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.

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

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

So, first things first:

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

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

Costing the business sales

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

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

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

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

Bad for SEO

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Use Google PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix to improve page speed

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

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

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

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

Is the website navigation super simple to use?

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

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

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

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

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

Web design

Table of contents

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

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

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

Investing in a quality website

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

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

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

Website Design Services

Website design services

First impressions matter

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

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

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

Make sure everything works as it should

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

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

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

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

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

Free

Free? Really?

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

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

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

Do you have the time?

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

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

Freelancer

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

Web design agency

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

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

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

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

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

Table of contents:

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

Introduction

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

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

What is its purpose?

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

Think of wireframes like a set of architects’ plans

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

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

Wireframes therefore allow:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, what exactly is a website wireframe?

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

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

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

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

Can you skip designing wireframes to say money and time?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How many pages need to be designed?

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

Mobile phones

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is the user experience of a website.

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

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

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

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

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

Low fidelity wireframes

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

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

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

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

Why do we need to keep bounce rates low?

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

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

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

Buttons and links

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

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

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

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

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

How can we design a low-fidelity wireframe?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How does using wireframes improve the web design process?

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

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

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

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

We can also offer the following services:

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

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