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.

What Are Pillar Pages?

Date: 11/10/2024

Long-form content marketing

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

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

Reaching the top of Google.co.uk

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

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

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

Fast forward to 2024

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

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

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

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

Google E-EAT
Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness

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

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

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

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

Google and the first index of a new company website.

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

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

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

Should the business be ranked on page 7?

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

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

Pillar pages and cluster pages

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

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

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

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

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

Google RankBrain

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

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

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

Introduction

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

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

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

Quick introduction on us…

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

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

What is a sustainable website?

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

Data centres

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

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

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

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

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

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

Offsetting

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

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

Why not ask your website designers to implement lazy loading?

What’s lazy loading? We hear you cry!

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

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

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

Font, colour schemes and web design

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

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

Web designers

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

We can offer your business the following services:

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

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

Date: 08/10/2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

Web designers

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

Planning stage

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

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

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

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

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

Administration tasks do need to be completed.

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

Designing

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

That’s the client as well.

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

Brainstorming

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

However, web design is more subjective.

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

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

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

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

Copywriting

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

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

Editing the text and website

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On-going business relationship

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Date: 07/10/2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Main menu design

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

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

What are your main competitors doing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Most definitely purchase a designer to design brand guidelines.

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

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

Poor mobile design

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

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

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

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

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

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

Text

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

It doesn’t scale to match the screen size.

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

Websites navigation

Avoid burger menus

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

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

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

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

This will, therefore, increase the bounce rate.

Is your company website a bit sluggish?

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

A balanced approach

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

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

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

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

Pop-ups can be annoying.

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

right?

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

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

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

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

Do you want a DIY website?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Google Adwords
• SEO Consultant
• Social media advertising

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

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

Why is your web design company always so busy?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We can offer you the complete package.

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

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

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

Date: 05/10/2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A web developer might then move on:

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

Ongoing maintenance to keep things running smoothly

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

Problem-solving

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

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

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

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

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

Ongoing work

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

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

What types of websites does W&P build?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We can use any website for any business.

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

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

Do you need to hire a web developer?

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

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

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

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

Call us for a free no-obligation quote:

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

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

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

Introduction

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

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

For example:

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

Forward-thinking

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

Demonstrated expertise & Google E-EAT

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

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

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

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

specialised working in business niche.

Growth in specialised marketing agencies / web designers

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

Faster pace

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

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

WordPress will get even more popular

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

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

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

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

Original thinking

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

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

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

A.I

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

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

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

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

The human touch

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

Rise in wearables

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

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

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

Basic websites will not cut it.

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

What do you see as the future of copywriting?

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

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

Why is this?

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

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

Engagement metrics

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

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

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

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

Helpful content marketing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How do you stand out in this crowded marketplace?

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

USP

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

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

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

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

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

superfast

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

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

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

Wearables

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

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

Contact us for high-quality web design;

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

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