cut it- so a word to the wise, don’t waste your money. If you are serious about getting a business on page 1 of Google.co.uk, the website must be well-designed and offer a good user experience.

Therefore keeping a low bounce rate across your main pages is very important, you must often provide a good UX.

Here’s some of the ways you can improve your businesses user experience:

– Pay for fast website hosting
– Pay to get the website designed so its super simple to use
– Pay for on-going A/B testing, for further improve the web design

 

What is Google’s Core Web vitals?

Google’s Core Web vitals are within and therefore part of Google’s core algorithm.
Google’s Core Web vitals determines how fast the company website is, how quickly it can become interactive so the customer can use it, and how visually stable it is. In a nutshell, you want your website to be lightning-fast so customers can use it immediately.

 

What does largest Contentful Paint (LCP) even mean?

So, without getting too technical, LCP measures how long it takes for a significant element on the page, such as a large block of text, to load and become visible in the viewport. They might have you scratching your head and thinking, what does that even mean?
In a nutshell, Google’s algorithms want to work out the LCP, how fast the company website is and how quick it is at loading the most significant element on the page to determine how good a user experience that page offers.
So, its bit like waiting for the bus, you want it come on time. And it’s the same with a website, if its doesn’t load on a smartphone, such as the latest i-phone super quickly, and instead its slow, well, this means the user experience is poor.
Super fast website hosting is now a must

Therefore, global brands, such as large multi-million-pound companies, have superfast hosting that loads literally in a fraction of a second. Consequently, it has a fast “LCP”, and even the page is likely to load on smartphones and laptops quicker.

You might be thinking, well, why is a lightning-fast website needed?

The reason is shoppers are simply impatient; if the website takes too slow to load cell a smartphone in an area with a weak signal, for example, they might not be 5G in the rural countryside, there just might be 3G in that area, and the page may well be slow to load, and what then happens is the bounce rate increases often substantially. This is bad for a businesses SEO.
This is why web designers and SEO consultants work hard to improve your website’s LCP.

 

High bounce rates are not the way to go

With most SEO metrics, you want them to be high; for example, you are on many good-quality backlinks, good-quality content marketing articles, and a high number of engaged followers on your companies Instagram account.
Yet you don’t want this one SEO metric to be high, and that is a high bounce rate. A high bounce rate means shoppers are leaving your website without visiting another page, which can damage your companies SEO.

 

First impact delay

The first impact delay is how long it takes a website that can be interactive to be used by the customer.
So, for example, somebody shopping for a kitchen blender, wants to find that item as soon as possible.
Again, it boils down to shoppers are now impatient; they’ve used superfast broadband and 5G mobile so shopppers are now used to ultra fast websites, if your company does not have the same level of service, and they instantly bounce off the websites, well this will damage your companies SEO.

 

What does Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) mean?

What you want is visual stability, so for example when you’re drunk, an you reach out for your glass of wine; it might not be where you expect it to be because your vision is impaired.

However, this is the same when a website that is not visually stable; the hosting might well be so slow, the company website moves around several times before it becomes stable and ready to use.

Therefore, good web designers want to ensure the website’s visual stability is good.

Making the company website “visually stable” as soon as possible offers a good user experience. If however, on the other hand the page unexpectedly moves around; for example, if a button shifts a place when a shopper is trying to buy an item and click “buy it now”, this does not provide a good user experience.

 

In summary

in summary, whether you are designing the desktop or mobile version of a company website, you need to offer a good user experience is essential.

This will directly correlate to improving your business’s organic SEO. If your business is serious about improving the organic SEO, then you need a website with a good user experience.

Therefore, this article illustrates the combination of good website hosting in terms of being fast and reliable. Still, it’s also more than that: it’s also the actual design of the website. It needs to load quickly and be stable, and every aspect needs to be fast.

 

How we can help

We have been designing websites for donkeys for years in Cardiff and for a wide range of businesses.

Therefore, we can create a quality website for your business with prices starting from just 950.

Call us for a quote today.
WP Web Design can help to improve your business’s website design and help to improve your organic SEO.

How long does it generally take to build a new website?

 

Introduction

Let’s say you’ve just started your business here in South Wales. You’ve printed business cards, and the company vehicles, such as your van, have been signed and written. There’s just one thing missing, yes, that’s right: your company website.

Now, you’re thinking, how long does it take to get a new website designed and built?

Well, you’ve come to the right place to find an answer to that pressing question. We are not new to this game but have built websites for local businesses for over ten years. Our experience puts us in a prime position to offer sound advice on how long it takes to design and build a brochure website.

In this article, you will find ways to help your web designers accelerate the web design process and explain why going cheap rarely pays in the long run.

So, without further ado, let’s examine some factors that dictate the time it takes to design a new website.

 

Have you got a clear vision?

A clear idea of what you like can make things a piece of cake for your web designers. Some businesses don’t have the foggiest idea, so everything from the colour schemes to how they want the company logo to look must be discussed in long meetings.
Yet, having a clear idea of what you want can massively accelerate the web design process.

So, to further help you along with your web design journey, here are some of the things you may wish also to consider:

– How many pages do you require to be designed
– Do you require a company blog?
– Do you have a business address you would like added?
– Have you already got a company logo designed?
– Have you got a colour scheme in mind?
– Who’s going to be writing the content marketing

 

Who’s going to be hosting the website?

Most web designers, including our web design agency, can offer you a low cost for hosting the website. However, not all web design companies are so fair. Sometimes, the monthly fee to host the website can be very high.

So you must consider this: if it’s going to cost £500+ per year to host the website with that web design company, do you want to use them?
You need to carefully consider this from the outset simply because many businesses choose web design agencies based on the website’s cost. Rarely do companies consider ongoing expenses, such as domain name renewal and hosting costs. For some businesses, these costs can be chicken feed, which is nothing worth worrying about.

Some other businesses’ hosting costs could be high. When you add up the hosting cost over the years, you have the website with them; you could be talking thousands of pounds.

So, to cut a long story short, consider the hosting and ongoing maintenance costs with that web design agency—if they are too high, go elsewhere.

 

Who’s going to be writing all of the text?

Thousands of words sometimes need to be written for a new website, such as an e-commerce website, which can take considerable time.
So, you have to ask yourself, will you have the time to write all of this text?
As this article discusses how long it takes to get a website designed, hiring copywriters can help save a lot of time. Often, a large digital marketing agency will have copywriters who can write all the text. This means you save considerable time and can concentrate on other aspects of running your business.

Therefore, a copywriter can work with the web developers. They will know about each page’s layout (or at least they should), and then, like busy bees, they can get to write the work.

First, before any copywriter starts drinking copious amounts of espresso and is set to work on writing everything from product descriptions to your new about us page, you will need a meeting with your copywriters. This is to discuss things like “tone of voice”—does your business want to sound professional yet funny? Or do you want to come across as a severe company? This is why we urge you to meet with your copywriters to discuss this.

 

Copywriters can help you save a considerable amount of time.

So, in a nutshell, if you’re in a mad rush to get your website designed, fully built, and live so your customers can start visiting it, then we would recommend hiring copywriters. The reason we say this is that some business owners say, yeah, no worries, I will write all the text, save a few quid, yet they then quickly learn that it takes up a considerable amount of time and can sometimes set back the website going live for many, many weeks. So, if you take nothing else away from this article, think about hiring a copywriter.

 

Talk to your friends in business.
You might be scratching your head right now, thinking, what have my friends, who are also in business, about getting a new website designed?

Well, we shall elaborate…. So, hold your horses!

Businesses up and down the glorious land we call Great Britain, our home, get talked into content management systems, CMS for short, which can sometimes be rubbish.

The CMS maybe like a 1.0 car—great if you want little performance. Yet, if you wish for actual performance, you don’t go for a small-engine petrol car, do you?

Nope, you go for a roaring 3.0 turbo or naturally aspirated if you don’t like turbo lag.
So, what’s the point we are trying to make? Even we will admit we’re going off track here…..

Well, the point we are trying to make is that you want the CMS you choose to be secure, so as your business grows and changes are needed to the website, you can make those changes; you’re not held back by a rubbish CMS that’s basic, rubbish, and just well naff.
So, this is why we ask businesses, when you’re thinking about making a super cheap CMS website, what CMS is it using? If you have never heard of it, other website designers have never heard of it, or it’s a CMS, the web designers have knocked themselves up. Well, just run and dash.

What you want is a well-known CMS used by millions of businesses. That way, even if you have a falling out with one set of web designers and heated e-mails are exchanged, you can walk away and find new web designers the same day who have experience designing websites using that CMS if it’s a popular CMS.

So we deviate, and you are thinking: What does choosing the suitable CMS have to do with how long it takes to build a website?
As the old saying goes, buy cheap, buy it twice.

Well, this 100% applies to getting a website built for your business. With the amount of rubbish, naf, and low-quality designs, the industry has tried approaching SEO agencies for quotes, and some SEO companies won’t even work on the website. It’s that rubbish.
So, pick a website content management system that’s widely used.

 

Take inspiration from your competitors.

Even the simplest of websites will need a main menu, a mobile version of the website, and a page layout for each page. When you think of a large e-commerce website, there’s a considerable amount to consider.

So, if you sit down with your web designers and say, well, I like how this competitor has designed their main menu. I like how the footer on this competitor’s website looks in terms of their Instagram feed; I like the page layout of this competitor; well, this is all food for thought.
Just like one giant puzzle, where once it looked like all the pieces were scattered, well, they can all start coming together, and your web designers, web developers, copywriters, and, of course, you can start to piece all of this together to make a new design yet incorporate aspects of our websites you like.

Of course, just to be clear here, we are not talking about copying any competitor’s website because they don’t do that, and it’s likely to get their lawyers contacting the website owner. Your new website needs to look different. We are talking about getting some design ideas.

Hi, yes, sorry, I forgot to mention this page. I need to be added…

As web designers who have been around the block (for those who don’t know, that means been around a bit), we often find that customers forget about an extra page they need added.

So, for example, let’s say you’re a solicitor. You’ve been working for a giant law firm for years, and now you’re setting up on your own. Well, it’s not uncommon for you to think, “O, no.” At 1 a.m., you might think,” I forgot to mention to the web designers that I need an added page for employment law or something along those lines.

So it sounds basic, but trust us, you need to do two things. One, check your direct competitors’ websites. How have they set out the pages?

How have they separated their primary services?
If you want to improve the SEO for these services, later on, have each set out on their page.

Then, sketch the main menu on paper, with the most critical services at the top and the least essential services moving down.

Now, a word to the wise, and listen up. This is a crucial piece of advice; you may thank us later. Set each leading service you offer on its page, then ask your web designers to add essential on-page SEO elements, such as page titles, internal links, H1-H6 titles, meta titles, and meta descriptions for each page. This will improve your SEO and make it easier to improve it later on.

Some move fast, some move slow, and the road is long, so choose quality

A website is unlike a soft drink; you pick it up, quickly devour it, and then drop it in the bin once it is done. A website needs to last, well, at least for a good few years. So please don’t go cheap; don’t pick a website designer who promises to design a website in the blink of an eye and then be disappointed with the masterpiece they have created.

 

The road is long…

Pick a web design company that doesn’t rush yet doesn’t move at a snail’s pace; you want quality. This often doesn’t come cheap, but if you’re serious about improving your company’s search engine optimisation later on, well, you need a quality website designed at the start. So, this means no copying and pasting anyone else’s text.

 

Web design Cardiff-what to think about when picking a local web designer

Introduction

Setting up a new business is an exciting time; you might have been an employee within a large company for, say, the last 25 years, and now, you’re jumping into running your very own limited company.

You have bold plans and ideas. You want to bring your company to the market and offer something new to the customer.

You believe you will have the edge over the competition and are eager and ambitious to grow your business.

You therefore want to grow your business into something that you are proud of.

When you sit back and plan your businesses growth, often the business owner often writes out a business plan for say the next 5 years. For some businesses, such as those business which are setting up in Cardiff, Wales, 100% of their customers may come via online marketing.

Therefore you may plan advertise on social media or are working on improving organic SEO, the key to the success of your online advertising is a well-designed website.

 

So many Cardiff web design businesses to pick from

Now, the good news is this: what is spoilt for choice when picking local website designers.

There are many freelancers which working in spare bedrooms, right through large marketing agencies in the United Kingdom that can easily employ over 300 staff.

So the price point for each company to design the website is different; a point that we are trying to make here is that there is an ample amount of web designers catering for all sorts of budgets, so your bound to find a web designer who can build a new website for the price you had budgeted.

We here at our web designers, have seen websites have been advertised for as low £300, and companies offering brochure websites sometimes well over £11,000.

We have a range of different companies out there to choose from, but this does beg the question, how do you pick a Cardiff website designer?

Well, we are not impartial- as we are a well known web design company.

Yet with that said, we can provide some helpful pointers on things you might want to consider when picking a local designer.

So, without further ado, let’s give you some food for thought on what you might wish to consider when choosing a new web developer or designer.

 

Can you work with that person

Now? You might think this is obvious- right?

But at this stage, you might be wondering if this blog post is even worth reading? However, hold your horses for a second, as we are going to dispense quality advice your way.

Working with a WordPress designer or another type of web designer is often not a one-off process.

You often need to liaise with that person over many months or years regarding discussions regarding backing up the website, hosting, SEO, and making amendments to the website.

Therefore, if you find a person difficult to deal with on the telephone, that they are quite, well obnoxious, or that they just don’t get back to you within a reasonable time frame, then this is an indication that you need to cut your losses and go to another web design business.

However, you should also assess at the initial meeting can you work with the web designers over a long period of time.

Choose the right content management system for your business

We are huge fans and great promoters of the content management system “WordPress”. It’s important to remember that it’s not the only show in town, and you do have to meet different agencies that may advise you to use different content management systems that better suit your businesses needs.

 

Take your time choosing the right CMS

Yet, for many of our clients, after seeing the admin panel and dashboard on WordPress, they often find it very user-friendly and simple to use.

As highly skilled web designers, we are sometimes shown other content management systems that are not so user-friendly, they can even be sometimes rather challenging to use, and full of glitches, and sometimes, these companies dissipate into thin air because there’s not a lot of uptake for that particular CMS.

WordPress is used by millions of companies globally

On the other hand, this is why we chose WordPress: It’s been around for a very long time.

Over our ten years we have been running our business, it’s been one of the most widely used CMS by Cardiff businesses.

It continues to be popular because people see that it is good quality, simple to use, open source, widely respected as a good CMS by web developers, and used by millions of businesses. Some global brands use WordPress.

But don’t take our word for it; step back and evaluate which content management system is best for your business. Is it WordPress, or is it the different types of CMS?

 

Ongoing maintenance

You might get up in the morning and have a nice refreshing cup of coffee and a croissant.
Then, for the day, you might make a list of things you want to do when at your business premises, and you’re excited to get to work to implement those things that you want to do today.

But as any good business owner knows, it’s easy to get sidetracked.

One hundred and one things can get in the way of doing what you’re supposed to do. You might get home-put your slippers on, switch on the television, evaluate your to do list you wrote out in the morning, and think, well, I can even get even quarter of that done today.

As business owners say, it’s difficult to sometimes juggle everything that needs to get done.
You often don’t have time to manage your website’s maintenance: updating the plug-ins, making backups, and fixing little glitches fixed on your website.

So, who will take care of the ongoing WordPress website maintenance?

Again, this is something you should discuss with designers because, trust us, some web designers charge a small fortune for this monthly work.

Often the business gets sucked into a supercheap web design price, so low that even the customers are thinking about how do the designers make money and do this.

Then you see them in the small print.

Sometimes, for ongoing maintenance, the designers charge a monthly fee for hosting and maintenance.

This might be £75 per month, which doesn’t sound much when you add up over the lifetime of the website; well, that becomes costly for some businesses, especially all you have is let’s say, seven pages or less.

 

Ask about what is the hourly rate to make amendments

As we know, sometimes staff come and go, the services your business offers may change, and so do the products, and this often means the website needs to be updated.

Now, if you receive your web design invoice for amendments made to your company website end of the month, and it shocks you in terms of the fee, so much that you have a shocked expression on your face all day, all this is no good.

Therefore, you need a web design company that offers a fair hourly price to make amendments to your website. So much so that you are not frightened to make changes to the website because of fearing how much it will cost.

Therefore, you need to check with your web designers how much they charge to make website amendments. You might need many amendments every single month. For example, you might need to amend a new staff member, or perhaps you no longer stock the product so you need it removed.

 

Functionality

One of our favourite TV commercials, which was on TV long ago, was created by a different advertising firm that used the strapline. Isn’t it nice when things work?

That’s an amazing strapline we think.

Because it’s true: You know things that are produced today are sometimes overly complicated, just too technical, and sometimes we lose appreciation for the simple things, things that just work.

The first thing is to pick are web designers who know how to design quality websites.

.
Let’s leave you with that thought: the success of a business can sometimes be in the hands of your web designers to pick your next web design agency carefully and spend your time evaluating what they’re offering for the money.

What are the main benefits of working with a highly experienced web design company?

 

You might be sitting with a cup of tea before checking your e-mails using Microsoft Outlook. You might be evaluating which web design quote to choose.

Prices for web design that have returned to your inbox may vary wildly. One quote might be for £750, while another is quoted over three and a half thousand pounds.

Yet, as the company’s director, you probably already know that you can’t evaluate web design agencies just based on the prices they offer. And neither should you because it boils down to the quality of the web design, whether the finished design reflects what your business can offer, and how well that website will serve you over the long run.

As the old saying goes, buy cheap, and you often must pay twice.

At the same time, you don’t want to cough up more than you need to.

Therefore, picking the right web design company requires balance, and making this choice is not easy.

 

The benefits of working with a highly experienced web design agency in Bristol

Functionality and design

If you buy a high-performance car that costs a small fortune, you often want high performance but also want it to work every time the switch is on. There’s nothing more frustrating than when something doesn’t work.

Now, this is the same for web design. You might have a website designed that initially looks impressive, so much so that it blows your socks off.

Yet if it’s full of glitches and the people keep emailing you to say there are problems with the website, this can be a real headache over the long run.

So, first things first, you want a web design company that simply builds and designs quality websites and offers functionality that works perfectly, with all the coding glitches, whether it’s Javascript or anything else, fixed. This often means picking the right content management system, but by having highly experienced web designers, we can ensure that everything works as it should.

 

Does your business require SEO services?

If a company gets most of its work from the public sector, it might not need to invest in organic SEO. The reason is that the business doesn’t need to advertise or be ranked high on Google for various keywords if most companies work from the public sector.

However, suppose a business relies more on the private sector, such as a plumbing, construction, or scaffolding business. In that case, you should hire a web design company that can also work hard on improving your company’s search engine optimisation every month, as your business may rely on advertising the business on Google for your company to gain work.

So, whether your business wants to improve its local or organic SEO, you will often need a marketing agency to help.

 

Long road

SEO is a long road; it must step into a long-term process; nothing happens quickly, and every month, you must work hard to improve your rankings on Google. And where your business ultimately ranks is dependent on Google’s algorithms. So, you could work, burning the midnight oil for months, and your company doesn’t rise that much in Google’s ranks. That’s until Google rolls out a major algorithm update; if the SEO work is done right, you can rank higher in Google’s results.

Many companies say it can take over six months to see solid results from your SEO, but how well your search engine optimisation improves depends on the company you hire.

Plus, before any SEO work starts, you will need a quality website; this is where our web designers in Cardiff are often hired. Whether a £950 WordPress website or a £7k WordPress website, our web designers will always design a brilliant website for any business we work for.

 

Supersonic

Websites today need to be supersonic fast, and whichever web design company you choose, you must ensure you’re getting good quality website hosting.

 

Purchase quality

You can buy a new winter jacket that is cheap and quickly falls apart at the seams.

However, you could pay more and buy quality, such as a wax jacket made by a British company that might last decades.

This is the same with company websites; often, if you buy cheap, you end up paying twice.

You want a company website that could potentially last a business, say, the next seven years. So, you need a quality website, and thankfully, today, when you pick web designers like W&P Web Design, you can gain a quality WordPress website for your business that doesn’t break the bank.

 

Mobile and desktop

The website’s mobile and desktop versions must work perfectly and be designed to a high standard. We are experienced web designers based in Cardiff and can create a high-quality WordPress website for your business in less than four weeks.

Contact the team for a quote today.

 

 

How to improve and optimise your page loading speed: different marketing strategies to make your company website load faster

 

Date: 02/July/2024

 

Introduction

Regardless of your business size or structure, the speed of your company website is a critical factor in improving its SEO.
A fast website is essential for a business to appear on the first page of Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs). The company website also needs to be fast on mobile and desktop. A slow website not only hampers your chances of being ranked on page 1 but also leads to a high bounce rate, potentially resulting in customer loss.

 

Here’s what can happen if your company website is slow:

-Google will not rank it as high
– Your companies bounce rate may well be very high
– You could be missing out on sales
– The time of site on Google Analytics could be slow
– The average number of pages the shopper goes on could be less
– Your business could be disadvantaged, as Google’s algorithm may rank your business much lower in Google’s SERPs.

 

Purchase good quality website hosting.

In today’s digital landscape, websites need to be supersonic—think Concord speed. Achieving this requires a significant investment in high-quality hosting and reliable hosting providers—don’t just opt for the cheapest hosting prices, as this could damage your business’s search engine optimisation.

 

This article will explain fully how you can improve your business page speed:

 

What is Google’s recommended page load time?

Many SEO consultants and leading web design agencies agree that Google (Alphabet Inc) hasn’t stipulated an exact page load time for which to aim. However, Google and other large search engine companies, such as Microsoft’s Bing, have clarified that they want company websites to be as fast as possible.

Google, for example, has provided “Google’s Page Speed Insights,” a perfect tool for assessing the speed of your company website and recommending ways to improve it.

Therefore, especially on larger e-commerce websites, web developers spend thousands of hours improving the website’s speed and lowering bounce rate to enable a better user experience; therefore, it’s all about having a fast website, and slow hosting or a slow website has no place in 2024.

If your business is serious about getting on page one of Google.co.uk or Google.com, you need fast hosting. Businesses also sometimes have an AMP (Accelerated Mobile Version) of the website designed.

 

Don’t opt for super cheap/low-cost hosting. It’s often a false economy.

Sure, there are also hosting companies that offer super low prices for low-cost monthly website hosting, yet if the website is so slow that it puts you at a direct disadvantage behind your direct competitors, then it’s a false economy.

Therefore, as a small business owner, investing in supersonic website hosting is well worth the extra expense. It’s also a good move, as it could help improve your company’s SEO. While it may be triple the price or more, the benefits to your SEO and user experience (U.X) are invaluable.

 

Some things can’t be improved.

Let’s say somebody is in the middle of a field at a rock concert, and the signal on their smartphone is not that good. The website owner cannot control how fast, say, the 4G network is in that particular area.

The business can control the design of the website to ensure it loads quickly, so you may want an AMP version of your website. Take the example of a content management system, which can sometimes be bloated with unnecessary plug-ins. These can be identified and removed, improving the load time, and a web developer can exercise this control to improve the speed of your company website.

Remove unnecessary WordPress plugins (get your web designers to do this, as it could affect how your website works)

These could be unnecessary WordPress CMS plugins, which, when present and not being used, could slow down the load time of every page. However, these are issues that a skilled web developer can address and improve upon.

Therefore, the key to good website design is not just aesthetics but also speed—this is why we recommend using Google Page Speed Insights to see how you can improve the speed of your company website. It’s about finding the balance to ensure your website is visually appealing, has a good design, and is supersonic fast.

Many SEO agencies and web designers fully understand that Google Page Experience is now essential to the web design process. Therefore, the website must visually stabilise quickly, be mobile-friendly, and have a rapid page load speed. If not, the website should be improved; yes, this can take hundreds of hours of a web developer’s time, which is sometimes vital if your business wants to improve its organic SEO.

While many web developers can help your website do this, it should only be undertaken by highly qualified and experienced web developers.

 

Compressing images

Let’s say you have a website; there are ten images on each page, say on the homepage of your WordPress website.
The homepage could take a long time to load, which could seriously disadvantage your organic SEO if your website is now slow because of the large pictures you have included on it.

Let’s say you run a holiday cottage somewhere rural in the middle of France. You might have thought you were doing an excellent job by adding all those pictures to show potential tourists what the place and the surrounding countryside look like. You’re happy because you designed the WordPress website yourself, and you may think you have done an excellent job.

But at the same time, if the website is too slow to load because of too many large images of your holiday cottage in France, another competitor with another holiday cottage with a more basic website may rank higher on Google.fr. So, you would work with a web designer from the start to make that website faster. The web developers will most likely use Google Page Speed Insights to make the website faster.

 

HTTP Caching

This can mean that if a shopper returns to your website, for example, somebody might browse around and buy or visit, say, ten different online retailers of washing machines from various online retailers. But let’s say that your company website has had “Browser HTTP Caching enabled”; this will likely make your company website much faster if the shopper returns to your website, offering a better user experience.

 

Most definitely use Google’s PageSpeed Insights.

You should definitely use Google’s PageSpeed Insights; it’s free and can help improve your website’s performance. It even gives a list of recommendations to help optimise your website. Therefore, most web designers and SEO agencies use this tool to improve the page’s loading speed.

 

So, what does a web developer mean when they’re talking about page speed?

It simply refers to how long a blog post or page takes to load in your browser. Therefore, it’s widely considered that the faster, the better, as it offers a better user experience, which can help reduce bounce rates.

 

How can this help to improve the business’s marketing?

In the early days of Google’s algorithm, when they used Google PageRank, Google’s algorithm didn’t consider how fast the website was—so it was not a ranking factor.

In 2024, most SEO agencies and web design companies would agree that Google’s algorithms are using the speed of your company website as a ranking factor.

This means Google is working out how fast your company website is and using this information in its calculations to determine where to rank your company in the SERPS. Therefore, you need fast and good-quality website hosting.

Do you need a new website designed?

When we design a brand-new website for a business in Cardiff, South Wales, we carefully contemplate the user experience—in terms of how to design the WordPress website to offer a good U.X. So, whether it loads on an Android Smartphone or an Apple iOS, it loads quickly.

Therefore, if you’re looking for a well-designed website built in Cardiff, we are most definitely the web developers to talk to.

 

 

Is your business looking for a front-end web development agency?

Written by: Dave Sanders

Date: 01/07/2024

 

We can build a stunning/fantastic website for your business

As expert web designers, we know that a website doesn’t just have to look good; every aspect must work as it should. So, if your business is looking for a leading front-end web development agency to design a brilliant website for your business, do call us. Businesses normally have to wait a month before we can start work, yet we are worth the wait, as our websites are amazing and well-designed.

 

Good User experience is critical.

So, today, what separates the top brands, which are ranked highly on Google, from businesses on page 7 of the search results is often down to whether the website offers a good user experience.

 

Is the website well designed?

Do you want a piece of cake when getting the product or service page?

A website that’s slow to load, difficult to use, or doesn’t answer the question the shopper wants answered will slowly start to move down Google’s ranks.

A website that does not offer a good UX is not going to get on page one of Google.

There’s a reason why businesses of all sizes flock to W&P Designs: We have some of the best web designers here, designing amazing, well-designed websites. We always consider UX, so we don’t aim to be the cheapest but to design a quality website for your business.

 

Make sure the website is responsive:

You need a website that works on every type of device, from smartphones to Tablets to Windows/Apple desktops. If your company website is not responsive, it won’t work on phones and tablets, and if this is the case, you could be missing out on sales. So this is another reason Cardiff businesses choose us.

The reason is that the fee to make the website responsive is always included in our web design costs. Therefore, we don’t bury this cost in the fine print of our contracts; we always say that if we design a website for £950 or £9500.00, all websites will be responsive.

Designed fast

Businesses that contact us to design and build a WordPress website often want it designed quickly. They may be start-up businesses that are already up and running and working for clients. They may also be working from their personal e-mail addresses right now, so they need our team to design a website quickly.

We can design a website for your business quickly, often in less than one month. Most of our £950.00 brochure websites can be designed in less than one month. Our customers are often impressed by how fast we can work. We offer the complete solution, including website hosting and WordPress websites, as well as ensuring the website is responsive. Our web design company offers amazing value for money.

 

Benefits of working with our Cardiff-based business

We build fast; we build quality websites.

Whether it’s a 7-page brochure website or a 100-page e-commerce website, we build our websites fast. We can also work to save the customer time because we have highly experienced copywriters in-house.

This means that whether it’s 1,000 words or 10,000 words, we can help save you time. Our business can, therefore, take care of everything: designing the desktop version of the website and the mobile version of the website. We can write the text, and we can offer affordable hosting.

It is clear why businesses in Cardiff, ranging from used car dealers to dentists, ask W&P to design their websites. We create quality websites fast. Our WordPress web designers design quality websites, which start from just £950.00

Don’t choose a web design company that will design an essential website for your business.

Today, whether you run an MOT station or a hairdresser, customers have plenty of businesses to choose from on Google.co.uk.

It’s important that your website impresses the customer, not just to obtain more sales but also because you don’t want a website with a sky-high bounce rate.

Too many businesses hire web designers just because they are cheap or because they can offer a super cheap web design price. Yet, as the old saying goes, if you pay cheap, you end up paying twice.

 

Instead, get a quality website built; here’s why so many businesses hire us:

– We can take care of the copywriting
– We are experts at designing WordPress websites
– We can offer you affordable website hosting
Come to us to get a quality website built.

WordPress is an excellent CMS. It’s been around for a long time, and millions of companies worldwide have chosen this content management system.

We have WordPress designers who can design a fantastic website for your business. Call us today:

 

Construction Website Design: Things to consider when building a new website for a construction business

 

Introduction

As we all know, the construction sector is fiercely competitive. Whether you’re a builder, plant hire company or tradesman, you will be competing with hundreds of other businesses in a capital city like Cardiff.

 

Two things are crucial for a construction business to not just survive but thrive in this competitive sector: a well-designed website that can outshine many of its direct competitors and a reliable SEO partner, be it a freelancer or an agency. These are not just options but necessities in today’s digital landscape.

The benefits of a well-designed website and a robust organic SEO strategy are immense, offering a business the opportunity to generate more sales.

There’s often a vast difference in price between what an SEO agency charges and when comparing that to an SEO freelancer. Yet, in terms of which one to go for, it doesn’t matter as long as that business gets you onto page one of Google.

What truly matters is the quality of the company’s work, as Google’s algorithms are now so fine-tuned, so well-engineered, that if the work is deemed as “spam”, you can get removed from Google in the blink of an eye if the SEO work is completed incorrectly. So, it’s crucial to prioritise quality over price for your website and your SEO strategy.
So, quality is not just a factor; it’s the name of the game.

Your business needs a quality website and a company offering top-notch search engine optimisation services.

 

Well-designed

Businesses often attract new customers through personal recommendations or online advertising.

A well-designed website plays a pivotal role in the latter, as it can instantly impress potential customers and significantly increase their likelihood of contacting your business.

An overly basic website that doesn’t offer much information will likely put off customers. Also, if the content marketing is not high quality then the business will never get on page one of Google.

When a customer lands on a well-designed website that showcases your business’s capabilities, it can significantly enhance your chances of acquiring new customers. However, companies often opt for super cheap web design services, leading to a poorly designed websites with slow loading times and unengaging content and means they cant rank well in Google’s organic results.

It’s important to note that paying a high price for a website does not guarantee quality neither. However, on the flip side, choosing a web designer solely based on their low prices can lead to subpar results.

Consider this: how much time can a web designer can spend designing a website, if the designer is offering super cheap prices to design the website? Therefore, you might end up with a very basic website.

 

Where will your customers be coming from?

When a new business is launched, the business will often have written a detailed business plan.

Part of this business plan will detail how it plans to market itself. Often, at the core of this will be what the company plans on spending on digital advertising. Therefore, a website often isn’t like purchasing office furniture, where the quality of the desk, chairs, or the canteen table doesn’t really matter to the running of the business, as long as it all works, right?

However, a website is different; sometimes, it can mean the difference between the business thriving or possibly even the failure of the business, if the company is solely reliant on their website to generate income.

If a website doesn’t have a good design, Google’s algorithms will quickly notice that the bounce rate is high. Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave a website without visiting another page. A high bounce rate, which can be caused by factors such as slow loading times, spammy content marketing, or poor web design, this can all negatively impact your SEO ranking.

As soon as Google notices that the bounce rate is high for a sustained period, it’s likely that Google will start to move that business down Google’s organic ranks.

 

And therefore, this is why you need to have a website designed that offers the following:

– Well designed, looks impressive, will make the right initial impression with your customers
– Has a low bounce rate
– Has high-quality content marketing, which follows the advice of Google E-EAT
– Has a good layout, where each distinct service/product has its page
– Has good on-page SEO
– Has good off-page SEO
– Is very quick- the web design company are using a website hosting company that offers fast hosting
– A well-designed mobile version of the website has to be designed

And the list goes on and on.
So, our motto here at this web design business is simple: often, if you pay cheap, you end up paying twice.

 

Be helpful

What’s crucial, especially since Google’s Helpful Content update and Google E-EAT, is that the information on your company website helps your customers.

This can be achieved in many different ways. It could be something as simple as a well-written product description, a blog post that answers common customer questions, or a video tutorial demonstrating the benefits of owning a product. It could, therefore, be YouTube videos with a company employee explaining the benefits of owning that product or a series of FAQ-style answers on a page.

When you offer, helpful, and well-written advice, you find that the bounce rate within Google Analytics can decrease, the time spent on the site can increase, and therefore its more likely your business will obtain more quality backlinks.

Now, if you do get quality backlinks, let’s say from a reputable source like the BBC, these can quite supercharge your business’s SEO and get your company can get ranked higher on Google. Quality backlinks are links from other websites that point to your site. When reputable sites link to your site, it signals to search engines that your site is trustworthy and authoritative, which can boost your SEO.

 

It has to be fast
The website needs to be fast, this is important consideration when designing a website, whether for a plumbing business that may only employ a handful of people or you run a multi-national brand with thousands of employees. There are many ways to improve the speed of your company website; one is to obtain an AMP or accelerated mobile page, but you may not want this.

One of the best ways to improve the speed of your company website is to choose fast and high quality website hosting simply.

Fast hosting is normally more expensive, yet how fast your website is an important factor when deciding how good your companies SEO is.

Pick a web design business that has created websites for companies in the same business sector.

Now, you might have a direct competitor; where you like there website design

Yet, at the bottom of that website, there will typically be a link to the web design company’s website in the footer.

So, it’s worth calling that web design company and explaining that you want a bespoke website built.

That web design company may well be better able to understand your business sector because they have already built a website for a direct competitor of yours.

 

Responsive websites
We think that the upward trend of more and more people buying services and products from their mobile phones will only continue and increase as smartphones have become so much more convenient for purchasing items form. Therefore, whichever web design agency you hire, ensure that the price that they quote for the web design, is a price to make the website “responsive”.

This definitely needs to be included within the web design quote. Also, monitor the mobile and desktop version bounce rate, if it’s very high, then do make design improvements to try and lower that bounce rate.

 

Homepage design

It’s imperative that your construction website instantly communicates exactly what size construction projects you take on. A good way of doing this is having an auto loading video on the homepage, which shows the typical type of buildings that you build. Whether that be a single house, or a multi storey block of offices.

Now, often, customers make a snap decision on whether they want to stay on our website. You have seconds therefore to convey what your business can offer.
Simple to use the main menu

Regardless of whether your construction company or another business, it’s imperative that the main menu works flawlessly and simply on your company website.

It should allow shoppers, with minimal amount of clicks, to get the page they want to find.
Therefore, it is crucial that the main menu is well-designed and works brilliantly on a sale iPhone or, let’s say, another Android smartphone.

 

Keep your construction website updated

When you look at the multinational, really large construction companies, they often regularly release regular news articles onto their website. A good reason for this is to promote their business and the new construction contracts that they have taken on. But at the same time, the business is also improving its organic search engine optimisation.

So, before you agree to a web design quote, consider whether you need help improving your business’s SEO as well. Some web developers don’t offer this service, so you might want to choose a digital marketing agency that does.

 

Social media icons, Facebook, X and also LinkedIn

Your construction company may have several construction projects that you are working on at this moment in time.
With this in mind, you will want to keep your visitors to your website updated on the latest construction projects that you are undertaking in Wales.

Therefore, the social media icons, such as your Facebook or your businesses LinkedIn account, or X account, should be prominently displayed on the website’s header section.

Therefore, you can readily post on your social media accounts, and visitors your company website can visit your companies social media accounts, and see what work your construction company or demolition company is completing at the moment.

 

Come to a highly experienced company

We have highly experienced web designers, SEO consultants, and copywriters, web developers and social media managers all under one roof.

With prices starting from just £950 its clear to see why so many businesses in Cardiff hire us to get their website designed.
Come to us, a highly experienced web design agency

So whether you are a plumber or running one of the country’s biggest construction companies, it would be great to speak to you about how you would like your website to be designed.

 

Why it’s essential to carefully plan how you would like your new website to look

Introduction

It might be the case that you have just emerged from a relatively long meeting with your web designers.
You’re tired, as for hours, you have been explaining how you would like your new website to look. You’ve gone into every conceivable detail to explain how you would like the website to look, from how the main menu should look to how you want the footer to look.

You walk away from the meeting, feeling that you have accurately conveyed precisely what you want.

You’ve enjoyed a good chat with them, and if you think they can now go away, design a brilliant website for your business, and it will look a million dollars in, say, a month.

And this should mean you end up with a web design you are obsessed with.
However, suppose the website is not carefully planned, you haven’t had regular meetings with your web designers, wireframes haven’t been created, and design suggestions haven’t been sent to your e-mail.

In that case, the web designers can create a design they think the client will like, but when they see it, there may well be a look of massive disappointment. So, to avoid this, its important to clearly plan how you would like your new website to look.

 

Have a detailed plan

This is why it’s essential to have a detailed plan, setting out how many pages are needed, you need to work out who will be writing the all the text, and the layout of the pages. Therefore, carefully planning how your website looks removes a lot of ambiguity. For example, by using wireframes you can gain a good idea of the page layout regarding pictures and text.

 

Food for thought

During a meeting, often scribbling down pieces of paper, how you want the website to look is not going to work. For example, a company director might scribble down an A4 piece of paper as they want the page laid out.

However, it can sometimes be much better for the business to say what aspects of the competitor’s website they like and how they may want a similar design for their own business. Of course, we are not talking about copying a competitors website, no, no no.
Instead what we mean is taking design inspiration.

Therefore, the client might step forward and say I like how the video also loads on the homepage of one competitors site, I want a video showing a walk through of my offices on my website.

I like how the main menu works on this competitor’s website, I like the page layout on this particular competitor’s website. The web developer can then start to gain a good understanding of the design you want built for your company.

This provides a much clearer understanding of what the client wants and how they want the website designed. Therefore, web developers can get straight into designing wireframes for you.

The problem with openly discussing how you would like the website to look in a meeting is that it is ambiguous. What the client wants could be misinterpreted, so the final design may not be satisfactory.

So, we found an excellent way to start or kick-off the web design process to stipulate exactly how you want your website designed. Perhaps a screenshot of certain aspects of a competitor’s website will give your web developers a good idea of how you would like your new website designed.

We are Cardiff web designers who have designed countless websites for Welsh businesses. Because of this, we always ask, which competitors’ websites do you like? What do you like about the web design? What unique aspects do you want added to the design.

Then you get a combination of the functionality you like, such as well-designed main menu, or a footer design you like. Then we can bring to the design the aspects you like, such as nice colour green used across the website, or a nice font, or lets say a nice page layout, showing your friendly staff across the website.

Think about colours you want used when designing your company website.

Perhaps you have seen a shade of colour you like on a particular soft drink can, or within a glossy magazine, or on a competitor’s website. Screenshot a picture of their colour or take a photo on your i-phone and bring it to your web designers so they can match it when designing your website.

Ask for updates

During the web design process, your web designer should be in to send you links to see the part-built website. What’s great about this is that the web design process does not need to be complete; and you can say throughout the design stages which changes you want made.
It’s worth asking web designers for say weekly updates.

 

Testing

It’s essential before the website is set live that it has a lot of testing to make sure that every aspect works as you would expect.
Therefore, every button must be pressed, internal links clicked, and everything checked to ensure the website works correctly on smartphones and different operating smartphones. The website must therefore work perfectly on desktops and laptops. Therefore, checking the website on various browsers is essential to ensure it works correctly and as expected.

Quality

The final point is that investing in a high-quality website is essential. Don’t go out shopping for a cheap web design company, as the website that you get might be too basic.

When purchasing a website for your business, you don’t want to aim to save money on it. A well-designed website is often crucial to the company’s success, so it’s worth paying more for quality.

That’s why so many Welsh companies come to W&P to get a website designed because we design quality websites here in Wales.
Sure, some companies offer cheap website prices, but they might well be too basic and built in an absolute rush: the website may have little text, a bad design, and looks terrible. This can mean that you often need to repurchase and have a website redesigned in a short period of time. So why pay to have a website designed, and then have to have redesigned because it looks, well, a bit rubbish.

Therefore, if you would like quality website designed, and often we can build most websites in less than 4 weeks, then do talk to our Cardiff web designers today.

Things to consider when setting a marketing budget for your business

 

Introduction

So, let’s say the bank has just approved your business loan, and you’re well over the moon. Are you ready to plough all that dough into getting a brand-new website designed for your business? We think you should hold your horses for just one second.

It’s a common pitfall for businesses to overspend on high-end website designs, and you might be wondering, why would a web design agency discourage this? The answer lies in the potential for success that strategic budget allocation can bring. This approach empowers you to make the most of your resources, setting your business on a path to prosperity and a brighter future.

Well, we are not. But also, it’s crucial to consider the long haul and short haul, and we shall explain what we mean by that in just a second. This thoughtful approach can guide your decision-making and ensure your marketing efforts align with your business goals.

 

Don’t spend all your dough on just one form of advertising

Many businesses, especially start-ups, think getting a well-designed website is all they need to do to get your customers flocking into your business.

However, it’s more complicated than that. When you have a brand-new website designed, Google’s algorithms may initially place your business on say page 10 of Google. This is where the importance of search engine optimization comes in. Without it, your potential customers might not find you, and your business could be left in the shadows.

The phones will be growing dust and cobwebs, and the sales staff will be filing their nails; bored is not the word.
So, you have to keep some, well, a lot of your marketing budget back for how you plan on promoting your company website.

There’s search engine optimisation, for example, yet this is a slow process, so don’t expect results any time soon. It can often take well over six months to get a company onto page one of Google’s organic results. But remember, good things come to those who wait, and the results will be worth it.

So, if you are going to invest in SEO services, make sure you keep a decent amount of your marketing budget back. Businesses often make the mistake of thinking their SEO agency will get them onto page one in a jiffy—however, it can take a very long time.

This means you do need to budget for that long period where the SEO company is moving the business from, say, page 10 of Google to page 1, as this may take many, many months of hard work.

 

Google Adwords

Businesses like the fact that they can specify which keywords they want to appear on Google, set a monthly budget, and instantly have their business appear on Google.

However, this, of course, does not come for free; you do have to “pay-per-click”- and if you operate in a very competitive business sector, let’s say you run a dental practice, you’re a solicitor, or let’s say you’re a hairdresser in a large city, well often the cost per click costs more. The reason is that more businesses will also want to appear there, so you usually have to pay more per click if more businesses want to promote their companies simultaneously.

 

Social media advertising

Sure, you can set up a free page on Facebook, say, and we recommend that you do this. It doesn’t take long, and you can mention your business’s NAP information, which can help improve your company’s local SEO.

However, to promote a post or product your business is selling, you may want to “boast your ad”—now, you often have to set a budget to do this.

So, again, this is why, right at the start of this article, we said don’t splash all your marketing budget on just getting a website designed. You often have to promote that website via search engine optimisation, PPC (Google Adwords), social media marketing, or a combination. Therefore, you usually need a budget for designing a new company website and then a budget for promoting your business.

 

All of these services are under one roof.

There’s a reason so many businesses choose W&P Web Design: We have brilliant web designers, SEO consultants, and people who can manage your business’s social media. With web design prices starting from £950.00, it’s clear why so many businesses come to us to get a quality, well-designed website built.

Come to the web design experts in Cardiff.

Talk to W&P web design today.

Our 7-page brochure websites start from £950.00

Our e-commerce websites start from £1950.00

Call us today, and we can offer a quote if you would also like to hire us to improve your business SEO.

How should we go about choosing a web designer for our construction/demolition business?

Introduction

As all builders, demolition companies and tradespeople know, it’s fiercely competitive for work. For example, if somebody wants something as simple as a property single-storey extension added to their home, they may go out and get many quotes.

For builders, demolition companies, and tradespeople, it’s not just about surviving in a fiercely competitive market but thriving. A well-designed website is a powerful tool that cannot only set you apart from the competition but also showcase your business’s unique strengths, instilling confidence in potential clients and making you proud of your business.

Therefore, This article is aimed at builders, construction companies and demolition companies to give some food for thought to what you need to think about when hiring a local web designer to design a new website for your business.

 

Must be mobile-ready / well-designed responsive website

When looking for local builders or tradespeople, people may sit on their sofas looking for a local company. However, it’s crucial to note that they will most likely be using their smartphone or Apple tablet to find a local business. This underscores the immediate necessity of having a mobile-ready website, making it a top priority for your business.

When customers shop for a local building company, the website must be fast, easy to use, and answer all the questions they are likely to have about having a loft conversion built.

When customers shop for a local building company, the website must be fast, easy to use, and answer all the questions they are likely to have about having a loft conversion built. This is where the importance of a responsive and well-built website comes into play. It’s not just about having an online presence, but about offering a superior user experience that reassures your potential clients and sets you apart from the competition. So, what often separates the cheap websites, built for £500.00, from the better quality websites is that sometimes the web designers can spend more time improving the website’s U.X. so that the website offers more quality information, more helpful information, which may translate to the company making an increased amount of sales.

 

Each service should have its own page.

This is critical if your business wants to improve its search engine optimisation (SEO) later. SEO is not just a buzzword but a crucial element that can significantly impact your online visibility and, consequently, your business’s success. Some web designers may offer super low prices to design a one-page website, yet we wouldn’t recommend one for a construction or demolition business, and we shall now explain why that is so.

A construction company often offers various services, such as building a loft conversion, property extensions, or a brand-new house.

Therefore, it is essential that the web designers you hire set out each service on its page. This helps us to improve the business’s search engine optimisation, as Googlebot can crawl and index each page, and because each service has its very own page, the H1-H6 tags, the meta title, meta description, alt text, and much more can all be optimised for each distinct service that your business offers. So, for example, a whole page can optimised for, say, “loft conversions”, “roof replacement”, or, let’s say “, property extensions”.

 

Well designed

Often, a shopper looking for, say, a demolition business or a construction company to hire will decide in a matter of a few seconds whether they wish to stay on that website or leave. Often, this comes down to the design of the website. A poorly designed website that’s just very hard to use or a website that looks dated or overly basic, well, these are the websites that have sky-high bounce rates, which is very bad for the business’s search engine optimisation, as Google’s algorithms will detect that the bounce rates are very high. The company may move down Google’s SERPs.

 

Content marketing

We highly recommend picking a web design agency in Cardiff that can also offer copywriting services. Whether you want the text written for the website when it’s initially designed or perhaps you want to partner with the web design company for their assistance in writing monthly blog posts, hiring web designers with copywriters in-house is crucial.

Writing text, say 2,000-word blog posts, is massively time-consuming. Therefore, you need to hire web developers with in-house copywriters who can help write evergreen content marketing, blog posts, or product descriptions.

Remember that since the Google E-EAT updates, it’s now more important than ever to write high-quality, 100% original content marketing that shouldn’t be copied and pasted from another website.

 

The content marketing, therefore, should be:

-100% Original

– Well written

– Written by an expert

– The author should understand Google E-EAT

 

How we can help:

Construction web design

If your business operates in the construction sector, we can design a well-designed website. Prices for a brochure website start from £950.00. Welsh web designers designed and built all our websites in Wales.

 

Why not call us today?

We can design a brand-new website for any business if you would like a new brochure website for your construction business.

We have worked with many construction businesses, plus demolition companies. Our clients like how simple we make the process; we can design the website, write all of the content marketing, and work with the business continuously to improve their search engine optimisation (SEO).

If you run a construction company here in Wales and need a new website, why not call today?

There are so many web design agencies to pick from- how should we whittle down the list?

 

Introduction

If you’re shopping around for a new web design agency, you are most definitely spoilt for choice. There are endless numbers of web design companies in every city and town throughout the United Kingdom.

This raises the critical question: How can a business whittle down that list of companies to just a handful it wants to shortlist for a quote?

Rest assured, if you do choose W&P, our agency boasts web developers with over ten years of experience designing WordPress websites. This wealth of expertise puts us in a prime position to provide valuable tips and advice on selecting a web designer.

 

Specialists

The first thing you might want to consider is choosing an agency specialising in your business sector.

For example, you might be in an automotive business, sell used and new cars, own a garage, or be, let’s say, a place that offers car servicing.

Many web designers will specialise in creating websites for the automotive business sector.

Now, you might be scratching your heads, thinking, what are the benefits of picking a web design business specialist in that business sector?

Often, they will know exactly what functionality your website will need. For example, let’s say that your business concentrates only on car servicing. The web designers might have the code ready to install on your website that allows a customer to enter their registration details and instantly get quotes for servicing that particular model of car.

Alt text: Create photo: WordPress logo, plus a car

So, for that specific code, all you have to do is enter the car’s registration to gain a cost for car servicing- and because the web developers have written that code for another customer, they will know to do that again for your business.

So, our first advice is to consider the advantages of hiring a web design agency that specialises in your specific business sector. This can lead to a more tailored and efficient web design process, as they are familiar with your industry’s unique needs and requirements.

 

Do you want to hire a web design company that employs copywriters in-house?

Numerous web design businesses throughout the UK, such as our web design company in Cardiff, offer copywriting services and WordPress web design.

Yet, as a business, you must consider whether you have the time/energy to write all of the text for your new company website.

Let’s say you have a 10-page website designed by us. For example, there might be many drop-down menus, a lot of text in the footer, and the main text, which usually needs 7000 words.

Create a picture: Someone writing a text on an Apple Laptop.

Now, if you have to go home from work after running your company, and every evening you have to write all of this text for several evenings, you might find it tiring.

So what you might want to do instead is pay a bit more and hire web designers like us, who have copywriters in-house. Make sure the copywriters have a good understanding of the business sector and that what they can do is write the text for your new company website. This can accelerate your business’s whole web design process, where often the website can be designed much faster because you can have a web developer working on building the website. At the same time, copywriters could be writing the text.

This can massively speed up the entire web design process. The text can be immediately placed on the website, and often, the turnaround time to build the website will be much faster.

 

Do you want to hire local web designers?

Some customers might have a very clear idea of how they want their brand-new company website to look, so they can tell their web design company over the phone or by e-mail exactly how they want the new website to look.

Other customers might want to meet with their web designers in person and discuss how they would like the website to look; therefore, if you want a series of meetings with your web designers, you have to think about how far they are from you.

Create a picture: someone sitting on a train.

So, for example, let’s say that you are an electrician, and there is a company that specialises in building websites for tradesmen/women. That web design company might be on the other end of the country, and you will be here in Cardiff. So, you might find it challenging to convey what you want on the phone.

So, you might want to hire local web designers who are not that far away. These designers can sit down with you and explain exactly how you want the website built.

Consider the time-saving benefits of choosing local web designers. Sitting down with them over a cup of tea to discuss your website’s design can significantly expedite the process. This is rather than train rides or having endless phone calls to ask for changes to the design to be made.

Local web designers can look at competitor websites, identifying their strengths and the functionality they might want to integrate into their WordPress website. For example, you might like other menu works on a competitor’s website and enjoy the same style as the main menu for your website.

You might like how a competitor’s website has a contact box on the right-hand side. Would you want this for your website?

Alternatively, you might like the video on the competitor’s homepage, which automatically starts as you land on it.

You might want this design for your website, and then your web designers can scribble down how you want the website to look and start designing it. They can then hand this to the web developers. Often, this is easier to do in person than explaining everything over the phone or via Skype, for example.

Which content management system do you want?

Nearly all of the websites that we design and build use WordPress; however, some businesses might not want to use it.

Create a picture: WordPress logo on a laptop.

Therefore, there are other web designers who specialise in building websites using different content management systems, such as Drupal. It could be that the business has had a website designed before using a different CMS, such as Drupal, and therefore, they are familiar with using the dashboard or admin area of that particular type of CMS.

You might want to use the same CMS in the future, so web designers often specialise in designing websites using a specific type of content management system.

 

Think about SEO

Quite often, businesses will require help to improve their organic SEO. Many companies might be happy going and shopping around the various SEO agencies in Cardiff to get a quote to improve the companies local / organic SEO.

Yet, many businesses also like the convenience of having their website designed, and then the company can also offer seo services as well. Here at W&P we can offer both services, that’s to design a company website, plus to also improve the seo as well.

This saves the customer a lot of hassle, such as having to go around and find a separate company to help start work on improving the SEO. For example, here at this digital marketing agency, we are often hired by so many Welsh businesses, because we can design the website and offer to improve the companies organic seo, our monthly prices for this service, start from just £500 per month. It is also worth noting that this is an extremely long process and usually takes well over six months to start seeing some actual results from your SEO- so do bear this in mind, as we or not seo agency can generate results straight away.

 

Ongoing costs (website hosting, domain name renewal, website maintenance)

Whenever you choose a web design company, you must consider the ongoing and long-term costs of owning that website. Many businesses that have never designed a website think it’s just a one-off expense; that’s to just pay to have the website designed- yet there are on going expenses as well.

So when you have a website designed, there will always be ongoing costs.

For example, there is domain name renewal and hosting. You might also want to ask your web designers to maintain the website by making backups and updating it. Therefore, you’ll need to know the monthly cost of this service.

Our web design company is different from many other Cardiff web designers because we provide the first year’s website hosting for free to help the customer. We often use Siteground hosting, as its very good quality. So our customers haven’t got to worry about paying for hosting or domain name renewal within the first year because we offer this free of charge as long as we can purchase the domain name for under £50 a year.

After that, we offer fixed rates for website hosting and domain name renewal, depending on whether the website is an e-commerce or brochure website.

We can also offer a service whereby we make backups of the website or where we are updating the websites plugins, every month. We offer a fixed monthly price to do this work.

Often, website maintenance will cost between £40 and £100 per month for website maintenance and hosting.

But as we said, our company charges a fixed yearly fee for this service, and we often offer most of our customers the first year free.

How fast can the web designers / web developers build the website?

You’ve just opened your business as a sole trader or started your first limited company here in Wales.

And you’ve been super busy buying vans, purchasing tools, and getting your business up and running, such as interviewing staff for example.

Now, you may well be in the situation where you might have left getting your website designed until the very last minute, and then when you start to call around various web designers, you might see that they are saying it will take over three months to create the website.

Some companies can design it much quicker; we can usually create a brochure website in less than four weeks. This is another reason why so many businesses choose W&P to get a website designed, because our WordPress web designers, can design the website so fast.

Another reason many companies come to us is that we have WordPress web developers who have built websites for Cardiff businesses for over ten years. This means that often, we can create a website in less than four weeks; it might take it a bit longer if there are any coding glitches that need to be fixed, yet we will always e-mail or call to say if there are delays in building your company website.
The vast majority of the time, however, we can quickly design a brand-new website for our customers.

 

Wireframes

We would highly recommend that whichever web designers you are going to hire, that you have a meeting with your web developers and ask to see the wireframes whilst they are designing the website.

So when a car is being designed often the designers will make a rough outline of a sketch of the car outline on paper or some car designers do an actual real-life size car made of clay.

This is so the company can get a good sense of what the car, will look like before it is built.

This is precisely why our designers can offer to show wireframes of what the website will look like. They can understand where the text is laid out on the page. The pages will be laid out as wireframes and will show where the company logo will be, where the footer is, and will be a rough outline of what the company website could look like.

So, we recommend asking for wireframes and a rough outline of the website’s appearance before it is finished. This allows you to make changes to the website before its built, which is beneficial to both the web designers and the business.

 

Choose highly experienced web designers.

There are thousands of web design companies here in the U.K, yet we would say pick a highly experienced company in building WordPress websites.

For example, let’s say a plumber. A highly experienced web design company has often built many websites for plumbing and heating businesses. They can usually recommend different functionality your business will need. They can also recommend other types of CMS and help you think about how you want the page structure to look.

We wouldn’t ever recommend going with a one-page website for any business.

The seo will be much harder work later on if you do pick a one page website. So, pick a brochure or e-commerce website and set up each main service or product on its own page.

That’s because if you talk to a good seo, agency / consultant later on down the line, they will always say its best to have each main service on its own page, so the page as its own page titles, URL extension, and content marketing.

So in terms of seo, its best to have each service laid out on its page.

 

Comes the experts in Cardiff

Whether you run a car dealership or perhaps you are a tradesman, such as a construction company, and you need a brand-new website design. For just £950, you can have our designers design a brilliant brochure website for your business.
The vast majority of websites we build are for Cardiff businesses and our websites can be turned around in less than four weeks. Therefore, if you are looking for highly experienced web developers, contact us today.

How much does it cost to get a website built?

 

Think about how important your website is to your business

Buying a cheap cattle toaster and microwave for the kitchen wont significantly impact the business, regardless of how well the kitchen appliances work.

However, picking a cheap website can dramatically impact a business.

The point we are trying to make is that there are some things you can scrimp and save on, when it comes to running a business, but we would’nt recommend your company website being one of them.

When talking to business owners, sometimes 100% of their sales are generated through digital marketing.

When you think about social media, add Google Adwords, organic SEO, which means funnelling customers towards one thing: the company website.

So if a customer arrives and is not impressed by the design, say that they find it difficult to use, and you will losing that customer.

So, you need to have a well-designed website.

They don’t have to pay a small fortune, but they don’t go for the cheap end of the market, where things are built at a bargain basement prices.

You look at some of these websites, designed for £500 or less, but often so basic that they know more than a virtual business card!

So, what you need instead is a quality website.

Now, paying through the nose is no indication that you can get a quality website.

It’s important to understand what you’re paying for when it comes to website design.

Don’t be overwhelmed by complex marketing terms. Instead, ask for a clear breakdown of what you’ll get for your money. This will help you make an informed decision and avoid any unexpected costs.

Superfast website hosting

People don’t wait around a long time for anything these days, they don’t want to be waiting in long queues at supermarkets; otherwise, they might switch to a different supermarket that offers to open more checkouts. This is the same concept for your online business; if it’s too slow and it is not easy to use, you could lose customers, they get to go elsewhere, and they will go to the website the supersonic fast.

So, make sure what’s included in the quote, is for your business to have superfast website hosting.

Well-designed and simple to use

You need to have a company website that is very simple to use. This isn’t very easy to use, or it is just too busy in terms of being too cluttered. Often, you lose customers if there is too much information say on the homepage.

 

Choose the right content management system

We have met so many businesses that have been talked into content management systems, which are simply rubbish.

That is the CMS might not be widely used, and sometimes web designers might choose it because they are experts at designing websites using that CMS.

What this basically means is that if there could be many glitches or problems with the website later on down the road.

Now, if you picked a more common CMS that millions of businesses use, you might be able to fix some of the glitches yourself and keep on top of the website maintenance yourself as well.

We not trying to say here that there is a CMS that is 100% guaranteed not to go wrong, as every CMS can go wrong, the same way a car can go wrong at any time.

However we would recommend picking a CMS which is a bit more proven, such as a content management system used by millions of businesses like WordPress, rather than opting for a CMS that’s not proven, and only just launched, and could potentially be full of glitches..

 

Choose your domain name wisely.

One of the factors that can influence web design costs is the website’s domain name; you can register for one for as low as £10 a year sometimes.

However, another domain name might cost over 10k per year, so the domain name often differentiates how much the web design will cost.

 

Who’s going to be writing all of the text?

When considering getting an e-commerce website built, you may need over 10,000 words of text added to the website.

To do that, this will involve a lot of work, so you need to ascertain right at the start who will write all that text? will be the web designers or the business?

Therefore, don’t take for granted that the web design agency will add and write all of the text.

Also You most definitely don’t want duplicated text added to the website because this can massively damage the business’s organic SEO.

 

Ongoing maintenance

Just as a car needs ongoing maintenance, so that the engine cant run low on oil and potentially seize, so will your website need upkeep and some maintenance . For example, plugins will need updating, back-ups need to be made, and any coding glitches must be fixed; otherwise, you could be losing customers.

Therefore, do ascertain with your web designers how much they charge for ongoing monthly maintenance of your website, some charge a very modest fee that covers this service; however, some might have written in the fine print that they charge a very high monthly payment for maintenance of your website.

 

Why we believe that designing a new business website should be a three-step process

 

Date: June/13th/2024

It’s important that whichever web designers that you hire in Wales, that they try to keep the process as simple for you as possible. Even if it’s a very intricate website, for example, an e-commerce website with over a hundred pages which needs to be designed, your web design agency should aim to simplify the whole process so that you feel that you are being listened to and have a website designed exactly the way you want.

There are many web design agencies to choose from. What you don’t want is for a company to railroad you into a design that is so basic that it doesn’t actually communicate or say anything about the services or products that your business offers. Each and every year, thousands of businesses in the United Kingdom choose really cheap low-quality website design companies and often they make websites that are so basic that they often need to be redesigned after a short period of time.
This prompted us to write this article, explaining why we think the web design process should be a three step process.

Set out a clear plan

By setting out a clear plan from the outset, you provide your web designers with a roadmap to effectively follow so that they can help your business to better advertise the products or services that you sell. Each main business offering, such as each service should have its own dedicated page. This approach avoids a common pitfall where services are grouped on a single page, potentially diluting their impact, that making the search engine optimisation (SEO) process harder at a later stage.
For example, let’s say a family lawyer, you might have all the different services grouped onto one page; when you talk to any excellent SEO consultant later on, they will tell you this is a big mistake to have all of your services mentioned on one page.

The point you’re trying to make is that the site map needs to be created prior to your web designers start work on wireframing or designing any the website. Therefore the kettle does need to be put on, nice cup of tea needs to made for the web designers and clients, and you need to draw a sketch of the sitemap.

If the website is relatively simple in terms of the page layout, this could be something as basic as simply sketching out a site map on an A4 piece of paper.

However, this will concentrate your web designers’ and developers’ minds on how many pages need to be designed and what services or products need to be promoted.

Also, before any web design takes place during this initial stage, you need to choose a content management system that is best suited to your business. After discussing with your web designers, you might find that your company wants a Magento website, perhaps a Joomla website, or maybe a WordPress website designed?

Designing a website often involves considering many different factors, such as how you will later improve the organic SEO, the usability (U.X), and how you plan on making the website look brilliant.

Therefore, what happens when you buy an overly cheap website, let’s for £500 or less, is that it’s often its just too basic, the hosting might be slower, and the finished website might not communicate exactly what your business can offer.

Therefore, during the design stage, the web designers needs to often wear many different hats, considering usability (U.X) , speed, and whether that’s likely to satisfy a shopper’s question, that has the content marketing, been written in such a way the copywriter / web designers have thought about Google E-EAT.

Many different skill sets are therefore needed from digital marketing agency; you often need a copywriter, you need an SEO consultant, and you also need web designers and web developers. Thankfully, we have all of these under one roof here at W&P.

 

Keep on improving

Getting a website designed is only the start; as your business expands so will the products and services you are likely to sell. You will also need extra pages designed, and your business will grow your web designers often need to make regular edits to improve the design of your company website. Not just that, you will also need the help of SEO consultants to monitor things like bounce rate of the homepage, for example, that’s to see if people are leaving your website too quickly?

 

Web design is an on-going process:

Web design is not a one-time task; it’s an ongoing process. As your business evolves, so should your website. This requires close collaboration between web designers and SEO consultants to refine and enhance the design. Major e-commerce websites and large brands understand this, constantly improving their web designs to stay ahead.

All of these minor changes to the web design can add up to a cumulative effect that can potentially help the business attract many more customers.

Web design is therefore not a one-time task; it’s an ongoing process that requires constant improvement. Many businesses in Cardiff understand this and choose to partner with web design companies for the long term like W&P Web Designs. This commitment to continuous improvement ensures that your website stays up-to-date and effective, attracting more customers and driving business growth.

 

Pick a highly experienced web design agency, choose W&P Web Designs

Whether you’re in the construction industry or planning to sell over 10,000 product lines online via an e-commerce website, our Welsh web design business is here to help your business. We don’t just design your website; we partner with you for ongoing improvements if they are required. Our team includes highly experienced SEO consultants and WordPress web designers ready to elevate your online presence.

We can also offer SEO services and write content marketing for your business. If you are currently looking for Cardiff web designers, then look no further than W&P; we have some highly experienced and knowledgeable SEO consultants and WordPress web designers working for us.

Therefore, if you would like a quote for a one-page website or a 10,000-page e-commerce WordPress e-commerce website, do contact us today.

What should we think about when designing the homepage for our company website?

 

 

As WordPress web designers, we have to regularly consider how we will design a homepage for one of our many clients. A homepage design needs a lot of consideration, as you want the initial impression of the company website to be impressive—to blow the socks off the visitors and impress them!

For instance, take a look at the homepage of South Wales Demolition Ltd, which effectively uses a clean layout, compelling visuals, and clear navigation to make a strong first impression.

 

So, how should you go about designing the homepage for a website?

 

Well, because we have super-talented WordPress designers who have been busy designing quality WordPress websites for over ten years, we are well-placed to answer this question.

The homepage must look impressive to retain the customer and the design should help to keep the bounce rate as low as possible.
Bounce rate refers to the percentage of visitors who leave a website after viewing only one page. A high bounce rate can indicate that the homepage is not engaging enough, leading to potential customers leaving the site without exploring more products that you sell.

 

Don’t overwhelm the visitor.

 

It’s a common mistake that businesses throughout the United Kingdom do make, especially when selling products online. That’s to add as many products as possible as possible the homepage, then they add too much text, and this can make the homepage look too busy. This can overwhelm the shopper; instead of the shopper being able to go to the main menu and find what product they want, you might find that there this is just too much information and they leave your company website.

 

Always put yourself in the customer’s shoes.

 

It’s crucial to empathise with your customers and understand their needs- when designing a brand new website. Before finalising any homepage design, seek the opinions of your family and friends- it’s important to take on board some constructive criticism.

For instance, ask them to imagine they need a new electric oven. Then do they find the website your web designers have built easy for them to use, and to navigate the website looking at the different products? Their feedback is invaluable in creating a user-friendly experience.
You might find that they can’t sort the electric ovens by brand, yet all the other competitors are allowing this option, to sort items by brand. This type of functionality can mean that another business clinches the sale and potentially the shopper leaves your website because they find it difficult to use.

How does your business have the edge over the competition?

 

Perhaps your business has been trading for over 25 years. Perhaps you have a superior-quality product or offer a longer guarantee period than most other competitors. Whatever the case, this needs to be communicated instantly on the homepage.

Therefore, web designers need to instantly communicate your businesses unique selling points, which must be made clear through say a scrolling banner or somewhere on the homepage. A unique selling point (USP) is a factor that differentiates a product or service from its competitors, such as superior quality, longer guarantee period, or extensive experience. A good web designer can advertise your business’s unique selling points, helping to attract and retain more customers.

Make sure your website is fast

 

You might have some web designers who recommend that you add auto load videos because they can look good and grab the shopper’s attention.

For example, let’s say you run a barbershop. You contact a web designer who may recommend getting an autoloading video added to the homepage. It could show say a 30 second video of your barbers improving somebody’s lovely Barnett.

This will instantly give the shopper an impression of your shop, the staff you have, and the type of haircuts you offer.
That’s without the shopper even having to read any text.

However, there is a downside: the homepage can be slowed down, which could negatively impact the business’s SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).

SEO refers to the practice of increasing the organic visibility and ranking of a website in search engine results on Google.

A slow-loading homepage can lead to a much lower ranking in search results, potentially reducing the number of organic visitors to your site.

 

Navigation is so important.

 

Some web designers make the main menu cluttered and challenging to use, making it a nightmare to find the product or service you want.
If they had thought out the layout a lot better, they might be able to design a better main menu, which could potentially decrease the bounce rate.

 

We believe shoppers like a simple layout

 

Look at a brilliant websites and fantastic online businesses such as Amazon. They sell hundreds of thousands of different products, yet the main menu is a piece of cake to use.

Whether you’re looking for brand-new razor blades or bags for your hoover, you can normally find what you want in just a few clicks.
The reason for that is they have had brilliant web developers and expert web designers who have carefully considered business UX.

Therefore, your business should aim to create a user-friendly website, that allows shoppers to get anywhere they want simply.

 

 

Use titles and break up that page.

 

Whether you’re writing a rather wordy blog post or perhaps you’re writing the text for the main pages, you must break up the text with titles.

This can also benefit your businesses SEO and help the shopper; for example, they might want to know about a particular product rather than have to read through 2000 words of text.

Using good font and well-written page titles often keeps the shopper on your website longer. This is the game’s name when it comes to improving your SEO: you want to keep the shopper on your website for as long as possible.

 

We would recommend avoiding pop-ups. They can be a nuisance

 

Some web designers, and some web developers they might have coded an e-commerce website, so that a pop-up appears regularly asking the for customer’s email address, let’s say, every five minutes. This could be a nuisance to the shopper.

It might discourage the shopper from purchasing from you, so our web design agency would highly recommend against using pop-ups; they can annoy the shopper if they keep asking them for their e-mail address or phone number.

Calls to action

In our previous point, we mentioned that we wouldn’t recommend having pop-up boxes. But you might want to embed contact forms into the page. Therefore, these might be embedded three times throughout the homepage. It just gives that extra opportunity for a shopper to send you a message or enquire about the service that you sell.

 

Choose excellent web designers.

 

If you hire the wrong web designer, they might provide a website that is too basic and a bit rubbish.
The difference between a good web design company and one that simply churns out websites is clear.

A good web design company invests time in understanding your business and your main selling points of your products or services, and knows how to communicate these selling points on your homepage. This strategic approach can significantly impact your business’s online presence.

 

Do you require a WordPress website to be designed?

 

Many businesses in Cardiff don’t want to pay for managed website hosting; some companies charge over £100 per month for this service.

This can be rather expensive for some Welsh businesses, and they may, therefore, wish to manage the website themselves, both in terms of updating it and managing the hosting.

Therefore, for this to happen, they need a content management system that you can log in into and update the website with just a few simple clicks, you don’t want to use an overly complicated admin panel that causes confusion when your trying to update your website.
To keep things simple, many businesses come to us and ask our Cardiff web designers, what type of content management system that they recommend. We often answer that with a resounding answer and shout loudly “use WordPress”.

We often recommend WordPress and shout its benefits from the rooftops simply because it’s an absolute piece of cake to use.

We know that when you’re running your business, you’re likely to have a million and one things on your mind, so you don’t want to have to worry about whether your WordPress website is kept updated or not.

Therefore, you can update your WordPress website in a few clicks; it’s simple. Plug-ins made by various companies also allow you to back up your website in a matter of minutes; this is free, and you can do it as often as you like.

This again helps the business owner because they have the total reassurance that their website is backed up entirely, and that they have updated the website, helping to make it more secure.

Would you like a brand-new website designed and built here in Wales? We design brilliant websites starting from just £950.

 

 

High-quality websites designed for just £950.00

We welcome you to contact us for more information
about any of our products or services.