Date: 14/01/2025

Businesses have naturally gravitated towards a minimalist web design for a long time.

This is with good reason, as an overly cluttered web design can confuse shoppers, leading to a higher bounce rate for that business.
Therefore, this can lead to an increase in the bounce rate, meaning that the business will not achieve the level of sales that it may have obtained if it had better-designed website.

Minimalist web design is, therefore, a preference for many British businesses.

Many of our clients prefer minimalist style website. This article will explain the many advantages of this type of design.

What is minimalist web design?

The first thing that we would say is don’t confuse minimalism with an overly basic website design; they are entirely different entities.
However, some businesses, choose a website that is a bit basic and a bit naff. This is not minimalism; it should just be considered a basic website.

These overly basic, simplistic websites often don’t cut the mustard, end up with a sky-high bounce rate, and put customers off purchasing from your business.

So, the first thing I would say is that there is a massive difference between designing an essential website and a minimalistic website.

The benefits of a minimalistic website

Lazy loading pages

If you want to improve your minimalistic web design, we recommend using “lazy-loading” pages.
Lazy loading pages mean that as you scroll down the product page, the products only appear into the section of the page that’s visible to the shopper at that time.

This enhances the page speed because not all products are loaded simultaneously.

Easily digestible

We live in a world where people are constantly bombarded with advertising on social media or as they walk down the street.
Many people have hectic lifestyles and might not have that much time to spend browsing a company website for products.

They often want to buy items quickly- that means getting to the item they want quickly.

Therefore, if the website is clunky and challenging to use, the bounce rate may increase.

You can check your businesses bounce rate using Google Analytics.

Therefore, it is best to focus on a well-designed website that’s simple to use.

You should make the website simple to use, to the point, and offer all the information and products that your customers need, conveying this in the easiest way possible.

Clever branding

Through simple design and clever branding techniques, we can convey your business’s message in just a few words or pictures.
For example, customers might not want to read a company timeline covering the last hundred years; they don’t have the time.

However, on key pages, putting something like a banner across the top of the website simply saying, “You have established and in business since 1970” instils trust within your brand.

Simple yet effective messaging like this can mean retaining customers or them leaving your website. Again because of a minimalistic design, because the page is less cluttered, you can simply convey a message much more simply, such as simple yet elegant logo, saying “established since 1970”.

Come to a highly established web design agency

We have been designing quality, well made websites in Cardiff for over 10 years.

How does implementing lazy loading help improve the user experience?

Lazy loading helps stagger and slow down the number of products or sections of the page, so only the section that the shopper can see, loads, then as they decide to scroll down, more products load.

So therefore as you browse and move to the product page, more products appear and load incrementally.

This reduces the load time, causing the page to load much faster and improving the user experience.

As an good SEO agency will tell you, improving a pages U.X or user experience is very important.
Offering a good U.X therefore can help to benefit your business’s organic SEO and enhances the whole user experience for the shopper.

Using lazy loading the page can load faster on a smartphone or desktop, depending on which device the customer is shopping on.

Therefore, lazy loading is arguably much more helpful when a customer is shopping for a smartphone because page load speeds are even more critical on smartphones.

That’s because at home the shopper will be using broadband, most pages will load faster on a desktop, so you must carefully consider smartphone load speeds.

Therefore, implementing lazy loading on the mobile version could help to improve the page load speeds, generating a better user experience.

Author: W&P Web Design
Date: 18/12/2024

In the table of contents:

• What exactly is local SEO?
• Why do so many businesses invest in local SEO?
• How exactly does local SEO work?
• How does Google’s algorithm determine which business to show in Google Business 3-pack results?
• What are some of the best SEO tools to help improve local SEO?
• How do you monitor SEO results?
• How our agency can help you

What Is Local SEO?

First things first, what exactly is local SEO?

A website is just that.

If people don’t know the URL or the domain name, a website will not get many visitors, if any, if it cannot be found easily on Google.

Therefore, businesses will want to rank as high as possible on the first page of Google.
Now, there are many ways to make this possible. For example, there are numerous different ways a business can appear on the first page of Google.

These are:

• Google Business results
• Google’s organic SERP’s
• Google Adwords

For a business to get as much unpaid traffic as possible from Google.

This often means improving the business’s “ranking factors”, to get the business to rank as high as possible within Google results.

This article describes how to get a local business onto the first page of Google.

So why is a web design agency talking about SEO?

Increasingly today, many businesses and their directors don’t just have a well-designed website built.

They also want to get as much free traffic and visitors from Google as possible.

It doesn’t matter if you sell whiskey or aluminium ladders; naturally, you want your customers to find you as quickly as possible on Google.

To do this, you need to improve your organic SEO, and if you are looking for businesses locally, you need to improve your local SEO

Why is local SEO important?

Company directors who have never invested in SEO might not know its benefits or the dramatic effect it can have on a business.

Of course, snake oil salespeople always say they can walk the walk but can’t.

With that said, there are a massive number of SEO agencies that have cut the mustard.

It goes without saying if your business ranks high on Google then shoppers will find it easier to find you.

Increase business visibility and brand awareness.

Often, the most successful businesses are the businesses that rank high on Google.co.uk, and that come as no surprise at all.

It’s no coincidence that Google, the search engine, can drive thousands, if not sometimes millions, of shoppers to your website.

The hard part is getting a business onto the first page of Google organic results, which explains why we wrote this article.

To get your business onto the first page and high up in the Google SERPs, you need to establish the foundations correctly and have a well-designed website.

This is where we can step in and design a quality website for your business.

How do you go about improving a business’s local SEO?

Complete a Google Business Listing

It only takes roughly 30 minutes to complete, and a Google Business listing is definitely needed if you want to improve your local SEO.

Here’s how to best complete your business Google business listing:

Add NAP information

Make sure you add the most up-to-date NAP information that matches what is on your company website.

URL

Make sure you add your company’s URL that’s your website’s domain name, and ideally the homepage URL to your Google business listing.

Obtain customer reviews

Let’s say you run a restaurant, and one of your diners says the meal has been delicious.

Why not ask them to leave a positive review on your business’s Google Business listing?

Add a unique business description

Add a unique description of your business.

It has to be a paragraph of unique text, and the author must accurately describe the company.

For example, you might want to write how many years you have been trading, what services you offer, and roughly how many staff you employ within the business description. Then, people can get a better understanding of your business.

Add pictures

Let’s say you run a shop, you might want to take picture of your staff stood outside the shop. This will give people an excellent impression of your business, and the staff that you employ.

If the staff are friendly and welcoming, people are more likely to contact you.

How does this Google algorithm, decipher which businesses display in the Google business results?

So, Google’s algorithms work by using a separate algorithms.

There is an algorithms that power Google Adwords Googl, and a separate algorithm for the Google’s organic business results in a separate algorithm for Google Business.

So, for Google’s Business results, Google ranks are based on the following ranking factors:

Relevance

How relevant is your business / website to the product or service the customer wants to purchase?
For example, they might be looking for a very exact form of law practice. Does your solicitor’s practice offer that type of advice?

Distance

Where is the shopper stood?

How far are they away from your business?

Therefore, Google looks at the searcher’s proximity.
Lets say, your stood slap bang in the middle of Cardiff city centre; then will you will see businesses appear on the map based in the city centre.

Alternatively, if you were on the other side of the city on the outskirts of St Mellons in Cardiff and were to ask the same question to Google, you would likely see a different set of companies appear.

Therefore, Google ranks businesses according to location and proximity to where the shopper is at that moment in time.

Prominence: how prominent is the business?

Things get a bit technical here, and we need to talk about the “semantic web” and will need to think about the business like a dot on a giant spider’s web.

Google understands you run a business, so it is a dot on the spider’s web.

However, some businesses are more prominent than others.

Some receive regular mentions across the internet, win awards and the brand is mentioned, and have well-known company directors who participate in charity events for example.

Some businesses are more well-known; therefore, Google better understands them as “entities” in the semantic web.

So in this semantic web, Google has a much better understanding of some entities than others; some entities are more prominent and brighter in terms of Google’s algorithm as Google is able to better understand them.

To improve your prominence, you must gain more positive customer reviews, mentions, and backlinks across the Internet.
Lets gives you an example: Let’s say you gain a lot of good customer reviews, the business gets mentioned on BBC News for an award you win, the company directors and staff participate in a marathon, and articles are written about it.

These pages may all provide links (backlinks), and Google better understands businesses and entities such as company directors. Therefore, more prominent businesses often appear in Google’s business results more often.

That’s because the semantic web and Google algorithm understand that they are local well-known businesses.

How can you improve the businesses of local SEO?

Keyword research

Keyword research allows you to understand terms and the questions that shoppers are asking Google to find your businesses products and services.

Lets give you an example, lets say you own a window cleaning business, you also offer gutter cleaning, and you might also offer to clean conservatories.

And lets say you offer commercial window cleaning as well.

These are all related services, but they are all very different.

They should therefore have their own pages so that the web designers can add meta titles, meta descriptions, alt text, internal links, and titles to each page.

Google Keyword Planner

So, you might be a start-up business, and the company is just setting up and getting out of the starting blocks; she might not have, say, £200 a month to spend on an SEO.

The brilliant thing is that Google offers a range of free SEO tools. They can help improve your SEO, but and they are often used by many web design agencies, because they’re perfect for helping improve a businesses marketing.

One brilliant and valuable tool offered by Google is the Google Keyword Planner, which allows you to understand what people are searching for when looking for your businesses products or services.
.

How can our business better optimise our Google business listing?

If you run a local business, we recommend investing time and effort in optimising your Google business listing.

We would break down the optimisation of a Google business listing into the following three stages
And we would recommend taking the time to set up the Google business listing correctly. It might take 30 minutes or longer to set up the business listing correctly, but do take the time to set it up correctly and add as much detail as possible.

Don’t rush the process.

Write a unique business description, and ensure you review all the information to ensure accuracy.

Contact information

Make sure that all the NAP information is correct.

Opening hours

If you’re opening hours change, make sure that you reflect this with your GMB listing

URL

Make sure you add your homepage; that’s your domain name.

Add an accurate business description

Add a unique business description to the page.

Keep your business citations up-to-date.

You might be wondering what business citations are?

Business citations mention your company website and NAP information on Thompson local, Wales Online unless a Yellow Pages for example.

These are brillant as acting as a reference for your company name, address, and phone number.

These business citations also have to be kept up-to-date as well.

If you switch addresses, they should also keep the NAP information.

Consistency is key

When it comes to improving your local SEO, let’s say, your Google business listing, consistency is the most important thing to remember, in terms of mentioning your companies NAP information.

What we mean by that is the business’s name, address, and phone number were all consistent across the web.

Let’s say you run a business in one industrial estate and moved to another on the other side of Cardiff.

Your web design agency should work to update your address and business citations as soon as possible.
Otherwise, you can have a website with two different addresses, which can wreck havoc with your SEO.

Customer reviews are a significant part of local SEO

When we talk about local SEO; we often describe how the Google algorithm works.
Still, it is just that it’s an “algorithm”, and an algorithm cant sit in restaurant and order a meal, an algorithm can’t call let’s say, a solicitor for help.

Therefore Google’s algorithm is dependent on feedback from customers, but there are many ways that Google can get feedback from customers.

For example, a website with a high bounce rate is feedback, it is negative feedback, saying that shoppers were generally dissatisfied with that page and left it, not wanting to click on another page.

Let’s concentrate here on customer reviews.

If receive lets say a lot of positive customer reviews, or from, let’s say, different Android smartphones where the customer is logged in using different account details, so you know the genuine reviews.

Well genuine Google reviews have a massive positive effect on the businesses’ local SEO.

Prominence and backlinks: you might not know the backlink, so let us explain it.

A backlink is simply a hyperlink, a link from one website to another.

There are internal links and external links.

Internal links occur because they can help shoppers better navigate your website.

However, when built correctly, external links can have a massive positive effect on your business’s local SEO.

Don’t buy links; spam links as this will damage your SEO. There are no two ways about that.

But, on the other hand, relevant links, high-powered links, from respectable businesses, let’s say a corporation like the BBC link to you, these backlinks can massively positively affect your business’s organic and local SEO.

So, backlinks can improve your website’s authority and prominence.

Google Search Console

If your business is serious about improving its local organic SEO, then an essential tool to have is called Google Search Console

Well Google Search Console is essential when improving a business’s local SEO because you need the following.

Average position

You need to know whether keyword ranks; if you optimise your website for say “wedding cakes” + city name, then you need to know where your business ranks on Google for that term.

You need to know the average position data that Google supplies.

You can check your businesses rankings over the last 24 hours, the previous seven days, the last month, or the last six months.

This allows you to understand the SEO methods you are applying, whether they are working, and whether you need to switch strategies.

Patience is a must when it comes to SEO

Talk to any good web designer or marketing agency, and they will tell you that 50% of the time, you often spend optimising the website, and then the other half the time, you manage expectations for the client.

That’s because businesses sometimes think SEO as a lightbulb: It switches on, and sales start flooding in.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like this.

It is a slow process, and only when Google rules out major core updates do you start to see a reflection of your business’s changed position on Google.

For example, you could implement work today, but you might not see the benefit until four months later on down the road.

This is why it is a slow process, where you often only see organic SEO improvements after significant algorithm updates.

With that said, as long as a business is willing to be patient, you can get a business up the ranks; this can significantly dramatically affect the number of sales the company makes if it’s done right.
Foundations have to be correct; we are a web design agency based in Cardiff.

We are writing this article because many businesses have a website designed, and after it’s been built,then only contemplate the SEO, as an afterthought.

However, SEO can’t be bolted onto a website; improving the SEO should be considered carefully when first designing the website.

Web design done right

We can design a brilliant website for your business, and we will do our utmost to design it in less than three weeks

If you like the website designed, contact us today.

We are a well-known web design agency in Cardiff, serving businesses across Cardiff and Cardiff Bay. This in-depth article will explain the benefits of blogging and why companies regularly add new articles to improve their organic SEO.

Companies often want to improve their search engine optimisation, and one of the main ways to do this is to write helpful and engaging content marketing, such as blog posts. When writing this work, you should follow and understand Google E-EEAT updates.

This article will explain how blogging can improve SEO and search rankings, which can ultimately improve sales.

How often should our business be writing blog posts?

Since Google rolled out a massive algorithm update in 2011, it has started to rank businesses higher in the SERPs if they regularly add brand-new content marketing to their websites. Many marketing agencies refer to this as fresh content marketing. If a website is seen to be updated more regularly and is quality work, it can rank higher organically in the SERPs.

Helps Google to understand better the products and services that you sell

When Google bots crawl and index new blog posts where you write about the different products and services you sell, this can help Google better understand the items you sell as a business when mentioned in your blog posts.
Therefore, when Google indexes your website, you can better understand the pages, products, and services you resell as a business. For example, if you regularly blog about kitchen blenders, it becomes apparent to Google that you sell these items.

Increases the chances of gaining more backlinks

Link building is a core part of SEO.

To improve your business’s rankings in the Google SERPs, you must obtain many, sometimes thousands, of do-follow quality backlinks.

Google Helpful Content Update and Google E-EAT

In a nutshell, if a business is seen to be writing excellent, helpful content (Google Helpful Content Update) that customers / organic visitors can find interesting and valuable to questions that they have, this can improve your SEO and, as a result, you rank higher in Google SERPs.
So, whether you’re writing about a kitchen sink or a hypercar, people often have questions about the product.
In summary, your business will likely rank higher in the SERPs if you write helpful guides about the products/services you sell.

Blog SEO best practices

Let us dispense some of our expertise when writing blog posts.

As a business, we have written thousands of blog posts for various companies here in Wales. We are an established web design agency, and we have written thousands of blog posts for solicitors, dental practices, and builders. Therefore, this puts us in the position of being expert content marketing writers, so let us dispense advice to help you when writing blog posts:

Don’t keyword stuff (if you do this, it will lead to a Google Panda penalty)

If you’re selling running trainers from a particular brand, such as Nike, you might think that to get your business ranking higher on Google, you must keep mentioning running trainers plus Nike repeatedly—a bit like a broken record!

However, “keyword stuffing” is a bad SEO practice that can penalise your website, so don’t do it.
Instead, focus your energy on writing super high-quality content your customers will like. This work will have a high dwell time and likely attract more backlinks, improving your business’s ranking in the Google SERPs.

Improve the user experience: Put yourself in your customers’ shoes. Are you likely to find this information valuable and helpful?

If a reader finds the text overwhelming, has it been written in a dull and rather academic way? Well, you’re likely to send the reader to sleep.

Instead, do you need to make the text lively and engaging?

Suppose you walk into the doors of many top web design agencies in the United Kingdom and ask them what is essential when improving a business’s SEO.

They will undoubtedly mention UX (user experience), which means improving the user experience. This means improving the dwell time while lowering the bounce rate.

Now, discussing how to increase the dwell time and lower the bounce rate can be left for another blog post.

Let’s keep it short. Our best advice is to make the text helpful and enjoyable to read.

This combination of the right business will likely rank higher in the SERPs.

Don’t go off on a tangent.

Companies often make the mistake of going off on a tangent rather than discussing products and services or something unrelated to their particular business’s core business activities.

For example, if your core business activities are as a business, you run a solicitor’s practice. If you regularly blog about award ceremonies, golfing events, and rugby tournaments, you can understand why Google’s algorithm can get confused about your business’s services are? For example, do you offer legal advice? Or are you a rugby club?

However, suppose you have a laser focus and start offering advice related to core business activity. In that case, if you keep writing work related to a solicitors practice, then this work is likely to help improve your rankings in Google SERPs.

Again, you have to put yourself in the customer’s shoes. They want to read about a golfing tournament your team has been on, so your business will benefit if you keep answering questions your customers frequently ask.

Be consistent

There’s no point in writing a flurry of blog posts saying 2017, which massively improves the businesses’ organic SEO substantially, but then you don’t write any new blog posts after.

The reason is that your rankings are likely to go on a rollercoaster ride. You will likely rank higher on Google as you write more blog posts and receive more organic traffic from Google directly.

However, if you go a long time without writing new blog posts, your organic SEO will suffer, and your SERPs will move back down.

Therefore, you have to be consistent, devise a schedule, and write a piece of content marketing, say once a month.

We encourage you to be consistent, write blog posts over a sustained period, discourage putting a flurry of content marketing on, such as blog posts, and leave wide gaps between your next post.

Make high-quality but engaging content marketing a high word count
we recommend only writing blog posts if you have the time to write a post with a high word count. Our experience as a highly experienced web design agency within Cardiff is that blog posts with a high word count will rank higher in Google’s SERPs

Has to work on mobile

Your company website must work on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, so make sure it is responsive. Otherwise, this can negatively impact your business’s organic and local SEO. If it is not currently responsive and mobile-friendly, a local web designer should be able to make it so.

We can design a website for you and offer to write your blog posts.

Introduction

It’s the question our web design business is asked the most frequently: How long will it take you to design a new website?
When purchasing services or products from a company, the customer will want a straight answer about how long it will take to deliver the goods or complete the work.

Things are slightly different when designing a website because every website is slightly different in terms of its design.

What we mean by that is you must consider what functionality is needed. If it’s a straightforward brochure site, then this is the “bread and butter” of most web design agencies, and it is usually designed in less than three months.

However, if the brochure website is highly intricate and has a lot of functionality, it can often take much longer to build.

Visualising the concept

First, the client must understand how they want the website to be designed clearly. If they don’t, they may require multiple brainstorming sessions, and the web designers will need to spend much time with them to work out their preferences regarding what they like and don’t.

– For example, how the company logo will look
– Who’s going to write the text
– Page layout
– Which colour schemes will be used

If a client has an obvious idea of what they want, this can often be designed much quicker.

Alternatively, sometimes a business will have direct competitors and want some of the same functionality as their competitor’s websites, such as the same page layout and type of main navigation in the mobile and main menu. This can help the web designer understand what the client wants.

Which CMS do you want to use? Drupal, Joomla or, say, WordPress?

CMS is like the engine that runs the website. It powers your website and makes it work, just as a car engine provides power to the vehicle. There are many different content management systems, including Drupal and WordPress, which are some of the most popular CMSs in the world.

Writing the content marketing

This is often what takes the most time. Usually, the customer will insist that they write the text; thus, the client needs to write the copy for every page. However, even on a straightforward brochure website for a coffee shop, you could still end up writing over 3000 words.
Sometimes, the business owner gets sidetracked by the million-and-one other tasks running their business and puts writing the content on the back burner. So, to save you time, we recommend paying for a copywriter to do this work.

How long would it take a professional web developer to build the website?

The best way to work this out is to determine how many pages are needed. If it’s a, say, 8-page website, we can normally complete it in less than three months.

Then there’s the actual time of finding the web designer

There are a ton of web designers here in Cardiff. If you walk into most coffee shops within the city centre, you will likely find many web designers there beavering away designing websites in most coffee shops.

Then, large web design agencies are based in the city centre and Cardiff Bay. However, finding the company in the first place can actually add time to the web design process for most businesses. Therefore, to help you save time, you might want to ask friends in the company who designed their website, or if you like a competitor’s website, look in the footer to see who created it.

Contact us today for a free web design quote.

Date: 29/11/2024
Author: W&P Marketing

Introduction

So what is all this talk about WordPress? We hear you cry!

You might be thinking about getting your current website redesigned for a brand-new website designed for your business?

You might have gone around various web design agency’s offices, and they’ve offered you every single type of fancy coffee and the sun?

You might have been offered flat whites and double espresso’s, and if the web design agency is really fancy, you might have been provided with a “pumpkin spice latte”—that’s our favourite.

Jokes aside, if you’re interested in having a website designed, you’ve most probably heard about the content management system “WordPress”. In our humble opinion, it’s the best CMS out there, and we create most of our clients’ websites using WordPress.
WordPress was launched in 2003, it is now, by a large margin, the most popular content management system worldwide, powering over 60 million websites worldwide!

One of the reasons we recommend WordPress is that we’ve seen companies being talked into using bespoke content management systems that either been built by the web design agency itself or it’s a CMS the web design agency has recommended that practically no one outside of the web design company may have heard of!

The question we always ask our clients is, why reinvent the wheel?

Why choose a content management system you never heard about?

Why not pick one that’s good quality, reliable, and used by millions of businesses worldwide? This is why we recommend WordPress. So don’t invent the wheel, choose a system that’s popular worldwide, choose WordPress.

It’s like buying a car; some brands are reliable, dependable, and designed to be, well really good, so there is a safe bet. Why would you want to go for car brand you never heard of, that is more expensive and perhaps less reliable? Unless you’re looking for something high-performance sports car to make a statement that is!

We deviate again; lets get back on point is, why reinvent the wheel?

So, whether you run a small business with a large company, WordPress is fantastic for most businesses’ requirements. This is why we recommend it to our clients all the time.

Avoid basic, nasty-looking websites

We see this all so often: the business is in a rush to start up, could be a self-employed consultant or small business, and they have a bash at builing the website themselves.

When ends up happening? Is a website that looks like a glorified business card online? It’s naff, its full of stock photos, and it’s too basic.

So we can recommend a WordPress hands down, everytime to our clients.

Table of contents:

• What type of websites can be designed and built using WordPress?
• What are the main benefits of choosing WordPress?
• How long has WordPress been running for?
• How to start building WordPress websites

What Is WordPress?

WordPress is simply an open-source CMS. If you don’t know what CMS stands for, it stands merely for the “content management system. The benefits of owning a CMS such as WordPress are clear; it allows the owner to log in using a username and password to the administration panel.

However, in the admin panel, within WordPress CMS is called the “dashboard”; there you can change almost everything about the website. Depending on the template or design, you can change the wording, the colour scheme, the pictures, and the page layout.

So, many businesses, hear in Cardiff, allow web developers to build their websites for them initially because this often a lot of work and the business may not have the time to do this work themselves.

Yet, Because they’ve been built using WordPress, they can change the design later themselves later. For example, they might move from Cathedral Road to City Road in Cardiff; they can change the address themselves if they own WordPress website.

A WordPress website has benefits because the content management system has a simple and straight forward to use dashboard. You don’t need any coding knowledge or even know what PHP means. You can make the edits yourself within the dashboard.

What type of businesses use WordPress?

When WordPress was first launched in 2003, most websites were rather simplistic blogs, which were designed using WordPress. However, things have now changed substantially. Intricate e-commerce websites can be built using WP and the plugin, WooCommerce, and many global brands even use WordPress because it’s a fantastic quality content management system.

WYSIWYG editor

The WordPress WYSIWYG editor is built into the actual CMS, which is fantastic and allows you to edit blog posts that your adding.
Therefore, without coding knowledge, you can make the text bold, add a H1 tag, and add internal links and anchor text.

In our opinion, out of all content management systems and the sun, we think WordPress and the WYSIWYG are superb.

What things do I need in place to design a WordPress website?

Think about the domain name and make sure it’s available

There are a lot of businesses that contact web designers to get a website designed, yet they may not have finalised a choice of business name just yet. So they may not have purchased a domain name.

Sometimes, for example, a customer might ask, “Can you go ahead and start designing the website and we give the business name and domain name later?”
Often you cannot.

That’s because the content marketing needs to be written to include the business name.

We must also register a domain name for a company such as GoDaddy, and the domain name must be available.

What you often find is that when you select the perfect domain name, that’s a short name, that sticks in your mind, well often sometimes it will already be taken.

That domain name might be reserved by another businesses, or someone has parked the domain and now asking thousands of pounds for your domain name every year for another business to use it.

So before you contact the web developer or designer, think about a business name and check whether it’s available on a domain name registrar such as GoDaddy or on 123Reg or 20i. if your domain name is available, say for £9.99 a year, snap it up, as someone else might take it. For example, sometimes a business might have to pay thousands sometimes, if it’s a really good domain name that they want, but someone else has parked it.

You have to install an SSL certificate

You should ask your web designers to add an SSL certificate to the page.

Start burning the midnight oil and start writing!

So you do have to burn the midnight oil sometimes and write a lot of content marketing in order to get a website up and running; for example, even with a small brochure website with just seven pages or less, you could sometimes have an excess of 3000 words that need to be written!

This can’t just be any old waffle. The content marketing must be high quality.

It must be well-written and persuasive so people want to buy your company’s products or services.

Therefore, we ask our clients to write the text before contacting our web design agency. Sometimes, writing this text can take many months, so you might want to have the text in place before contacting your web designer to start building a website.

Different page builders

When you select WordPress, you can choose from different page builders such as “Elementor” and “Divi”. However, our firm favourite is “WP Bakery”.

Your web designers should show you how different page builders work. Some people prefer different page builders; we like WP Bakery.
However, another company might prefer Elementor.

It does come down to choice. However, we say you need to sit down with your web developer and ask them to show you how these different page builders work, because you need to use them to edit everything from the text on the website, through to adding pictures, or say adding new blog posts you have written. So you must find the WordPress page builder simple to use.

If you don’t find them simple, you might want to try different page builders. However, you need to talk with the web designer about which page builder you want because changing once the website has been built, is a very hard task to do.

Why Use WordPress?

So why do so many businesses choose WordPress?

It’s a widely stated statistic that over 40% of all websites have been built using WordPress!

It’s a content management system with tens of millions of websites built using it.

This is good for so many reasons. It’s good because it’s been around for a long time; it’s been improved and refined, just like a fine wine; it has improved with time.

It’s now a simple-to-use, elegant and brilliant content management system.

Many businesses can use it, from car garages through to solicitors practices- well just about any business can use WordPress. Perhaps you’re thinking about launching a product range and setting up an e-commerce business, well there are plugins such as Woocommerce, which make an absolute piece of cake to turn WordPress into an e-commerce store.

A Brief History of WordPress

WordPress has been around for a very long time, since 2003. It was first created by Matt Mullenweg, who wanted to design a website that you could edit and improve without modifying the source code. This is when WordPress first started. We here at this web design company have to say a massive thank you to Matt Mullenweg.

The Importance of WordPress 1.0

WordPress 1.0 was first offered to businesses in 2004. It had the name “Davies” back then, and when WordPress since then has rolled out many updates each being assigned with a code name.

An example of a popular, well-known update, the significant change WordPress was called “Gutenberg” update.

Come and have a chat with us

Come and have a chat with our web design agency, we design fantastic websites; we have experience designing websites for a wide range of businesses, everything from dental practices through to car garages.

We are WordPress experts within Cardiff

Why not give us a ring today?

Author: W&P Web Design
Date: 28/11/24

Artificial intelligence (AI) technology is developing at a lightning pace, transforming many aspects of modern life. Therefore, our web design team thought it was about time we explained how AI is changing web design

Introduction

Artificial intelligence (AI) technology is rapidly changing our lives. Many people don’t know that AI is being used across many large online retailers. In web design, AI is not just a futuristic concept but a practical tool that’s helping with everything from customer service to arranging the products we want to buy.

For example, AI can power the chatbot you chat with on a retailer’s website, arranging the products on the page to maximise the business’s sales chances.

Massive international conglomerates such as Meta, Google, and ChatGPT are all investing in AI and developing it to improve it further. This means that web designers and web design agencies should consider how AI will impact a website’s design.

This article will also examine how artificial intelligence is now used in web design, such as creating personalised user experiences, generating content marketing, and automating repetitive tasks.

What is AI, and how does it work?

When we think of artificial intelligence, we automatically think of the film with Will Smith, I-Robot (Brillant firm). However, AI is simply a program used to help people solve problems. Therefore, AI is trained on a massive amount of data, which are called language models.

How are our e-commerce businesses actively using artificial intelligence right now?

It’s widely thought that large PLCs and large online retailers use AI integrated into e-commerce websites to learn about buying habits.
For example, the next time you visit the website, look at numerous running trainers’ products. It might promote running clothing, smart watches, and water bottles to track your running performance.

Many companies believe that AI is being used to target fake reviews in that the A. I can determine whether reviews are being manually written by real shoppers or placed by bots, so they are fake reviews. Artificial intelligence is, therefore, being used to detect fake business and product reviews.

ChatGPT and Midjourney are examples of what is called “generative” AI.

What is generative AI?

Some businesses use ChatGPT and Midjourney to create content marketing and add pictures to the company’s content marketing.

Other AI programs like Midjourney can create images from simple text instructions.

For example, midjourney is used to create images.

If you give AI programmes, such as Chatgpt and Midjourney, a few simple instructions, such as “create a picture of a man drinking a soft drink out of a can on a hot summer’s day,” they can create amazing pictures.

Language models and AI are getting even better every day
At this moment, large language models are being used, and artificial intelligence, such as chat GPT, GPT is being trained on these language models. Then, you can create content marketing blog posts and pages of text using this artificial intelligence technology.

Many think artificial intelligence can help web designers and business owners save time. However, some worry that as AI becomes increasingly sophisticated, it could lead to job losses.

What do we think?

However, we think that AI can be used to save a lot of time. For example, you could use it to help you brainstorm ideas for a blog post you are thinking of writing.

For example, you might ask Chat GPT to develop 10-page title ideas to help you brainstorm ideas for a blog post or write a blog post about your interior design blog.

Therefore, instead of drinking copious amounts of coffee to develop ideas for your new blog post, you could save time and ask Chat GPT for suggestions that might spark your creativity.

Could it be used to design a website?

Cardiff business owners could have a website designed by AI, but it may lack the human element of creativity that comes with employing real web designers.

Therefore, many businesses like to chat with us, explain how they want their website to look, and then leave it to us to design.
Many companies don’t want to use AI; they often prefer to hire local web designers like us to create a quality, well-designed WordPress website. Our emphasis on the human touch and unique design sets us apart.

Comes to the WordPress experts in Cardiff

We can design a high-quality WordPress website for your company. We have designed excellent WordPress websites and work with many solicitors, dentists, and construction companies. Call us today for a no-obligation quote.

When a new business or an established business requires a brand-new website designed, there are thousands upon thousands of web design agencies to choose from. There are everything from freelancers working in their spare bedrooms at home to large web design companies that only build websites for one specific business sector, such as solicitors.

Yet, we think you may choose local companies when looking for a web design agency. So here’s why we believe that:

– Build up a long-term relationship, whereby it is easier to have meetings in person because there are local
– Local knowledge of the city and surrounding area
– Cost-effective: choosing web designers from larger cities can sometimes be more expensive

So, how do you go about choosing a web design agency?

Well, no two web design agencies are ever the same. Most, like W&P, want to provide you with a quality CMS that helps promote your business’s products and services for many years ahead.

However, on the other hand, you have your companies that churn out websites, well, a bit like a product on a factory production line. What ends up happening sometimes is that you have a website that’s cheap yet a bit basic.

So, here are some of our top recommendations for when choosing a web design company:

Clearly define what you need and set a cap on how much you’re willing to spend.

There’s no point in being sucked in by a web design “special offer” only to find when you’ve added up everything you need to get your new website live; it’s treble what you anticipated to spend at the start.

So, make sure right from the outset what the monthly/yearly hosting costs are. Also, make sure that the quote also includes making the website responsive.

For those of us who do not know what responsive means, it simply means the website will work on a mobile phone. However, some web design companies do not automatically include making the website mobile responsive within the initial quote.
So, you have to make sure that when agreeing to a web design quote, it includes the basics needed for your website to work. For example, all businesses will need hosting, a domain name, and a responsive website.

We recommend arranging a meeting with your web designers so that you can discuss everything the business will need. Often, special offer prices do not include everything, and for example, when you add up the costs, sometimes the cost of the monthly hosting can be pretty high compared to the price of getting the website designed. So, this is where some businesses draw your interest through getting a low-priced website built initially, yet the ongoing hosting costs could be high.

Don’t commit to an web design agency before you are ready

There are so many web design businesses splashing out tons on advertising on social media and on Adword campaigns. You may have entered your mobile number for a callback, and before you know it, a smooth-talking salesman is on the line.
After a chat, you might be sent an agreement to sign to begin designing your new website.
Hold your horses and not rush to choose any web design agency. A business often uses a website for an extended period, perhaps over the next seven years.
So our best recommendation is to don’t rush into signing any agreements. Instead, meet with your web designers in person and see if the company is a business that you want to work with over the long run. For example, you may want to hire a company to manage your company’s social media accounts or to improve organic search engine optimisation. Therefore, many web designers offer these supplementary services.
However, these services are ongoing, meaning that you often need to work with the business on a monthly basis. Therefore, we think it’s a good idea to meet with several web design agencies to see which company directors and management you enjoy working with because you might want to work with them over the long run.

CMS

Many people stick with a car brand because they are familiar with its styling, performance, and garages that service cars.
Some businesses are the same when choosing a content management system, or CMS, for short. Often, businesses get familiar with how a CMS such as WordPress works, and therefore, understandably, during a website redesign, they don’t want to switch to a different CMS and have to learn, for example, a totally different dashboard.
Our web design company is solely focused on building WordPress websites. Most of the businesses that contact us to get a website designed or redesigned want WordPress because they are often familiar with the CMS, how the Dashboard works, and the many benefits WordPress can bring.

What’s the ongoing cost?

So, any business does have to work out the ongoing costs of running that website. What you don’t want is to sign an agreement only to find that the ongoing costs are high.

Our business, for example, offers one year of free hosting for the brochure websites we build.
This differs from other businesses, which may charge a fixed monthly fee. After the first year is up, we charge a flat yearly fee, which is very affordable for all businesses.

Time frames

If you see they have made solid progress so far, there should be an element of time where you allow the web design agency to run over a deadline.

Yet what you don’t want is to sign up to get a website designed, perhaps pay a deposit, and then sign an agreement for the website to be designed. Then, you might be left waiting months for the website to be designed. Some brochure websites can often be designed in a matter of weeks.

There are times of the year, such as the peak of summer and the run-up to Christmas, when Cardiff web design agencies are busy bees, yet you should gain an understanding from the web designers how long it will take them to design the website.
With us, if we have the content marketing ready to go and add to the website, we can often design a brochure website from start to finish in

less than three weeks.

Would you like to work with us?

If your business needs a WordPress website designed or help improving its organic search engine optimisation, why not give us a ring today?

Author: W&P Marketing
Date: 26/11/2024

For many businesses today, the main way they draw in new customers is via their organic search engine optimisation (SEO). This simply means that the business improves its on-page and off-page SEO so that it appears on page one of Google for the products and services it sells.

Now, don’t get us wrong. This is not easy, and it’s most definitely not a piece of cake. To get any business from a standstill position to being on page one of Google takes at least six months of hard work. For the more competitive business sectors, where you have more competition, this can take much longer.

Who are we?
We are a web design business based in Cardiff. We build websites for a wide range of different businesses, from small businesses to much larger companies. We can also manage a business’s search engine optimisation for an extra fee. We charge a set fee per month depending on how much work is needed, which is based on how competitive your business sector is.

Yet the whole reason for writing this article is that we wanted to explain why it’s important to consider a business’s SEO right from the get-go. What we mean by that is when the business is designing the website.

It’s a bit like building a house: You have to get the foundations right for everything else to be built on top of them. This is exactly the same when improving a business’s search engine optimisation.

What exactly is SEO?

Google and the other major search engines use algorithms to calculate how good your business’s SEO is. For example, Googlebot crawls and indexes websites regularly.

It then looks at the strength of your business’s SEO by working out how strong the ranking factors are. Examples of ranking factors are a company’s backlinks, content marketing, and also how fast your company website is.

This ultimately dictates how visible your website is. For example, if you have very strong ranking factors, such as hundreds of quality backlinks, then your business is simply going to be on Google’s first page often for many different products or services that you sell.

How can you improve the SEO from the get-go when designing a website?

So, like when you enter a car into a race or train a boxer for a boxing match, you want to give that individual or car the best chance of winning.

Now, when you have a website designed, let’s say, by a web design agency based in the city of Cardiff, you’re most likely going to want that website to appear on the first page of Google’s organic results. Now, with that said, you have to improve the SEO on an ongoing basis, but also right from the start. So you have to consider Google E-EAT to make sure that the content marketing is high quality.

But also, you have to improve the SEO. Now, obviously, if you rush building the new company website and don’t consider SEO from the start, you are then quite literally fighting with one hand behind your back.

So we recommend that you don’t rush building your website and make sure that you get the SEO right before it even gets indexed. Here are some things that you need to think about.

Improve the on-page SEO

Make sure that you add high-quality content marketing, anchor text, internal links, meta titles, meta descriptions, page titles, alt text, etc., but make sure that all of this work is completed in a white-hat way. You must follow Google’s Webmaster Guidelines to ensure that the work is completed in a white-hat way.

You need to add high-quality content marketing.

All of the written work must be white hat. You must understand Google E-EAT. The content marketing must be very high quality if you want the page to appear on page one of Google.

Plus, we recommend hiring a digital marketing agency to add high-quality blog posts, perhaps once a month. As any good web design agency will tell you, in order to get your business on page one of Google, you have to add high-quality articles/blog posts on a regular basis.

You also have to consider the technical SEO

Responsive web design

So when you approach some web designers for a quote, they may quote you to design a brochure or an e-commerce website. They may state a flat fee, yet you have to also calculate how much it will cost to get a mobile version of the website designed. Sometimes, some web design businesses can charge quite a hefty fee, on top of the web design cost, to get a responsive, mobile-friendly version of the website designed.

Here at W&P, we are a well-known web design business based in the heart of Cardiff. Our fee always includes the fee to make the website mobile-friendly. This simply means that our very high-quality WordPress websites will work on smartphones and tablets as well.

Backlinks do take a lot of time to build

So, for some businesses, it’s absolutely crucial that they have high-quality backlinks; otherwise, they stand little to no chance of getting on page one of Google.

We recommend using the method of building backlinks: writing very high-quality content marketing that attracts backlinks.
However, backlinks also need to be managed. A business doesn’t want to accumulate low-quality spam links, as this can negatively damage its SEO. So, if it is to get on page one of Google, a business will need backlinks, quality backlinks.

Yet, with that said, the links need to be managed. By that, we mean that a company needs to use an SEO tool, such as Ahrefs or Moz Pro, to manage the backlinks. This is to ensure that the backlinks are high-quality.

If a business accumulates a lot of low-quality links, it may receive a link penalty.
An example of a link penalty is Google’s Penguin Penalty; this is why backlinks need to be managed.

Conclusion

Whether you’re a plumber, dental practice, or solicitor, we can design a well-crafted website for your business. We offer web design packages starting from just £950.00. For an additional fee, we can also manage your business’s SEO on a monthly basis. If your business needs a website designed and help improve its organic SEO, then do call us today.

Engagement

Large and small businesses alike understand that it’s a constant battle and competition to keep the business rankings high organically on the first page of Google.co.uk. Businesses must also compete with each other based on “engagement metrics”- such how long can they hold shoppers’ interest (dwell time)?

Arguably, at any time in history, our attention spans have become shorter when purchasing goods or looking for a company. That’s because as consumers we are spoilt for choice; we no longer have to search through catalogue businesses to find a local telephone number. We now have a mass of companies all competing for our business on social media and on Google’s results.

This is good and bad for businesses, as it keeps businesses on their toes and requires them to offer excellent customer service.
When you talk to any good marketing agency or web design company, they will tell you it’s all about keeping the shopper engaged.

Keeping the shopper engaged

Therefore in 2025 web designers globally will be focused on building and designing more engaging, animated and websites able to grab and retain your interest.

We’ve all seen websites’ header sections with auto-loading videos, which give a sense of the business its staff working for the business. .

This is sometimes supplemented with drone footage showing the business premises, or its services or products it offers to the market.

So, there you have it, its a constant battle to keep shoppers on your website, lower the bounce rate, and increase the dwell time. So web designers, cant make boring, stayle websites anymore, you need come up with an intresting design, in order to retain a shoppers interest, to do this the web design must stand out from the crowd.

Domino’s pizza have nailed it

Domino’s website is exciting and uses animation to keep the shoppers intrerst. For example on the App, and online, Domino’s Pizza often shows a robot that automatically updates you on the progress of your pizza being baked at the local Domino’s Pizza restaurant.

This is brilliant because it is interactive, it retains interest, and informs the customer on the progress of how their food is being prepared, whether it is baking stage, ready for collection, or out for delivery, for example.
So we can begin to see a lot more interactive, engaging, and fun.

Dynamic and responsive layouts

Many web designers will be discussing dynamic page layouts more we think during 2025. That’s the layout of a page which can change and rearrange themselves based on shoppers’ interactions with the website.

So, let’s say that you are particularly interested in a brand of running trainers. Rather than being presented with 300 pairs of randomly ordered trainers, spread across say 7 pages, if instead you have shown a preference for three particular brands, then the page can rearrange themselves on the page to entice the customer to buy the product.

This includes the user experience (U.X) and improves the click-through rate of each particular product.

Powering this dynamic layout are often complex artificial intelligence (A.I) based algorithms working away in the background, tailoring the results to what the algorithm thinks the customer will want to see next, so in this example arranging the trainers in terms of what the customer may well be interested in buying.

Virtual reality will become our reality

Virtual reality and augmented reality, AR for short is going to become something of a phenomenon. With millions of people owning these headsets in the future.

Imagine, for example, sitting in your living room and watching major sporting events, like the boxing match between Tyson Fury and Jake Paul on NetFlix.

Imagine if there were advertisements that popped out on all the television within your living room when and lets say you were then looking at a giant soda bottle or something to that effect circulating in your living room- this is what we think is the future of advertising and marketing.

This is basically what becomes possible with virtual reality and augmented reality.

Keeping things simple

Although we are entering a time where we will see artificial intelligence, augmented reality and virtual reality used a lot in our everyday lives, we will also think that a lot businesses will return to minimalism design as well.

So, for example, we think a lot of websites use a lot of empty spaces, clutter-free design, and text in brief paragraphs.
Because people’s attention spans are shorter, the skill in terms, of designing un-cluttered websites will become an art form.
Clutter-free design is becoming popular again, offering a good, elegant-looking website.

Chat bots

This might not happen in 2025, but we think it will happen in the future. Just as you walk into a traditional shop and a shop assistant greets you, we believe this is will become possible online through an automated sales assistant.

This representative will be like a real-life sales assistant, answering any questions you have about the product or service.

Let’s give you an example of what we mean. When you are shopping for an electrical item, customers often have many questions before they buy, let’s say, a rather expensive television.

Perhaps the customer can’t find the answer through the product description. So they might turn to the AI-powered chatbot to ask a questions about that particular product. We think artificial intelligence has become so good that it will understand the question, and provide an answer the same way a real customer service representative would.

If your business requires a website redesign the website to call us today.

Author: W&P
Subject: Web Design

Introduction

So, many businesses, especially start-up companies that are cash-strapped, might call around various local web designers for quotes. Yet they often find that even freelancers now often want upwards of 2k to design a brochure website.

Now, when a business is writing a business plan, it often budgets a lot less for the website, thinking that it can be built for a fraction of that price.

However, websites can be built cheaply, but do they serve their intended purpose, which is to increase sales?

Often, a DIY job website will have weak SEO and sometimes be very slow to load. The mobile version of the website is also often not considered, so the point we are trying to make is that the design often ends up being very weak.

Yet, if you are going to try building your own company website, we thought we would put together a handy guide.

I hope you will not fall into the trap that so many other businesses do when designing their first company website.
Without further ado, let’s examine some of the common mistakes that some businesses make when designing their first company website.

Lack of mobile optimisation

Walk practically anywhere today, and everybody is glued to their smartphones. This means that more and more shoppers buy goods and services from smartphones.

This means that the company website needs to work really well on smartphones. Now smartphones and tablets come in a huge range of different screen sizes. For example, some Samsung Galaxy smartphones have mini iPhones with giant screens.

So, the website needs to work well on desktops, such as your Apple MacBook Pro, smartphones, and tablets.

So, a common mistake many businesses make, especially small businesses designing their first company website, is that they don’t carefully consider how the mobile version of the website will look and don’t prioritise making it super simple to use.

Therefore, one of two things happens: either there’s no mobile version of the website, or it’s so poorly designed that when the business logs into its Google Analytics account, it will see that the website has an extremely high bounce rate. That’s because the mobile version of the website could offer a poor user experience, so the bounce rate will be high. This means that the business could be missing out on a lot of sales.

Poor navigation

A website’s navigation should be super simple to quickly take a customer from the homepage to the right product or service page. If the main menu is wholly cluttered and doesn’t even work on some smartphones, then again, the bounce rate will be very high.

So, as a hugely experienced web design agency, our best advice is to keep the website’s navigation simple and make it uncluttered and straightforward. So that you are taking the shopper from the homepage, through to the right product page, using just a few clicks.

Don’t add pop-ups

Some businesses think adding pop-ups to the page is an excellent way to put a CTA or call to action in front of the customer.
Let’s say you run a law practice and add pop-ups saying, “Fill your details in now, and we will call you back.” This is fine, but when you land on the website, which is the first box on the homepage, it can be unpleasant for a shopper.

Plus, every page they then subsequently go on, they may see the same pop-up message. What ends up happening is that this might annoy the shopper, who may then quickly decide to leave the company website. Google will know that a shopper is not spending very long at all on that business website, which means that the website has a low dwell time. This means that the business might start to move down Google’s ranks because it has a low dwell time.

So, if a company website is outdated, for example, you might add an award that the business achieved in 2017, yet the company website is not updated with newer awards. This can make the company website look outdated.

This is another reason you may want to hire a marketing agency like us instead. Not just to design a really impressive WordPress website or, let’s say, a Drupal website, but to work with the marketing company on a monthly basis to improve search engine optimisation. Then, you may want to make web design edits more often to keep the website updated.

Stock images

So, many companies make the common mistake of using stock images, which don’t sell the products or services that the business sells well.

What do we mean by that?

Well, let’s say that you run a construction company here in Wales. You hire a local web designer who uses stock photos of diggers, construction staff, and the construction of a building. Yet anybody who’s worked in the U.K. construction industry often can immediately see that the construction work has taken place in America and not here in the U.K.—how would they know that?

Well, the health and safety equipment, such as high-viz vests, often look different, as do the helmets and the overhead power lines pictured in the picture.

So, a customer, somebody looking for a local construction business, will know that those photos haven’t been taken in the U.K. and are stock photos. So, we recommend that when hiring a web developer, either pick high-quality stock photos, which you often have to buy or pay a local photography company for the day to get high-quality, high-resolution pictures for your company.

Stock photos often look low-quality if it’s clear to the shopper that they weren’t taken in the U.K.

Come to the web design experts in Cardiff:

Here the services that our company can offer:

WordPress web designers

We have been designing WordPress websites for diverse companies in the U.K.

SEO

We can offer both organic and local SEO services.

Would you like a free quote?

If you’re opening a dental practice here in Cardiff or thinking about starting a plumbing business, whatever type of company you plan on starting, why not give us a ring? We can design and build CMS websites, starting from just £950.00

Introduction

So, we know the score. Everyone likes a good deal. After all, why pay more for something if you can get it for less?

Well, we fully understand that fact.

However, there are some things you can save a few quid on- such as not buying that designer-label shirt.

That kind of decision is not going to affect your business, yet if you opt for a super cheap website that’s slow and doesn’t advertise your business in the best possible way, well, this happens:

– Super high bounce rates (this will damage your business SEO)
– Not generate sales
– Might be slow, therefore offers poor U.X

First impressions
Whether they’re buying a mountain bike or a set of ski gloves, shoppers are spoilt for choice in terms of the number of online retailers they can choose from.

This is good for the consumer, yet for a business, it means that they must have a well-designed website with good SEO; that is, good search engine optimisation offers a good U.X and is well-designed.

So, can a cheap website achieve this?
Probably not.

When a website costs, say, £500 or less, how much time can a web designer and developer realistically spend on it?

Well, the answer is often not that long at all.
The result is often an overly essential website that probably doesn’t sell your business.

A mobile-friendly website is essential.

Your company website must be responsive. Whether you run a solicitor’s practice or a trendy hairdressing saloon in Cardiff Bay, you will need the website to be mobile-ready and responsive. So, whichever web design agency you hire, when you obtain your quote breakdown, ensure that the website is responsive.

Your business will, therefore, need to have a company that is:

– Responsive
– Well designed and has a low bounce rate on smartphones and tablets
– Should be a piece of cake for the shopper to use

Content marketing

For example, writing 3,000 words for a new website can take time.

So, when you obtain quotes for your new website, ask whether that includes copywriting services.

Well-written text is essential to promoting your business’s products and services and to helping keep shoppers on your company website for a long time, improving dwell time.

When you talk to any good and established web design agency, they will tell you that a good website needs high-quality content marketing. This should be written in a white-hat way, and the author should know about Google E-EAT.

Good quality content marketing should have the following

– Be unique
– Written by an expert
– Have a very high Google E-EAT score

The website could have high ongoing costs.

So, many web designers and web design agencies sometimes offer super low prices to design a new company website.

Yet, the ongoing costs, such as the monthly hosting costs, can sometimes be quite expensive.

For example, you might have a website designed for just £700.00, but if the ongoing hosting is 40+ pounds per month, this is close to £500 a year.

So this is what some web design agencies do: They offer special prices to build a website for businesses, say, in the construction sector. Yet, when you look at the web design contract, you might see that the domain name renewal costs and hosting cost every month can sometimes be quite high.

So, when you choose a website design company like W&P, you will find that we offer very competitive prices for our web design services.
We also offer low prices on our website hosting and domain name renewal costs.

So if you want a want website designed for your business in Cardiff why not give us a ring?

Some company directors may have set up multiple companies in the past. This means that they may have a go-to web designer who knows exactly what they want. The company director also knows which CMS they want and the information that the web design agency will need to get the ball rolling.

However, many companies may never have had a website up and running before. So now, they are on Google looking for “web design Cardiff” and trying to whittle down the list and work out which companies to hire.
Yet, before you pick up that dog and bone—that’s your phone—and start getting talked into a website by a smooth-talking salesperson, we recommend sticking the kettle on.

That’s because you do need to mull over what your business needs and what you need the website to do so that you can tell the website designers exactly what you want. This way, you don’t go through the whole web design process and then go, hang on a minute, I forgot about, say, having a responsive version of the website built.

So planning is essential, but if it’s a 7-page brochure website, you haven’t got to go overboard on planning. You need to think about the following:

– Will your website be taking payments? if you so, you need to think about which e-commerce CMS you need
– Who will be writing the content marketing that’s the text
– Will you hire a photography company, or can the web design agency offer this service?
– Will you require help improving your SEO? If so, does the marketing agency offer this service?
– Which font would you like?

Put yourself in your customer’s shoes; what will they need from your company website?

For example, the website will most likely need to be responsive.

In addition, how are you going to design the product pages so that they offer useful product descriptions?

How do you make the website easy to use for selecting items, such as whether they are in stock, price, size, etc?

All this needs to be thought about from the start, including what functionality you will need, because if not, the web designers normally consider this extra work and add it to the price.

What is the competition doing well?

So, take a look at your competitors. We would never recommend copying your direct competitors.
However, think about this: let’s say you’re about to start a brand new company, a solicitors practice in Cardiff Bay. You will know your main three competitors; they may well be ranked on the 1st page of Google. Have a look at their websites and consider the following:

– How many pages do they have?
– How have they set out their services in terms of pages?
– How much text is added to each page?
– How is the text added to the page?
– What parts of the design are good? For example, is the main menu a piece of cake to use?

What features will your business need?

So, every business owner who comes to us to chat about the new website they want designed often wants something different.

For example, one customer might call us in the morning and want a minimalistic, professional-looking website for an accountancy practice.

Another business owner might call us in the afternoon and be setting up a new insurance company and want bold, bright colours used.

Our customers often want something completely different, so you will need to think about how you want the website designed.

However, with that said, all businesses will want the following, so do make sure that this is included in your web design quote:
– Responsive/mobile-ready website
– Super-fast website, so will need fast hosting
– Good logo design
– Who will be writing the text?

These points are essential to consider when designing a website. However, when you chat with our web designers, they can often recommend the suitable CMS for your business and other functionalities you might need. For example, some businesses might want a company blog section built as well.

Come to an established web design agency.

If you’re opening a new car dealership or perhaps a construction business in Wales and you want to hire an established Welsh web design agency, then do talk to us. We mostly build WordPress websites, yet our company can also offer SEO services and copywriting services. Come to W&P; we have some of the best web designers in Cardiff working for us.

Author: W&P Marketing
Date: 14/11/2024

Many companies are asked whether they want a blog section added when they have a website designed.

As this blog post will inform you, having a blog section can be beneficial to a business in terms of helping to draw in more customers.

However, managing a blog, in terms of keeping up with writing blog posts, can be massively time-consuming, and the blog posts may need updating. For example, if you have added, let’s say, “10 best tents for camping in 2018”,- well if this attracts many organic visitors, you may want to update the blog posts occasionally.

Writing and keeping blog posts up to date can be time-consuming. Yet, a blog can be your business’s opportunity to show off your knowledge and expertise. This is precisely what Google E-EAT advises: It wants a company to show it has real expertise and knowledge about the products or services you are selling.

These websites, which have a high Google E-EAT score, will be the businesses that rank higher on Google’s organic results.

Freshness

As any good SEO business and web design agency will know, it’s essential not to let a website get delayed if you want to improve the business’s organic search engine optimisation (SEO). The website needs to be kept fresh; one way to do this is to add blog posts regularly. For example, you may want to add a social media feed that shows your business’s latest Instagram posts on a page.

The benefits of adding a blog to your company website

SEO and rankings

So, why do businesses spend a lot on creating content marketing every year?

The answer is simple: If done right and the work is high-quality, it can potentially help attract many organic visitors. If the marketing business attracts many organic visitors, the company can turn those visitors into paying customers. So, for example, if you have expert knowledge about a product or service, you can turn this into helpful and engaging blog posts.
Whether it’s about how to change a car’s oil filter or which hair conditioner to buy for split ends, what matters is if the customer finds the work valuable and helpful.

If content marketing offers the following, it can help improve your company’s SEO.

• The work should have:
• High dwell time
• Low bounce rate
• Good CTR from the meta title and meta description

Building backlinks

If you were to ask a top web design agency or an SEO expert, what’s the most challenging part of improving a business’s organic search engine optimisation? They would probably say, “Building backlinks.”

The reason is that backlinks need to come from another website, and the backlinks must have the following attributes if they are to improve your company’s SEO: they are:

• Must be good quality
• Built using white methods
• The websites they come from must be relevant

Now, by writing numerous high-quality blog posts, you can earn backlinks.

So, for example, if you have written an excellent, well-written article that’s high quality, then readers may want to link to you.

So, for example, let’s say you sell oil filters and parts for servicing high-performance cars. If your business writes a series of blog posts saying why your car parts, such as the oil filters, are high quality, this will likely interest many people who own high-performance cars. For example, they may own blogs regarding track day racing, rally cars, and car tuning. These websites may link to your website, meaning that you obtain backlinks.

Gaining leads

Google has released a significant update called the “Google Helpful Content Update.” This means that Google’s algorithms now reward pages and blog posts that offer helpful information.

Also, from a business standpoint, if your business offers helpful advice that helps customers with questions they may have, they are more likely to buy from you.

It could be “Which are the most energy-efficient washing machines in the UK?” or ” Which is the best kitchen blender to buy?” No matter what it is about, if you write helpful advice, customers will likely read it. They are more likely to purchase from you if they find the information useful.

So, what are some of the downsides/drawbacks of owning a blog?

Well, we wouldn’t recommend using A. I do write blog posts. If you want to write high-quality blog posts, you must do the work manually.
A significant downside is the time it takes to write this work. Consider, for example, the top solicitor practices in any significant city in the United Kingdom.

You will see on these solicitor websites that, because the business sector is so competitive, they regularly invest huge time and marketing budgets in writing helpful guides and articles.
If you want good quality work that’s well written and has a high Google E-EAT score, 20+ hours could be spent writing just one long blog post. It might involve a lot of solicitors or a partner in the company. Then, the SEO agency has to do its bit and optimise the work, which costs quite a lot when done right.

So, what’s the downside of having a blog?

We would say the time and expense of writing and creating the work. Some businesses don’t have the time to write, say, 2500 words and then monitor the SEO performance of that work in Google Analytics to monitor the bounce rate, the time on site, and the number of links obtained using an SEO tool such as Moz.

It is half-baked

So, writing blog posts and well-written content marketing needs to be well written. It needs to tick all these boxes:

– Very low bounce rate
– High dwell time
– High Google E-EAT score
– Have many good quality do-follow and no-follow links
– Needs to be written by an expert
– Have good on-page SEO, such as meta titles, meta descriptions, anchor text, etc

The work cannot be half-baked, but that’s exactly what many businesses and even some web designers produce for their clients.
It becomes a bit like a production line. The main competitors publish three blog posts a month, so they feel they need to keep up.

However, this is not the approach to take when creating content marketing. It’s not about quantity or writing blog posts as regularly as possible; it doesn’t work like that.

Quality always pays

It’s, therefore, better to publish quality work than to try and write, say, four blog posts a month that are rubbish and half-baked.
So only publish good quality work.

Have an evident vision of the visitor/shopper you want to attract?

So why are you writing 2,500 words?

What’s the purpose of writing such long blog posts?

That is the question you must ask: what customers do you want to attract?

What are the questions that they most often ask your business?

Then, can you write a perfect answer to that question? If it ranks on the first page of Google, it may attract thousands of organic visitors, and you could potentially convert some of those shoppers into paying customers.
So, don’t just write, say, 700 words of absolute marketing waffle; instead, put yourself in your customer’s shoes and ask yourself:

– What are the questions they most often ask?
– How can you answer that question in the best way possible
– How can you create a piece of content marketing that your shoppers will find helpful?
This is why we always say it’s better to write a perfect piece of content marketing than to try multiple low-quality pieces that will not help your business attract customers.

Google E-EAT.

Have multiple staff member’s input.
You know earlier that we mentioned Google E-EAT. Well, Google now wants the author of any blog posts or pages to show that they are experts on whatever they are writing about.

This is why it is a good idea to have multiple people within your company provide input or completely write the work.

We say that because within your company, you will likely have different experts in your services or products.
For example, a large solicitors’ practice will likely have family, employment, and business lawyers.

Now, all of these skill sets are different, so we recommend having a “content calendar,” which ensures that you write about your business’s different services.

So, let’s return to the example of a solicitor’s practice. You might want to obtain more work for the employment law team, the family law department, and the business law staff. So, to optimise the business’s organic SEO, it’s a good idea to create a content calendar that sets out who’s writing what and when.

This means you can optimise your organic SEO for multiple keywords rather than writing many blog posts about one thing.

How we can help:

WordPress web design

Many businesses in Cardiff have come to us to get a WordPress website constructed. Whether you run a construction business or accountancy practice or are about to start your law practice, we are here to help. We can build quality WordPress websites, often in less than three weeks.

SEO: Our business can also offer SEO services, such as organic and local SEO, which require a monthly payment. We have some of the best

SEO consultants working for us.

Would you like a quote?

If you would like a quote to design a new website or perhaps you would like help improving your business’s organic search engine optimisation, why not give our web design agency a call?
 

Introduction

Let’s face it: start-up businesses often don’t have the budget to spend money on expensive photography shoots. Sure, they may do this later when the bucks start rolling in, but they often want to get a website up and running for now.

This means that web designers are often tasked with finding the right stock photos. Adobe Stock Photos is a brilliant site for really high-quality stock photos that are not free.

We have used these on most websites we build, yet they are not offered for free.

Some of the websites we recommend below, however, are offered for free. So, if you’re about to design your own website or perhaps you hired a web design agency, but they want you to pick out some photos for your new company website, well, these websites are brilliant for getting stock photos.

Unsplash

Website: https://unsplash.com/

So, a viral stock photo website is Unsplash; it is brilliant. It has been around for a long time, since 2013. Unsplash originally started as a Tumblr blog, but now it’s a website that web designers all around the globe switch to when they need stock photos. The reason why is that the website now has a huge, gigantic collection of stock photos, over 1 million high-quality photos.

Unsplash is brilliant, as it has a very simple-to-use website. When you search for stock photos, say of an excavator, that’s exactly what you get.

You might be thinking, shouldn’t all stock photos do that?

The answer is no; ask any good front-end web designer when tasked with finding a stock image of something generic and basic, such as a garden fence. Some other stock photo sites sometimes show gardens, ponds, lawnmowers, and anything they think is remotely related to a garden fence.

Now, as you would imagine, this can get rather annoying when designing a new company website because, well, it can take a long time to find the right photo.

However, this is why we like Unsplash so much. We often go straight to this website when we need stock photos simply because the results are accurate. When you’re looking for a picture of an excavator, that’s exactly what you get back.

We highly recommend Unsplash. It offers great stock photos, accurate results, and is simple to use. Our web design team here at W&P gives it a massive thumbs up.

Pixabay

Website: https://pixabay.com/

Another really popular website is Pixabay—it’s massively popular with web design agencies. The reason why is that it has over 1 million free stock photos.
This is important because when designing a website, the designers will often need choice. Whether it’s a picture of a car dealership or a Christmas tree, it’s always good to have a choice. This is exactly what PixaBay offers: a lot of choices.

Freeimages

Website: https://www.freeimages.com/

Getty Images owns free images and has a massive collection of stock photos. Therefore, it’s very popular with web designers.

Pexels

Website: https://www.pexels.com/

Pexels is one of our favourite stock photo websites. We have built numerous websites for clients using Pexels photos, and there are a massive number of stock photos to choose from.

Pexels has been around since 2014, and this is important because the more established websites have a large number of stock photos.

Does your business require a website to be designed?

We know exactly what it’s like; even though some business owners could build a website themselves, do they have the time?
Even searching for the right stock photo of someone passing over a bunch of flowers takes time.

This is why so many businesses come to us in Cardiff: We can design a fantastic website with a starting price of just £950.00. We can select the stock photos, helping you to save time. Therefore, we can assist you whether you’re a plumber in a hurry or a solicitor with a diary full of meetings.

Most of our websites are designed using the CMS called WordPress.

Have you never heard of WordPress?

Well, you are most likely to have been on a WordPress website. Over 40% of all websites are built using this CMS. It’s trendy, and we have already built many websites for various Cardiff businesses using this content management system.

Why build it yourself?

So, if you read an article about free stock photos, you might be thinking about building a new website yourself.
Yet, writing all that text and selecting all of the stock images can take a lot of time. So why not let us design the website for you?

We can design a new CMS website in a very short amount of time. Most of our websites are built and designed in less than three weeks from start to finish, which helps you save time. With a starting price of just £950.00, our websites are very affordable.

Why not contact us for a quote?

Our web design company can offer the following services:
– WordPress CMS web design
– Drupal website design
– Organic search engine optimisation
– Local SEO
– Logo design
– Cardiff business

Date: 12/11/2024
Introduction

What’s the longest you’ve been away from a screen today? An hour or more? Well, that’s unlikely because most of us check our smartphones as regularly as clockwork.

We are all checking screens more often, whether on our smartphones, iPads, tablets, Macbooks, desktops, or reading messages on our Apple smartwatches.

Whether it’s a social media update or a vital work e-mail, shoppers and smartphone users expect the website or mobile app to be responsive. This, in a nutshell, just means automatically adjusting to the screen size and resolution.

Shoppers, therefore, expect the website to snap to that screen size almost instantly. Businesses that fail to do this don’t adjust to the correct screen size. Well, the bounce rate is likely to go through the roof, and if sustained for long enough, the business has no chance, no chance at all, of getting on page one of Google.

So, if that wasn’t clear enough about why you need a responsive website for your business, we will hammer home the point even more. We’re not really; we want to give you the info you need to ensure your Cardiff web design team designs a well-designed website that should work across various devices.

Over half of visitors now come via a mobile device.

Plumber, hairdresser or solicitor practice, no business can afford to turn away half of its visitors to its website. Yet, unless you have a responsive website, this is precisely what you do. Plus, as soon as Google crawls and indexes the website and sees no mobile version of the website designed, this will result in lower search engine rankings.

Let’s reword that: your business might now appear in the mobile results if you don’t have a responsive website. So now, with over 55% of organic traffic coming via mobile devices, your business in 2024 must have a well-designed, mobile version of the website. And with web design businesses, like W&P, offering to design mobile responsive websites for as little as £950.00- well, there’s no excuse why your website

is not mobile-ready already- even rhymes.

Out the window with fixed width layouts

So, back in the day, we remember when our company owner, over twenty years old, designed his first website. It meant using fixed-width layouts and stating how long a wireframe section should be. This then got replicated on the shoppers’ desktop screen.
Well, I had a mobile responsive website that changed all of that completely.

So whether it’s a 4 K desktop monitor or a small iPhone screen, your website must work on various screen sizes. The width can’t be fixed anymore; the website must be responsive.

Google rolled out mobile-first indexing.

Google has made it clear that it wants a company website to be mobile-ready and responsive. It rolled out its mobile-first indexing update in 2018.

This means, in a nutshell, that the mobile version of the website, such as that new blog post you’ve just added to, will get indexed first. If your website is not responsive and mobile-ready, it will likely have seen a massive ranking drop since 2018.

This was when businesses in Cardiff and globally dashed to get on the phone with their web designers to make their websites mobile-responsive. It was dubbed at the time Mobilegeddon—a bit dramatic, we know.

Millions of businesses feared they would be left behind unless their websites were mobile-ready. However, many were already mobile-ready. For example, the countless WordPress websites we designed for many Cardiff businesses were responsive before the update.

Fluid grids are now the way forward.

Fluid grids are now the way forward. Remember early on in this article that we mentioned fixed widths and why this doesn’t make the website responsive?

Well, our web developers and designers are using fluid grids, which fix the issue by using percentage-based widths for your website rather than having them set in stone and fixed with pixel values. So, nearly all of most websites will now use fluid grids rather than fixed widths.

Hire W&P to design your responsive website today.

Our digital marketing agency can design a brand-new and impressive WordPress website for your business and offer SEO services. Most of our brochure websites can be live and completed in less than three weeks. Therefore, if you’re looking for a local web design agency, why not call us today?

What’s the main difference between UX and UI design?

Introduction

Some marketing agencies describe both UX and UI design as the same thing. However, even though they are peas from the same pod, they are still very different. That’s why you will have other people with these job titles on web design agencies’ websites. Therefore, we thought it would be a good idea to write a short article explaining the difference between UX and UI.

First things first, what is U.X Design?

So, UX design is simply short for user experience design; it’s about creating a good user experience.

So, just as an interior designer is called in to, say, a big department store to help design the layout, say, where’s the best place to sell certain products, and where to place advertising boards, etc., this is the same for a UX designer. However, the UX designer doesn’t work inside, say,

John Lewis or any other physical store for that matter; instead, the UX designer aims to create the best user experience online.

So, for example, a UX designer or user experience designer should make the website as simple and intuitive as possible. Here’s the thing: if you make it difficult for a shopper to find a product or service, they will leave. So, a UX designer’s job is to put themselves in the customers’ shoes and make it an absolute piece of cake to get the right products or services they want.

But the work for a U.X designer doesn’t stop there:

They have to:

– Make sure that the product descriptions answer the queries the customer wants
– Make it super simple to use the main menu
– Think about the main products/services you sell to get a shopper from the home page to that page as quickly as possible
– Make the website fast so shoppers do not have to wait for it to load.

To complete this work, the U.X designer will have to work with the web designers to do the following work:

User research:

• Who are the main customers? How have the competition designed their websites? How can you make your company website better?
• Wireframing
• This is like a rough sketch of the website, what it could look like

Usability testing:

This is all about making sure everything works as it should

Continuous improvement is achieved through split testing, also known as A/B testing.

U.X designers should work with the web designers to use A/B testing to see how the website can be improved. Therefore, when a business purchases a WordPress website or any other CMS, such as Drupal, you should work with the web designers to see if the design can be further improved. Many businesses, especially well-known company brands, use split testing to make minor and gradual improvements to the website design.

So, what is UI design?

UI design is user interface design, focusing more on the visual and the interactive part of the design. A UI designer, therefore, has the job of improving the aesthetic appearance of the website.

So, a UI designer will use various design software to design the buttons and the fonts, decide which hex codes and colour schemes to use, and how the page layout is designed. This can dramatically affect how long shoppers spend on the company website, yet if the design is not good, this can mean that the bounce rate is high; this can then have a negative knock-on effect on the business’s organic search engine optimisation.

UX Designers and UI designers often work closely together

When you walk into any large digital marketing agency, usually the UX designers and the UI designers will have their desks close together.
This is for good reason, as both designers have to work together, and the two job roles are linked.

For example, to create a good user experience, where the shopper wants to spend a long on the website and potentially buy more products, you have to have a good website design. To get a good design, you need to have good U.I. design; therefore, both U.X and U.I designers often have to work together.

Do you need a website designed in Cardiff?

Whether you run a construction company, for example, you might be a builder, plumber or electrician, we could help you to obtain a new website. If you run alternatively a solicitor or dental practice and require an intricate, well-designed WordPress website, we can help you.

Many businesses in South Wales have a WordPress CMS website designed by our designers, and then they hire our SEO team to improve the organic SEO continuously. Improving any business’s search engine optimisation requires much work. Yet, with that said, we do have, at this digital marketing agency, some of the best WordPress web designers and some of the best SEO experts working for us.

This is why we have worked with a diverse range of businesses here in Wales, ranging from large online e-commerce businesses to some of the best and most well-known solicitor practices in the whole of Wales.

If you want to redesign your website or a new one, we can help.

Introduction

Businesses sometimes take a very long time to optimise their Google Adwords campaign; this is important as ensuring your business is displayed for the right keywords is essential to gaining more sales.

After all, if you sell car tyres online, you won’t want your business displayed on bike tyres, for example.

This will, therefore, waste your business’s Google Adwords spend. That’s if your company is displayed for bike tyres when you actually sell car tyres, for example.

However, it’s surprising how often businesses overlook the crucial role of a well-designed landing page in maximising the amount of sales your company makes.

Google Adwords and Landing Pages

Therefore, your business might need a one-page website designed as a landing page. If you however spend a lot on Google Adwords, the page needs to be well-designed, otherwise, you could be losing out sales.

Here’s our tips for designing a well-designed landing page:

Create a picture: web designer, designing homepage, on Apple Laptop

Keep things simple

When it comes to design, simplicity is key.

Avoid overcomplicating your landing page design, instead, aim for a clean and straightforward design that effectively conveys your business offers.

If the shopper lands on single page, which is overcrowded with products, then this may overwhelm the shopper and make them leave the website, if they cant find the products they want quickly.

Calls to action

Within seconds, after a shopper lands on the website, you should make sure they can easily see a call to action.

So, for example, let’s say run a personal injury business. You might want to add a CTA, asking the shopper to enter your mobile number so that a sales representative can call the person back.

Therefore, you should make it an absolute piece of cake for shoppers to use a call to action on your website. Make your CTA’s clear and stand out from the rest of the page, so think about using a different colour box.

Content Marketing

Take the time to craft high-quality copy and content marketing. The written word is often what is a crucial factor in determining whether a shopper stays on your website, or they leave soon after. So use titles, to split the text into manageable sections the shopper will want to read, plus, this allows a shopper to skip to a section they may want to read more about.

Do add internal links as well, as this way the shopper may click on another page, which is keeping the shopper on the website for longer.

It’s also important to provide the details the customer wants to hear; for example, you might want to highlight your guarantee period. If a shopper can’t find the information they want within a few seconds, they may leave your website, contributing to what’s known as the ‘bounce rate’-the percentage of visitors who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page.

Split testing and A/B testing

Creating a Google Adwords landing page should be like cooking a complicated recipe in your kitchen .

Often, the chef wont get it right straight away. It would be best to keep refining the dish, that’s until you have the recipe down to fine art.

This is the same when designing your landing page; you will often get it right immediately. It would be best if you had split testing, also known as A/B testing, to improve the design gradually. You can use split testing to improve the design, find out which design looks best, which design in generating more sales for your business.

Think about website hosting.

What if the hosting is super slow?

This can mean that during crucial trading periods, such as Black Friday sales or January sales, your website hosting might be even slower because many website visitors are simultaneously shopping at the same time, causing your company website to be super slow, if you have slow website hosting?

Having a lot of shoppers on your company website at one time can be a good thing for the business.

However, this can be a significant drain on the website’s hosting; the company website can become very slow. What this could mean is that, at the same time, the bounce rate will start to increase substantially.

So it would be best to have super fast hosting to help your business website cope when you get busy with a lot of shoppers. Otherwise, imagine spending thousands on Google Adwords, only to find that you are losing out on making sales, because the hosting is too slow.

Date: 04/11/2024
Topic: WordPress

Introduction

Many businesses want a well-designed website, yet the owners may not know which website platform to choose. This is important because some businesses will use the administration login and dashboard sometimes weekly or at more frequent intervals.

This means that you’ll want a CMS that’s simple to use. You should be able to log in and add a new blog post quickly.

You don’t want to opt for a CMS that’s difficult to use. If you can’t find, for example, how to add a blog post, it will become a headache.

WordPress is not just a piece of cake to use; it’s a delight. Its user-friendly interface and intuitive features make managing your website a breeze.

So, let’s say you plan on adding a new piece of content marketing, such as a well-written blog post, every week.

You want this to be as simple as possible. When you’ve written, let’s say, a somewhat wordy 3,000-blog post and you’re a bit tired, the last thing you want is for the CMS, that’s your website, to make it hard to add content marketing.

Believe us when we say we have seen some content management systems designed by web design agencies that are a nightmare to use, complete with glitches. These systems develop problems, such as slow loading times or frequent crashes, making even adding a blog post difficult.

So, pick your CMS wisely, and choose one that’s a piece of cake. Now, different businesses will have different preferences regarding which CMS they like. Some company directors might like Drupal, Umbraco or another type of CMS. And these are all good quality content management systems that a business can use.

Yet, if you were to ask us to get our penny’s worth, we would say go for WordPress. Of course, we would need to meet you, have a chin-wag, and discuss what the CMS needs to do regarding functionality and how you want the website to look, and then our web design experts can make a recommendation.

9 times out of 10, most CMSs we design at our web design studio are built using WordPress.

We think WordPress is the bee’s knee, and here’s why we believe that:

– Simple to use, offers a good UI
– Piece of cake to update
– Good quality websites can be built using WordPress
– A massive chunk of every website for every business under the sun has been built using WordPress

What if we don’t want WordPress? What are our other options:

– Wix
– Squarespace
– Magento
– HubSpot CMS

How popular is WordPress

WordPress is not just popular; it’s a global phenomenon. From massive brands to sole traders, a vast community relies on WordPress. Choosing WordPress means you’re part of this thriving community with a wealth of resources and support at your fingertips.

Over 43% of all websites globally use WordPress, so when you look at your direct competitors’ websites, they often use WordPress.

It’s not abnormal for a business to have seven or more of its main competitors ranked on page one of Google.co.uk who have chosen a WordPress CMS. The reason is often due to how simple the WordPress Dashboard is to use, so if a business wants to manage, say, adding new blog posts themselves, it is indeed a piece of cake if you own a WordPress website.

You say famous, but how popular?

Statistics show that over 810 million websites use WordPress across the globe.

So, if your business in Cardiff chooses to have a WordPress website designed, you will select a prevalent content management system.

Why is it important to choose a popular CMS?

The main reason is that you will want the support and help of web design agencies during the life of your website.

So, it’s a bit like choosing a new car. You might not want to select a new brand that hasn’t established a repair and service network of garages.

Because you might have a bunch of mechanics/garages, you could state something like, “Sorry, mate, don’t work on those.”

The same goes for a website: You’ll want an established brand and a website CMS, which millions of businesses have already chosen. This means an army of web developers and designers specialising in building WordPress websites.

Why are so many businesses flocking to W&P Designs?

Is it because you’re as cheap as chips?

Well, no. Many web design companies offer bargain prices to design a website, and we don’t want to compete with these.

We have seen some websites that these web design companies churn out and beyond basic.

So, they often have a few lines of text and look like an online business card; they don’t offer much useful or helpful information. This means they cannot rank on page one of Google simply because they are often poorly designed.

Are there any downsides to choosing WordPress?

No, not unless the website is poorly designed.

Yet, any CMS, regardless of the brand, can be poorly designed. Many WordPress websites are very slow because their owners have too many plugins. Sometimes, some of the WordPress plugins are unnecessary or might be redundant, but they are still slowing the website down.

So, Google has moved to reward fast and lean websites.

You might hear your web designers discussing making the website fast or lightweight. They mean making sure the load time is as quick as possible.

You can check load times using two main tools: Google Page Speed Insights and GT Metrix.

Also, a significant factor is the speed of the hosting. We would highly recommend opting for super fast dedicated hosting.

Are you able to design WordPress websites quickly?

Yes, we can often, but it depends on how many pages need to be designed. So, like most web design companies, our bread and butter is building 7-page or less brochure websites.

Like most web design companies, our bread and butter are building 7-page or fewer brochure websites with WordPress. We can design most of these websites in less than 3 weeks, ensuring you get fast and efficient service.

This is dependent on whether the client has the text ready to go. If the client needs more time to write the content marketing, it can often take a lot longer for our designers to design a website.

As you can imagine, most websites need about 3,000 words written for the main pages, which can take a lot of time. In fact, what slows our web designers down the most is waiting for the text from the client. We can, therefore, offer our copywriters to do all of this work for you for an additional price.

Have you designed many WordPress websites?

Yes, we have designed many WordPress websites. For example, we have developed WordPress CMS websites for construction companies, solicitors, and the automotive business sector.

We also offer SEO services as well.

Are you to make a WordPress website responsive?

Yes, we certainly can; your company website must be responsive and mobile-ready. Any good SEO consultant will agree that over 50% of most businesses’ organic traffic now comes via smartphones and tablets.

It’s essential, therefore, that your website is made responsive; it should also offer the customer the following:

– Be simple to use; have, for example, a simple main menu
– Be lightening fast
– Offer valuable and helpful information, answering questions the shopper wants answered.

How do you update a WordPress website?

It’s an absolute piece of cake; however, you should regularly back up the entire site. Free WordPress plugins can help you create a backup.

We recommend making a backup because what can happen is you go to update, say, a plugin, and then the website might incur a glitch, or worse, the website might no longer be live. So

How much does it cost to build a WP site?

We are typically asked to build a 7-page brochure website for a new solicitors’ practice, say, opening up in Cardiff’s city centre.

We can normally complete these types of websites in less than three weeks. Sometimes, however, our web design team is also asked to write the text, design a logo, design an AMP version of the website, and improve the on-page SEO before the site is launched; this will, therefore, take us longer.

Yet, we always offer the customer an estimate of how long we think it will take us to design the website. If we encounter anything that holds the web designers up, we always promptly e-mail or call the customer to let them know what is happening. For the vast majority of the CMS websites we design, we build them often in less than three weeks.

Do many businesses in Cardiff have WordPress websites?

There are most certainly a huge number of businesses in Cardiff that own WordPress websites. We have built many well-designed WordPress websites for solicitors, dentists, and construction companies.

We can design a brilliant website for your business with a starting price of just 950.00

Can you also offer website hosting?

Yes, we can most certainly offer website hosting. So, on the vast majority of the WordPress websites that we build for our customers and most of the brochure websites that we build, we offer one year of free hosting.

After the first year ends, we offer affordable prices for website hosting.

Why should your business purchase a dedicated server?

So, first things first, let’s explain what website hosting is, why your business needs it, and why we recommend purchasing dedicated hosting for your business.

To get a website live, it requires a website to be designed, a domain name, website hosting,

Now, many businesses, especially small companies, are designing websites themselves, so they sometimes make the mistake of purchasing the cheapest website hosting they can find.

However, like with most things, you get what you pay for, so cheap website hosting is normally slow. Some hosting companies have seen websites become so slow that they load in rectangular blocks, bit by bit!

Yes, it was that slow!

It was as if the website didn’t even know about broadband internet and was still loading as if it was on a dial-up connection.

So, slow hosting is like having a 1.0 small-engine car: annoying, with no guts, and very, very slow.

So, what are your business’s options regarding website hosting?

They have a dedicated server:

This is the best option; we shall explain later why this is the best option for your business.

A cloud server

Then you have a cloud server, so we would pick a fast dedicated server rather than this option; however, it’s still better than a shared server.

A shared server

Then, you have a shared server. This option is the cheapest, but not one we would choose. A shared server can sometimes be very slow and cause SEO issues. For example, if the website is so slow, it impacts the U.X., meaning customers might get frustrated with how long it takes to load. This could lead to a very high bounce rate, which will negatively impact your company’s SEO.

So why would your business recommend a dedicated server?

A dedicated server should serve only one business, that company alone, and host only that customer’s websites. This means that the business should then have a unique IP address, which some SEO companies and web designers think is essential if you want to improve your company’s organic SEO.

So, having a dedicated server is almost like the business owning its own server, yet it’s a lot cheaper because you’re actually paying a hosting company to manage the server for you.

So, at this web design agency, we would say that having a dedicated server is the gold standard, and it’s not something that only big businesses have; all sizes of companies should have dedicated servers.

Yes, it does cost more, yet if your business is serious about improving its SEO and making the website super quick, your company does need dedicated hosting, that’s for sure.

Now, when you look at the price difference between dedicated hosting and shared hosting, it’s a lot, yet it’s still worth paying more to get a dedicated server.

U.X and peak times

So, let’s say your business purchases shared hosting. This means that your company website is on a server with other company websites.

What could happen is that other businesses obtain thousands of organic visitors via Google. Your business’s hosting will slow down because your website is on the same server.

So, when that server is trying to load the website for the other businesses, the shopper trying to access your company website is slowed down because the server is also working for those other business websites.

Now imagine, let’s say, a Black Friday or during the January sales. Let’s say those other websites might be in huge demand. This means that because the other businesses on that server are getting so many shoppers, this will slow down your business’s performance.

This is why so many businesses choose to have a dedicated server, and our web design company also recommends it.

Why a cheap website is sometimes a false economy?

So, especially when a new business starts here in Wales, it often doesn’t have much money to spend on marketing.

The company directors might opt for the cheapest web design quote. The downside is that this could mean super slow, and we mean moving at a snail’s pace hosting.

This will adversely impact the business’s SEO because it will incur a high bounce rate. When you talk to any good SEO company worth their salt, they will tell you that because of Google’s RankBrain, a business with a high bounce rate will have weak SEO.

How much does your web design company cost to design a website?

Prices for us to design a brochure website start from just £950.00. It’s clear, therefore, why our WordPress web designers are always so busy and drinking so many espressos.

We offer great prices, design exceptional websites, and have built many websites for Welsh businesses.

If you want a website built, why not give us a ring?

Who’s better to hire a web design agency or a freelancer?

Author: W&P

Date: 31/10/2024

When a business searches Google for local web designers, it is often presented with a mix of freelancers and web design agencies.

If you typed into Google.co.uk “local web design agencies,” you would often get a list of the larger digital marketing agencies in that area.

However, if you were running a search such as “web design companies,” you would often get a mix of sole trader freelancers through to large marketing companies, sometimes employing in excess of one hundred staff.

So, knowing which one to choose can seem daunting. You don’t want to go bargain basement, as most company directors fully appreciate that it’s crucial for most businesses’ success to get a really well-designed website that offers shoppers a good U.X.

On the other hand, most businesses don’t want to get talked into a website designed by a large digital marketing agency that will charge an absolute arm and a leg. So where’s the balance? What should you be opting for, an agency or a freelancer?

As we have been busy bees in the Cardiff area creating websites for small and more significant businesses, we are well-placed to explain the pros and cons of choosing freelancers or an agency.

So, whether you’re a budding entrepreneur or a seasoned veteran of running a business, this guide will be useful as we explain the pros and cons of choosing an agency over a web design freelancer.

So, how many people will you need to work on improving your business marketing?

First, consider this, how many different marketing skill sets do you need to promote your business?

You might be a plumber who just needs a brochure website built, in which case, you can hire any type of web design company. Some freelancers can design an absolutely amazing browser website, and if you’re not worried about investing in search engine optimisation, then freelancers are most of the time the way to go if their work is good quality.

We say that because the prices are likely to be lower and more affordable, and you often get a good level of customer service from web design freelancers because they run the business and care about offering a good level of service.

On the other hand, sure, you could fork out a ton on getting an agency to design, say, a WordPress brochure website for your business. But you might ask, when this job is pretty straightforward, why are you paying agency rates to design what should be a straightforward website for a plumber or a construction-related company?

On the other hand, if you are a more significant business or a business that wants to improve its ranking in Google.co.uk, you will need to hire an agency or a freelancer with two distinct skill sets.

That’s web design and SEO skill set; now, you might automatically think web designers can do both, so wear two hats. Yet you might be surprised.

Jack of all trades, master of none

It is entirely possible to hire a freelance web designer who is just really good at what they do. Yet they may also offer local SEO services and make a complete pig’s ear of the job.

The reason is that search engine optimisation, whether it’s local or organic SEO, is not simple. Google and the other major search engines are constantly improving and changing their algorithms, so unless the SEO consultant has their finger on the pulse, you will soon be left behind.

Now, what can happen is that some web designers are good at, say, designing a WordPress website, yet the SEO methods they employ might be outdated. That’s because a freelancer business, by definition, is just one person, so can they offer a good service when it comes to designing websites and offering to improve a business’s SEO?

Well, sometimes yes, they can, but in our view, having been doing this for 10 years, it’s rare to meet freelancers who are absolutely ace at web design and SEO. Normally, it’s just one of the other.

However, exceptions exist; you can have some good web designer freelancers and SEO consultants rolled into one. Because the skill sets needed are pretty different, you will generally need an agency, which usually has a team of SEO consultants and then a team of web designers and web developers.

This is not to say the skill sets operate in entirely separate silos from each other and that the work doesn’t overlap. That’s because for SEO to be effective today, you need good web design, yet for that to happen, both teams must communicate well. So, in our view, if your business is serious about improving your search engine optimisation and you want an excellent website built, we would head over to an agency that employs separate people to complete the work.

Trust us when we say this: to be good at SEO, you need your finger on the pulse, and to cut the mustard, so to speak, the SEO expert must be reading and brushing up on their knowledge daily. Now, when you look at the global brands, the vast multi-billion-dollar companies out there, they don’t put out job adverts for SEO experts/web designers, as they know to be good, ace at what you do; these are two completely different skill sets. To be at the top of your game, you usually must choose which side of the fence you sit on; you can’t often be good at both.

Web Design Agencies Vs Freelancers

So, often, the choice between hiring a freelancer or a web design agency boils down to one crucial factor: price.

Often, there’s a huge difference in price between what a freelancer charges and what a marketing agency charges.
When you consider the overheads, some of the best designers in Wales are based in Cardiff Bay and the city centre. As you can imagine, the rent or running costs of a building will be considerable.

However, to get the best web designers with the best skill set, in terms of hiring a WordPress designer, sometimes these staff are employed by these agencies, so it’s well worth paying the premium.

However, if you’re very clear about how you want the design to look and know which CMS you want, then why contact web design freelancers for a quote?

Although the quote will often be lower than that of an agency, there’s often one very big drawback to hiring a freelancer.

There are only so many hours in the day, and working as a self-employed person means you are likely to encounter very busy periods. This means a new website that needs designing may get on the back burner.

This means that where an agency might have been able to complete the website design in two weeks, you could sometimes be waiting a lot longer for a web design freelancer to do the same work.

If you are in a rush to get the website designed, then it might be better to choose a web design agency. However, all businesses, regardless of whether there’s one staff member employed or 1000, can get very busy at certain times of the year, such as the run-up to Christmas. So, you have to get a good idea from the web designers about how long they think it will take to complete the design.

How simple or complex is the web design?

So, if it’s a relatively straightforward brochure-style website, most web designers can design it quickly.

However, if the website is more complex, say, an e-commerce website built, perhaps with a large number of product lines, then you will often need a web design agency for this work.

A freelancer will get overwhelmed if they have to design an e-commerce website with a wide range of products, do the copywriting, do the on-page SEO, and do all the needed design work. This type of web design work often requires a team of staff to work on it. Therefore, a freelancer might be able to complete the job, but it might take a very long time.

So, consider how complex the project is and also what staff you require to complete it. We say this because even web design companies vary massively in terms of staff numbers.

Some agencies might have multiple web designers who specialise in Drupal, WordPress, and Kentico. Well, some other agencies might just have one designer who only builds using WordPress.

You might also need an on-page SEO consultant, a UX designer, a WordPress developer, and a copywriter. So you might have several staff working on one website, so often for e-commerce websites, you must hire a marketing agency.

What are the main disadvantages of choosing a web design agency?

Well, if you choose a really good web design agency, there are often no real drawbacks. You have the possibility of creating a business relationship with them, where, under one roof, they can offer all of the digital marketing services your business needs for the foreseeable future.

Therefore, we are just an e-mail away if you need a job advertisement added to your vacancy page or if you want to spend more on your Google AdWords in the run-up to Christmas.

However, it often boils down to cost. Many businesses don’t hire agencies because of cost. Sometimes, they might have a minimum pricing of 10k to design a brochure website. This is obviously unaffordable for many small businesses.

So, we would say that the only real drawback to hiring a well-known and respected SEO agency or web design company is often price. These companies have often become so successful that they don’t want to work on lower-cost brochure websites. They often have a minimum price point in place to design a website, which can be out of reach for some businesses.

However, for other businesses that can afford to hire an agency, it’s often really beneficial for them to have one company managing Google AdWords, organic SEO, and web design rather than having to work with, say, three different businesses. It takes a lot of time to communicate with all of these different businesses rather than hiring one agency that can manage everything for you.

Our top tips for choosing the right CMS website for your business

Written by: W&P Marketing
Date: 30/10/2024

At W&P Marketing, we engage with a diverse range of business owners daily. Whether it is to have a quick chat about improving the company’s SEO or having a chin-wag about which CMS might suit that business best.

We’ve learned that even within the same business sector, a CMS that perfectly suits one business might not suit another company that offers exactly the same service.

For those who do not know, a content management system is integrated within a website, which normally makes it easy for a business to publish blog posts, make updates, and manage the company website.

Therefore, you need to sit down with your web design team and discuss which CMS might best suit your business.

How to choose the suitable CMS for your business

Your chosen web designer might recommend a CMS that differs depending on the size of the business.

If you lack technical knowledge and don’t know JavaScript from AMP, you’re going to need a simple-to-use CMS.

However, the web design company might recommend a completely different CMS if you have an in-house digital marketing team that might have experience using Drupal or Kentico.

Why its so crucial that your website offers a good user experience

Which CMS you choose can ultimately dictate how simple the website is. Some content management systems might have, for example, drag-and-drop functionality to make the website simple to design.

On the other hand, websites might be overly simplistic and clunky and offer a really poor UX.

When considering a CMS, it’s crucial to evaluate both the front and back ends of your website. The backend should be user-friendly so that your staff can easily update the website, while the front end must be well-designed to ensure a positive user experience and prevent high bounce rates.

How simple is the back end of the website to use?

Depending on the content management system you choose, the back end of the website is often referred to as the administration panel or the dashboard.

We recommend that you visit your web design agency’s offices, have a nice cup of tea made, complimented by a few biscuits, and ask them to show you the back end or the admin panel of each CMS.

Then ask yourself, well, how simple is it to add a new blog post or change the company address?
If you can do well blindfolded (not literally, of course) and find the CMS Dashboard a piece of cake to use, that might be the CMS for you.

Which type of CMS do you often recommend to your clients?

When we show the vast majority of our clients the WordPress dashboard, they instantly see how simple it is to use because of how logically laid out the dashboard is. Compare this to some other content management systems, and you might find them difficult to use, and some of them are not that user-friendly.

So if we are working with a business and, let’s say, they have little technical knowledge or no one with coding knowledge within the business, then we often recommend WordPress because it’s so simple to use.

Consider speed (it’s important if your business wants to improve its organic SEO)

So, if we were to predict the future in terms of what Google ranking factor will become increasingly important, we would say the speed of your website will be a top consideration for most SEO companies.
What we mean by that is that a fast website can help you climb up Google’s ranks, while a slow website could mean that you’re on page 2 or beyond.

You must have a fast website, desktop, and mobile because if the website is slow, it will offer a poor user experience.
Speed is, therefore, important. You will want a fast website. So do have a chat with your web designers about which website hosting packages they offer. And if you have the marketing budget, we would highly recommend forking out more on fast website hosting. Think grease lightning fast. Get it so that even if you have a large sale on your website, with thousands of shoppers on your website, it’s still super fast.

Don’t offer a poor U.X. It will negatively impact your business’s SEO offer in the long run.
If your website often has a poor user experience and is slow, you start to fall behind the pack, which can negatively impact the SEO and your organic SEO. So, it’s crucial to have a fast website.

How can we make our company website fast?

• Choose a CMS that’s built to be fast
• Choose a fast website hosting
• Hire a web designer and developer with experience in improving load times.
• Use Google Page Speed Insight tools to improve load times
• Use GT Metrix to improve page load speeds
• Use split testing to see if you can further improve the website’s speed.

Choose a CMS that will grow with your business.

Sometimes, the business owner reacts knee-jerk to a web designer’s special offer. For example, some web design businesses may offer unbelievably cheap quotes; to give you an example, a company might offer a content management system below £500.

Blinding, you think, that’s the one for me, right up my street; you might think I don’t want to spend much on our new website.

However, why you should hold your horses and choose the right web design agency

Now, when you are building a business, you will likely have a million and one things on your mind. For example, you might be interviewing multiple people for new vacancies within your company and driving around like a headless chicken to find suitable business premises from which to operate.

However, we would say to hold your horses, take your time, and find a really good web design company that offers a range of different content management systems. Your business may want a Drupal, Squarespace, WordPress, or Joomla website.

And we would say the cheapest is not necessarily the best option when it comes to website design.
We say that because you don’t want an overly basic CMS; you want a CMS that can change and improve as your business grows.

But it is a bit like buying shoes; it’s most definitely not a one-size-fits-all approach. So, do have quite a detailed conversation with your web designers to make sure they recommend the right CMS for your business.

Do you require an e-commerce store to be built?

Suppose you require a website that takes payments or signs a customer up for a monthly subscription.
In that case, we might recommend a different CMS than we would if it were just a straightforward brochure website design, and we might recommend a different CMS that specialises in being an e-commerce website.

What is an open-source CMS?

There are various types of open-source CMS, but by an absolute country mile, the most popular is WordPress here in Great Britain. This is a type of open-source content management system; there are others, such as Joomla which are also very good.

The great thing about picking this type of CMS, and we’re talking about WordPress here, is that roughly 40% of all websites on the Internet right now are made using WordPress. Finding a WordPress developer or a WordPress design agency is an absolute piece of cake.

The benefit is that if you are falling out with your current website designer because, let’s say, they are too slow to respond to e-mails. It is simple to find another WordPress designer because thousands are dotted right throughout the United Kingdom.

Proprietary CMS:

Then you’ve got other content management systems called “proprietary CMS”; examples would be Umbraco and Kentico, which are excellent options.

On-going cost considerations

There are content management systems that are offered either free of charge or with a monthly subscription.
Some companies sometimes charge yearly subscriptions for you to use their CMS. These are often described as licensing fees, and you must carefully consider how much you will be paying per month to use various content management systems.

We say this because when you factor in other costs related to your digital marketing, for example, you might be paying to improve your organic SEO as well. If you also have to pay quite a lot monthly for the website itself’s subscription, things can get a little bit more expensive sometimes.

So again, based on your marketing budget, you have to decide how much you are willing to spend on ultrafast hosting, subscription fees for the website, SEO, and social media management, and perhaps you’re also paying for Google AdWords.

If your marketing budget is unlimited, that’s no problem. However, if you’re a small business, you will need to work out the costs, such as the licensing fee for your website.

Who will be making the updates for the CMS?

Have you ever sat in a new electric car and seen how long it sometimes takes to update itself?
Sometimes, it can be quite considerable and take some time. Sometimes, even the whole night could be spent with the car updating its software.

This is the same with a website. Even though the website’s front-end design might not change, updates often need to be made to the content management system work.

Updates

This might be to update various plugins or to roll out a patch because, let’s say, the CMS company notices a vulnerability in the website, which means a hacker could access it.

Other updates could include updating the content management system to a new version, for example.
Sometimes, these updates go like clockwork, and within a few minutes, your website is backed up and running smoothly. However, sometimes, they can roll out, causing glitches and havoc.

What we mean by causing havoc is that the pictures on your website might not be where they were before, the text might move around somewhat and be now out of place, the whole website might be jumbled up, and it might look like cake that has just fallen on the floor.
A bit of a mess!

So, we suggest you ask your web design agency how much they charge for “managed website hosting” and how much they charge per hour to rectify any glitches that may occur on your website.

So, for example, you might have unmanaged hosting and want to update the WordPress plug-ins yourself, but this might cause your website to go haywire and develop a glitch.

So it’s always worth paying that small monthly fee to the web designers to have managed website hosting.

Does your SEO consultant/agency like working on that type of CMS?

It’s like talking to a mechanic at a garage. Often, they have a preference for what manufacturer of car they like to work on.
For example, they might like servicing a particular type of car more than another.

This is true for SEO consultants and digital marketing agencies alike. Sometimes, a marketing agency will have a preference for which type of content management system they like to work on.

For example, we like to work on WordPress websites at this digital marketing agency.

For example, WordPress offers customisable URL structures and plug-ins that automatically set up site maps for you. Plus, editing the meta titles and descriptions with WordPress is simple to improve the click-through rate.

It doesn’t matter if you don’t know what each of those items is. We are trying to hammer home here because some content management systems allow you to edit to improve the on-page SEO.

How fast your website is is now very important.

Your content management system must be fast; if it’s not, this will likely give rise to more frustrated shoppers.
If you are a frustrated shopper, this often means the bounce rate increases and some content management systems are simply faster than others.

Some are road-run fast, meaning that they offer a good user experience/

Is the CMS popular, or will you be left stranded?

We have met with many business owners over the years, and sometimes, their previous web designers heavily pushed them into a particular content management system.

Since then, the web design agency might have gone bust, the content management system they recommended might not have been prevalent, and even that company might have gone into liquidation.

This means they are left stranded with the CMS no longer being updated, and it is hard to find patches to fix website problems.
Sometimes, you have no option but to start over again with a new CMS.

This is why we often recommend WordPress.

It has been around for donkey years; we’ve been designing websites with it for 10 years. The dashboard is also very logical and straightforward, and many company directors like using it.

So, the point we are trying to make here is that if you have a web design agency that is heavily pushing you into using a CMS that you have never heard of before and that is not very well-known, then be wary.

The reason is that finding the help and support you need in the future might be very hard, such as finding a web developer who specialises in that CMS.

If the company developing the content management system goes bust, you might be left with a problematic CMS.

Come to the web design experts.

We’ve been designing websites for Welsh businesses for a very long time. In fact, we have been designing quality WordPress websites for over 10 years.

We are WordPress experts.

Whether you are about to open a fancy coffee shop or you are going to open your clothing brand in the middle of Cardiff city centre, we are the company to call. We design affordable websites with brilliant, well-designed designs. We are the WordPress experts. Give us a ring today.

Date: 28/10/2024

The importance of good web design and SEO for solicitors

It is arguably one of the most competitive business sectors for implementing and improving a solicitor’s practice SEO. That’s because, in any busy city throughout the United Kingdom, a mass of solicitor practices will be dotted all over the city. These businesses will, therefore, be fiercely competing for the top three places both organically and in the Google Business rankings.

Therefore, good, top-notch SEO consultants and agencies work with these businesses because a few places on Google can sometimes mean the difference between earning or not earning hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Then there’s the web design. You could have some of the best solicitors working for you in that region, the best minds, yet if the website doesn’t sell the business well, customers often leave a website in a matter of seconds.

Bounce rates are significant to monitor to improve web design and SEO
So, sometimes, when you start to talk about bounce rates, you might think that this has solely to do with SEO. However, lowering a bounce rate often involves improving the business’s SEO and web design.

The website must, therefore, be:

– Simple to use
– Offer the answer or product/service the customer is looking for
– Be fast
From an SEO perspective, the website must be:
– Offer helpful advice (Google Helpful Content Update)
– Must have a low bounce rate
– Be written by an expert
– Have a high Google E-EAT score

Good quality content marketing is essential for solicitors’ practices

So, some businesses might publish a new blog post or page once every three months.
However, for your top law firms, this is nowhere near enough. Top solicitors often have to work with their SEO agency to publish top-quality content marketing as regularly as once a week or even more.

FAQ

Customers often have many questions, especially when it comes to offering legal advice, such as employment law or family law advice.
Therefore, they often ask Google to find answers to these questions. If your blog post or main page appears on the first page of Google answering these questions, you will receive a lot more organic traffic.

Because there are so many questions that customers ask solicitors, this is why there’s so much content marketing that needs to be written.
Google E-EAT

Ever since the Google E-EAT update, it’s more important than ever that the written work on your company website is written with the help of or entirely by an expert on that subject.

We understand that an employment law practice often can’t have a solicitor write 2,000 blog posts monthly, as it’s time-consuming. So usually, the solicitor will liaise with the copywriter at the web design agency to have input into how the article is written.
The article must be well-written, clear, and written by an expert.

Keywords

We highly recommend using quality SEO tools, such as Ahrefs, Moz Pro, or Majestic SEO, to see which keywords your business should optimise your company website for.

Google Analytics

Ask your web designers to set up a Google Analytics account for your business. We highly recommend that this be completed at the same time as the website is being designed.

You want a Google Analytics account added at the very start so you can track whether your organic visitor numbers are improving or not every month. Also, it gives you valuable information, such as the website’s bounce rate and how long a shopper is spending on the website. Google Analytics 4 is offered for free, so we would highly recommend asking your web designers to add it.

Do pay for quality SEO

So, for solicitors’ practices, let’s say you run an employment solicitor. In a capital city like Cardiff, you will have tremendous competition. Therefore, to obtain more customers from Google’s organic results, you will need a quality SEO agency. Here at this web design company, we also offer SEO services at an affordable price.

Which CMS would you recommend for solicitors’ practices?

This does depend on the business; we would need to chat with you regarding which CMS your business has experience using. For example, the company director might have had a Drupal website and know how to use the admin panel. Consequently, you might want another Drupal website designed.

If not, after I show you WordPress and how the dashboard works, your business may want a WordPress website designed. The Dashboard on a WordPress website is super simple to use. You can update plugins, for example, with just a few clicks of the button. Plus, it’s simple to make edits to the text. Let’s say your solicitor’s practice switches address in Cardiff. You can use your WordPress Dashboard to make such simple changes quickly.

Backlink analysis

So, when you have a massive bunch of solicitors practices, all with well-designed websites costing more than 10k to build, how does Google know which businesses to rank on page one of Google and the others on page 7 of Google?

Well, the quality of the business’s content marketing, such as blog posts and guides, will be a massive deciding factor in whether that business should rank on page 1 of Google.

Don’t think for a second that just writing one blog post, say 3,000 words, will be enough for you to log into your Google Search Console account and have your business appear on page one of Google.

It doesn’t work like that.

That’s why businesses often have to write many articles and improve the business’s backlinks simultaneously.
Building backlinks takes a lot of time. The best approach is to use high-quality backlink-checking tools like Moz Pro to examine your competitor’s backlinks. Then, hire a backlink-building expert to ensure they build backlinks in a white-hat way.

When you launch your new website, set up a Google Business profile.

The technical SEO is set to a good standard when designing the website.
Make sure the website is supersonic fast.

Good web hosting and design are needed to ensure the speed of your solicitor’s website. The website needs to be fast on mobile and desktop, so the design must also be fast. Also, make sure that you choose good-quality website hosting.

Mobile responsive

Your new solicitor’s website must work on desktops, laptops, and smartphones. The mobile design must be perfect because the website won’t rank high organically if it’s not, and the bounce rate is too high. This means businesses, such as solicitors’ practices with a sky-high bounce rate, often get moved down Google’s organic ranks because the bounce rate is too high.

Keep on top of your SEO progress.

Google rolls out algorithm updates on a very regular basis. Some of these algorithm updates can substantially alter where a business ranks in the SERPs. Therefore, your SEO agency must ensure they keep up with SEO progress.
For example, there was a significant update, meaning that if your website didn’t have a mobile version of the website design, your business would never appear in the organic mobile results. This often means the company could miss out on receiving thousands of visitors.

Web design and U.X

First impressions matter, so if the web design for a solicitor’s practice doesn’t instantly show that your business offers the service it wants, this could lead to a high bounce rate. Therefore, your web developers and designers need to spend a lot of time designing the website’s home page so it instantly tells a shopper that you offer that service or product.

Introduce your solicitors via a short 3-minute video

A good idea that our web design company would recommend is that your solicitors introduce themselves via a YouTube video.
When this is embedded into the page, it can increase the time on the site. For example, a solicitor introducing themselves and the services they offer might have a video well over three minutes long. Therefore, you retain a visitor on the page for longer, improving the business’s SEO.

So, let’s say that you publish a 2,000-word blog post. A customer might not want to read a massive amount of text. They might be on the train on the way home from work and might be tired. Therefore, if they can instead watch a YouTube video that you have embedded on the page to offer advice, they may watch that, increasing the time on site.
As any good web design agency will tell you, improving a business’s SEO involves increasing the time on-site and reducing the bounce rate.

Do you need a website designed for your law firm?

We have experience designing very high-quality websites for solicitors’ practices. We can design a very high-quality WordPress website. Many of our clients then partner with us so that we can improve their search engine optimisation as well.
How much does it cost to design a solicitor’s practice website?

Our web design prices start from £950.00 for a 7-page website. Many businesses, especially solicitors’ practices, will require more pages. Therefore, we can design as many pages as the business needs. We offer affordable prices.

Does your web design company build websites?

We can also offer the following services:

Organic search engine optimisation
Once our web designers have finished designing a fantastic WordPress website for your business, we can improve organic SEO.

This is a monthly service, and our SEO services start at £500.00 monthly.

If your business needs help improving its SEO or obtaining a new website, why not call us today?

What exactly are AMP pages and how can they benefit a business?

Date: 24.10.2024

You might have heard about Accelerated Mobile Pages, which is often referred to as “AMP.” In a nutshell, this helps speed up web pages on smartphones and tablets. Sure, we now have 5G mobiles and signals, yet a super-fast website still benefits from offering the customer a better user experience, and Google does tend to rank faster websites higher.

What is HTML AMP

So, a standard webpage is made up of HTML, just like the one you are reading here. Yet, with AMP HTML, things are different. It’s what web designers call a stripped-back version of HTML, which makes it faster.

Your company website on a diet

So, a streamlined version of CSS is used, plus many web designers basically call an AMP version of a website your company website but on a diet. This means you get super fast loading times, improving the user experience for shoppers because your company website is faster.

How you can benefit from AMP pages

How can we have AMP pages designed to benefit our business?

So, if a business wants to rank on page one of Google.co.uk, it often needs to have a fast website. Google’s algorithms and Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, want to offer shoppers a good user experience. No shopper wants to wait around for a long time for a website to load, so the faster you can make your company website, the better.

This is why many businesses in Wales are asking web design agencies to design desktop, mobile, and AMP versions of their websites.

Impatient

Have you noticed how impatient shoppers get when they need to wait too long in a queue? Well, this is the same as running an online business. Shoppers simply are not willing today to wait around for very long; they will just leave. For example, 53% of mobile shoppers will go in 3 seconds if the website hasn’t fully loaded.

Do bear this in mind when designing your company website because, let’s say, on the header, you have an autoloading video of the header section, which can slow the website down.

So, for example, let’s say you run a hotel and hire a person to video the hotel using a drone. They fly over the hotel, which does give a customer a very good idea of the hotel they may choose to stay in.

However, the downside is that having an autoloading video on the homepage can massively slow the website down, meaning that the SEO might sometimes be affected.

So, if your business offers a good user experience, in that the website is simple to use and shoppers can easily find a product or a service, then they are likely to return. Therefore, if you make your company website fast, you are improving the user experience, meaning that you are making it simpler for shoppers to buy products or services from you.

Therefore, when they need to buy an item again, they may return to your company website to do so. However, if the website is slow, and for example, they may have had difficulty processing their payment because the website was so slow, then you are likely to get repeat customers.

We have a WordPress website. Can we make an AMP page?

If your business, owns a WordPress website, then it can be straightforward to create an AMP page. However, before you do this work, we would recommend hiring a web designer to do it, plus also making a backup of the website before you add an AMP page.

AMP WordPress plugin, produced by Automattic

Talk to your web design agency about which WordPress plugin they recommend using; you may wish to use a WordPress plugin called “Automattic”.

Ask a web designer for help.

Sometimes, you will need the help of a web developer to activate an AMP version of the website.

How we can help:

We are a highly experienced web design agency. Our business, that’s based right in the heart of Cardiff’s city centre, can offer your business the following services:

– White hat SEO
– Organic SEO
– Local SEO
– WordPress web design
– Web design services
– SEO consultants
– We are a highly experienced web design agency

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

The vast majority of the websites we design will be brochure websites that are ten pages or less. We often use a CMS called “WordPress” to design these websites. The cost varies depending on how many pages the business requires, yet we can design a 7-page brochure website for just £950.00. Most businesses, ranging from construction companies to plumbers to solicitors, often need a brochure website, and we can design this type of business website in a short period of time.

How much does website hosting cost?

We offer to host the website for free for the first year. Normally, we offer website hosting for a flat fee of £100 per year for us to host a brochure website.

How much does SEO cost in Cardiff?

SEO is a completely separate service that we offer; search engine optimisation takes up a lot of time. If the work is high quality, white hat, and follows the advice of Google E-EAT, then it can take a lot of time each month. We therefore offer a minimum price of £500 per month, up to £5k per month, depending on the level of competition that the business faces.

How long does it take to design a website?

We can design most brochures and websites in less than 3 weeks.

Why your web design company should know about Google E-EAT

Date: 23/10/2024

Subject: Google E-EAT

Google does make improvements to its algorithm as regularly as clockwork. This is to help keep spam off the 1st page results on Google. However, even if a web design business doesn’t offer SEO, this doesn’t mean that it should be aware of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and Google E-EAT guidelines.

Most businesses want to improve their organic search engine optimisation; you must ensure your website has a good E-EAT score.
So, what is Google E-EAT?

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Google employs quality checkers, known as quality evaluators, who have a tick-list, if you like, for evaluating whether a blog post or page on a company website is good quality.
Therefore, built into Google’s algorithms, it works out your business Google E-EAT score.

What does Google E-EAT mean?
Experience

So, do Google’s algorithms want to determine whether the author of the work has firsthand experience of what they are writing about? For example, sometimes, it’s clear when reading a page or blog post that the author has an in-depth knowledge about what they are talking about.
The text offers clear and helpful advice. Google’s algorithms, therefore, want to place businesses on the first page that provides helpful guidance. Thus, Google’s E-EAT is looking to determine whether the author has experience with what they are talking about.

Expertise

Again, this is similar to experience; how much expertise does the author have with what they are talking about? It is 700 words of waffle about, let’s say, a jacuzzi, or it is an article that explains clearly why that product is high quality and has an in-built filtration system patented by the business to keep the water fresh.

The point we are trying to make is that when writing content marketing, the work must be written by someone with a good level of knowledge regarding what you are writing about.

So, as web designers, here’s our best advice when writing content marketing for the main pages. For those who don’t know, this is simply the text.

– Make sure the content marketing is unique; don’t copy and paste it
– Use the main pages as a way of showing your business are experts at what you are talking about
– Make sure the work is helpful to your shoppers

– Go the extra mile, write text, offer practical advice via YouTube video, get infographics created to make the page enjoyable for the shopper

Authoritativeness

For example, Google’s algorithms use backlinks to check the authoritativeness of a website or page.

For example, if a well-known company or person links to the work, it signals that they like it.

So, let’s give you an example: If Barry Schwartz linked to us from his website, SEO Round Table, www.seroundtable.com, because Barry is an extremely well-known and respected SEO consultant, this would help that page or blog post rank better in the Google SERPs.

So, Google’s algorithms use the number of backlinks and citations to determine a page’s authoritativeness.

Trustworthiness

Google’s algorithms will likely use Google Knowledge Graph to ensure that the facts and the statistics a business mentions are accurate.
This is important because shoppers want helpful advice and don’t want to make a buying decision based on false facts.
So, Google’s algorithm using Google E-EAT determines whether the facts and statistics are correct.

So why do web designers need to know about Google E-EAT?

Google E-EAT means that web designers, SEO companies, and any business that publishes content marketing must ensure that the work is well-written and high-quality.

It must be the work that shoppers read, and it must help them with a question they want answered. For example, it could help the customer find an energy-efficient washing machine by, say, writing a blog post stating the company’s four most energy-efficient washing machines.

The article could clearly state the washing machine’s features to make it energy efficient. Therefore, it would not be just 700 words of waffle trying to sell more washing machines without answering the customer’s question.
So why should web designers/businesses know about Google E-EAT?

Seo

If Google’s algorithm states that your business website has a high Google E-EAT score, your business is likely to rank higher in the SERPs. That’s why any business that wants to improve its organic SEO needs to know about Google E-EAT.

So, how can our business improve our Google E-EAT score?

This article is essential for web designers because businesses or web design agencies sometimes rush to write the text for pages when a website is designed.

This often means that you have a “content-thin” website, a page, or a blog post that offers little information, possibly just a few lines of text.
This is not good because offering such little advice means that often, you don’t offer enough information for the customer to answer their questions.

Content marketing, instead, must be helpful and well-written. Often, you need a lot of well-written text, but you should also complement this with a YouTube video embedded on the page, infographics, and bullet points.

Now, for Google to give your business website a good Google E-EAT score, here are our recommendations on what you should do.
Copywriters should work with the client closely.

So, content marketing must show firsthand experience, and the copywriters must work closely with the business’s directors or staff to use their knowledge of a product or service and incorporate that knowledge into the text.

This will make the work more helpful for the customer and show Google’s algorithms that you are an expert on what you are writing about because you will have gained help from an expert when writing about that product or service.

Demonstrate Expertise

So, again, I will work with experts on that product or service to help write the evergreen content marketing, main pages, and blog posts.
Whether you sell car insurance or run a solicitors practice, make sure that the copywriters at the web design company work with you to write high-quality content marketing. The work must be unique, well written, and show your real expertise in the product/services you sell.

Also, make sure that information is kept up to date. For example, if you add facts and statistics from 2018, well, make sure that you update this every few years; otherwise, the information starts to get old and outdated.

Build Authoritativeness

This is easier said than done because it is hard to build quality links. However, if you write top-quality content marketing, then other businesses and bloggers may choose to link to your work.

So, when you log into your backlink-checking tool, say Moz Pro, which we highly recommend, you might start to see that your business’s blog posts and main pages are starting to obtain high-quality backlinks. This is how you improve your business’s authoritativeness.

Improve your trustworthiness

To do this, incorporate reviews from customers on your website. Ensure all the facts and statistics are mentioned; you may want to add an outbound link to show where you obtained the facts you mentioned in the article.

Also, ensure that you keep the page or blog post updated and that the website is secure, so add an SSL certificate.

Do you need a new website designed

For over 10 years, we have designed very high-quality websites for Welsh businesses. If you run a business in Cardiff and need a website designed, why not give us a call?

Introduction

So, whether you sell surfboards or are a top lawyer in your area, the homepage will be your website’s most important page.

The design must be correct, as it often influences whether a shopper stays or jumps to one of your competitor’s websites.

Because our WordPress designers have been designing quality websites for a very long time—over 10 years—we are well placed to offer you some design tips.

Here we go, so before you start slapping together a homepage design, pause, take a break and brew. Have a good read of this article; it will offer you some of our best advice:

Layout is crucial

If you provide too much information and pictures, you will overwhelm the shopper, slow down the load time, and lose shoppers.
So, it’s better to balance offering advice and helping the shopper but don’t go overboard with writing a ton of text.

Hire a WordPress web designer.

So, first thing, check if WordPress is the right content management system for your business; for our web design company, we would say that for the vast majority of people who contact us, most of the time 99.9% of the time, WordPress meets and exceeds what they need from a website.

However, sometimes, it might not be enough, so get a packet of biscuits, brew, and sit down with your web designers to chat about which content management system is right for your business. And there’s a lot to choose from. Popular CMSs that many British businesses have chosen include Drupal, Squarespace, and Joomla.

Act like a signpost

So, you know, when you visit a famous landmark or walk along a famous street, say in Hollywood- well, often there are clear signposts.
That’s because tourists often don’t know the area and need guidance to get to the attractions.

So, signposts are helpful.

So think of this when designing a homepage for your business: Your business’s organic SEO could potentially attract thousands of visitors every month.

Therefore, you must consider how to direct all those visitors to the right product or service as simply as possible.
So, the homepage has to act like a signpost, be clear, and have simple-to-use main navigation. It also needs to use a call to action and have internal links.

Now, if your main selling item is, let’s say, a fridge freezer, the homepage needs super clear pictures of that item and a call to action, such as “sale now on fridge freezers,” which gets the shopper as quickly as possible to that page.

On-page SEO

So, it’s essential to offer helpful information to your shoppers. It is also important to have a perfect design so shoppers on your company website are impressed by the website and company branding.

But when you look at the companies on page one of Google.co.uk, you will see they also have good on-page SEO. They use the H1 through to

H6 tags, with well-written meta titles and descriptions, alt text, anchor text, and well-written content marketing.

So, the on-page SEO must also be good; otherwise, shoppers won’t be able to find your company on Google.

So, a well-designed homepage must have the following

– Have a good design to impress shoppers
– Have good on-page SEO
– Must offer helpful advice

Why not use drop-down menus?

One way of helping shoppers is to have an FAQ section on every page. For example, a salesperson in a shop often gets asked the same questions daily by customers. Well, this is precisely the same for online businesses.

Customers will want to know the delivery time, the returns policy, and whether the product is environmentally friendly.

Answering these questions can require a lot of text, which could overwhelm the reader if it is added to the page too soon.
So, just a design tip, why not use the drop-down boxes and offer helpful advice to your customers via drop-down boxes?

Stock photos

Most web design companies use stock photos because a business might be just getting started and might not want to spend 3k on a photo shoot and hire a videographer for the day.

So, many businesses, including those we have worked for in Cardiff, often ask our web designers to use stock photos to get a website live at a lower price.

However, some stock photos don’t suit the business. For example, if you’re, let’s say, a loft conversion company and the outsides of the houses are American-style homes rather than the properties you would usually see here in Britain, this can be off-putting for a shopper, as it’s clear that the loft conversions and construction work weren’t completed here in Britain.

Using stock photos is acceptable; however, the web design business and the client must pick the right ones. Because we have been building websites for a very long time, we can say that selecting the right photos often takes a long time. So, if you want the homepage and your company website to look good, we recommend that you work with the web designers to ensure the right stock photos are chosen.

Calls to action

So, when you walk into a car dealership in the U.K., there are many calls to action.
Such as “low-cost finance, talk to us today”, prompting the customer to discuss car finance options.

Now, you should prompt the shopper on your company website, such as “Sign up for our newsletter, or would you like us to call you back?”
Or, perhaps, just a bold, buy it now button. CTAs encourage the shopper to purchase something from you or to sign up for a company newsletter, for example. This can help the business generate more sales, so CTAs should be part of the web design.

YouTube video

So, it doesn’t matter what type of business you run. Often, your business website would benefit from having a member of staff explain the benefits of buying that item or service from you.

If you’re a small business, why not have the company director simply offer a quick introduction to introduce your business? For example, when a shopper hears that the company has been trading for over 25 years in Wales, it instantly makes shoppers trust it more.

So, YouTube videos added to the homepage and main pages help you sell and explain why shoppers should choose your business. Often, shoppers don’t want to read large amounts of text. Yet watching the company director, for example, showing you a quick walk around the showroom where you sell, let’s say, sofas instantly tell the customer more about the products that you’re selling.

Social media

Add social media buttons to your website’s header. Your web design company can do this for you. If a customer decides not to buy from you right then, they may add your business to their Facebook account.

Then, when your business is running a promotion, your advertisement may appear in their feed, and they may decide to purchase from you later. This is always why we say to businesses to add social media icons in the header, but you may also want to add them to the footer.

You may also want to add clear CTAs to tell the customer why not follow us on Facebook, X or, let’s say, LinkedIn.

Clear pricing

Offer transparent pricing; for example, if you offer a fixed-price service, make this clear on the homepage. Our web design company provides to design a 7-page website for £950.00. We make this clear on the homepage because shoppers are often more likely to read other pages and more about your services when they can quickly obtain a price.

Call us today

Here at W&P, we can offer the following services:

– Web Design for business in Cardiff
– SEO

Why not call us today:

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 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.

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:

• Cyberduck
• FreeFTP
• Transmit
• FileZilla

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.