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.