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

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

Understanding exactly what your business needs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For example, think about the following

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Web Development

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

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

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

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

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

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

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

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

In conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to Create a Responsive Website Using PHP in 2024?

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

Web designers must design a fast website.

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

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

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

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

Responsive design

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

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

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

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

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

For example, a web developer should consider the following

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

In conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The future of web development and new emerging technologies

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

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

The rise of artificial intelligence development tools

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

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

Helping to reduce debugging time

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

You run the code and might find some significant errors.

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

Augmented Reality (AR)

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

Augmented Reality (AR) helping to make better purchasing decisions

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

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

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

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

The rise of blockchain technology and Web 3.0

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

Voice User Interface (VUI)

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

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

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

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

Customer support and the evolution of chatbots

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Partner with a forward-thinking web design business

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

How much does a website cost to build?

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

Why should we pick your web design agency?

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

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

Have you built many websites for Welsh businesses before?

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

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

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

Do you just design brochure websites?

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

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

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

Why do you recommend choosing WordPress?

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

How much does your website hosting costs?

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to choose the right web designer:

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

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

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

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

Why you need to understand some of the critical terminology

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

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

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

Domain name

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

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

Why you need to check a domain name history

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HTTPS/HTTP

What does HTTPS/HTTP mean?

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

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

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

HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

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

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

What does Cascading Style Sheet or CSS mean?

What is a blog?

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

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

Why should we be routinely adding blog posts?

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

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

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

Bootstrap

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What exactly does front-end development mean?

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

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

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

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

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

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

What exactly does full-stack development mean?

Full-Stack Development

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

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

Wireframe

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hosting

Website Hosting

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

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

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

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

User Experience (UX)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First things first, what on earth is a wireframe?

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

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

So, without further ado, what is a wireframe?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Functionality

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

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

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

Do you need a brochure website?

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

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

This will dictate how the wireframes are designed.

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

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

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

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

Navigation

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

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

How do you even begin creating wireframes?

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

An initial meeting

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

Competitor research: who are your direct competitors?

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

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

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

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

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

Create a basic layout

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

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

Refining make it better and better

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Speed and Efficiency

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, your website is responsive.

It works on all Google Android devices

It works on Apple iPhone devices

Yet, is it designed with speed in mind?

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

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

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

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

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

Are you looking for a web design agency in Cardiff?

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

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

YouTube

Author: W&P

Date: 23/09/2024

Bounce rates

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

How to reduce bounce rates

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

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

Bounce rates, dwell time and Google Analytics

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

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

– Improve sales
– Reduce bounce rate
– Improve dwell time

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

User experience and conversion rates

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

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

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

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

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

Get a well-designed responsive version of your company website

Use split testing to make gradual improvements

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Able to convey complex ideas and services

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

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

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

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

Help to generate more sales.

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

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

Help improve sales

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

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

So, it’s your opportunity to:

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

Dwell time and Google Rank Brain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An explainer video

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

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

Why we recommend adding an explainer video to your website

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In summary

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

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

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

You might embed a YouTube video onto the following pages:

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

How we can help:

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

WordPress web designers

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

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

Author: Ryan Walsh
Date: 20/09/2024

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

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

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

WordPress can be used for most types of businesses

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

So, a simple one-page website can be built using WordPress, or you can create a massive e-commerce website with 1000+ pages if you want to.

Simple text changes

So, before you had a website designed by, let’s say, an extensive website design agency that built its very own bespoke CMS, plus it offered no log-in details, you might have had to go through the web designers for all of the amendments, no matter how simple.

However, now with WordPress, what’s possible is that you log in with the admin details, and then there’s a super simple WordPress dashboard where you can edit the text without having any coding knowledge. So, it lets you own a dental practice; you change location but keep the same phone number. Someone in the dental practice with no coding knowledge or knowledge of PHP can log in, select the “page” icon, scroll down to the “contact us” page, and often use the built-in editor to change the text.

Many WordPress websites use two prominent editors: Elementor and WP Bakery Builder. Both are super simple to use, and you can change the text even if you have no coding knowledge at all.

Simple to use

One of the main reasons companies all over Wales use WordPress is its built-in text editor, which is a piece of cake to use. Once the websites have been designed, says a local web designer, you can log in to the WordPress Dashboard with the login details. This is super simple to use, and on every page, you can open the in-built text editor.

With the built-in text editor, you can edit the main text, the titles, the alt text, the meta title and the meta description. You can also return to old blog posts and update them; for example, you might have written “the best ten e-bikes of 2023”.

That article might have accumulated many good-quality backlinks and organic traffic, yet because it’s now out of text, you might want to use the same URL extension and web address but update the article for 2024. That way, you are offering the reader up-to-date information, and because the shopper knows that the information is more up-to-date, that can help reduce the company’s bounce rate.

So, when you hire a search engine optimisation company, they will often write top-quality content marketing, and the author should know about Google E-EAT. I also learned about Google Helpful Content Update. This way, they should write good-quality SEO work, but at the same time, it’s essential that the author goes back and updates the work to ensure that the job is up to date while also aiming to keep that bounce rate as low as possible.

Very versatile

So, what’s important to know is that bloggers do not just use WordPress; it’s also used as a brochure website, and many millions of e-commerce businesses have been built using WordPress.

Plugins

Let’s say the customer wants to add a feature on the contact form to help reduce the amount of spam. So, they use a honeypot spam filter. Well, instead of paying, let’s say, a local web developer to spend hours building a bespoke spam filter, there are thousands of free plugins on WordPress that you can use. This helps the business save money.

So, instead of hiring a local web developer, log into your WordPress Dashboard, go into the Dashboard, select plugins on the side menu, and click Add new plugin. Then, you can search for the plugin you need, whether a new Contact Us form, a slider, or a plugin to help you back your company website.

So, thousands of free plugins are available, which can help the business save a lot of money. In contrast, if it was a bespoke website built using a content management system that the web design agency had built, then all of the changes you want, such as adding a spam filter, because it was a 100% bespoke CMS to that web design agency, you need to have all the changes made by a web developer. So, something as simple as adding a spam filter to the contact form might be rather expensive.

A lot of SEO agencies, like WordPress

When you talk to many SEO agencies, one of the first questions they will often ask the business is, which CMS is the website built on? The reason for this is that some CMS are simple to make changes to, say, URL extension to on-page SEO elements such as H1-H6 tags, meta description and alt text, while some other CMS can be glitchy and problematic to make changes to. So, we included many different web design agencies; they like to work with WordPress because it’s so simple to use and it’s been around for a long time, so just like a good bottle of whiskey, it’s got better and better and better.

Are you planning on managing your WordPress CMS yourself?

If you plan on managing your WordPress CMS yourself, you will find a tremendous amount of support out there. There are countless

YouTube videos from WordPress experts who can help you fix everything from problems with your meta descriptions to
So, WordPress is straightforward to use.

The mobile version of your company website

So, your company website must work well on Android and Apple iPhones. For this to happen, your web designers must design a responsive version of the company website. This is simple to do if you want a WordPress CMS website built. Our web designers can, therefore, design a responsive version of your company website that will work perfectly on tablets and smartphones.

When calling around web designers to obtain a quote for web design, it’s essential to make sure that the price to make the website responsive so that it works well on, say, Apple iPhones or, let’s say, your Samsung Tablet, for example, is included in the quote.

WordPress is affordable

Some content management systems can be pretty expensive. For example, they might not be chosen by start-up companies because the cost of some CMS might be pretty high. Yet with WordPress, it’s very affordable, and the CMS itself is free. So businesses of any size could select WordPress as their content management system, plus there’s no ongoing subscription.

Some content management systems can sometimes have high monthly costs, yet with WordPress, you don’t get this. So, besides the price for the web developers to build and design the website, WordPress doesn’t have any ongoing fees. Many businesses like this because some content management systems can be rather pricey. For example, they could be £75+ a month for some CMS.
Many businesses use WordPress because there are no ongoing costs.

Many businesses also heavily advertise their company, products, and services on social media like Facebook. So, what some businesses do, let’s say a construction business, is their social media feed, which is then fed to a page on the WordPress website. This keeps the page updated. For example, a construction company might be carrying out a large loft conversion, so that page gets updated with pictures of the loft conversion, updating the shopper on the latest construction projects the business manages.

Why is important that you work with your web designers to reduce your websites bounce rate?

What exactly is a bounce rate?

If you were to search on Google for local web designers, you would be presented with Google AdWords results, organic results, and Google

Business results. Now, let’s say you’re shopping for a local accountant. You might visit three business websites, visit the homepage, and return to the main results—this is called bouncing off the website.

You may have thought that the business is too far away, that the company has an old website, or that the industry doesn’t offer the services you want, so you didn’t click on another page. This means you bounced off the website.

Use Google Analytics

We recommend installing Google Analytics. It will provide you with information on each page’s or blog post’s bounce rate. We recommend that you pay particular attention to the homepage’s bounce rate, as this will be the most important page on your website in terms of getting the most organic visitors.

Working with your web designers

Many companies want a website designer to design a brochure website that may then stay the same, unchanged, for the next few years. However, businesses that really want to improve sales often partner with SEO companies, and part of the SEO agency’s work is to reduce the company’s bounce rate. If the homepage bounce rate is too high, and this is across many pages, it could be because the website is too slow.

Although there are many reasons why a website could have a bounce rate, here are some of the more common reasons:

– The hosting is slow
– The mobile version of the website is complex to use
– The main menu is complicated to use
– The website doesn’t offer much useful information
– It isn’t easy to sort items, i.e., whether they are in stock or by price.

How to reduce your website bounce rate:

First things first, purchase good quality hosting
You want your company website, whether it’s a brochure or an e-commerce website, to be as quick as possible. If the website keeps shoppers waiting, even if it’s for a relatively short period, they will leave your website, causing the bounce rate to increase, and the organic SEO will then be negatively affected.

Google Optimise and split testing

A lot of businesses use something called split testing; it could be that an SEO agency or a local web designer has built a lot of links and written a lot of quality content marketing, yet what they spot is that the more organic visitors, the website, gets, the more the bounce rate is increasing.

Therefore, web developers may use A/B testing, also known as split testing, to redesign the site. This doesn’t mean writing masses of PHP or JavaScript. Instead, the changes are much more gradual, so the web design agency can monitor improving the bounce rate and wants to increase it.

The web designers may spot a redesigned mobile main menu, reducing the bounce rate by 10%. Then, this is something that the web design and the client would want to keep. Then, they may notice that switching hosting companies and paying for much faster hosting might decrease the homepage bounce rate by another 7%. So, it’s about making these gradual changes to lower the business’s bounce rate.

Install Google Search Console

Use Google Search Console to see which keywords your website ranks for and which keywords could use improvement. If you notice that the more organic visitors you obtain, the bounce rate increases, then work with your web design agency every month to try to bring that bounce rate down.

Work on improving your mobile design.

You could have just had your website designed by the local web design agency. In the meeting, when they showed you the finished design, you may have been pleased with the finished design. Yet the web designers may not have spent as much time designing the mobile version as they have the desktop version. This means you may have a basic mobile version of the website, offering very little information about the business, meaning the bounce rate increases.

As a general rule of thumb, over 50% of organic traffic comes via smartphones and tablets for most businesses. For some businesses, the percentage can be higher, so it’s important to compare the bounce rate of your website’s mobile and desktop versions.

Your web design agency should, therefore, design a well-designed mobile and desktop version of your website. You should also work with your web designers to use split testing to reduce your bounce rate over time.

How we can help

If your business requires a website designed, do call us. We have extensive experience working with a wide range of businesses, including many construction companies, the automotive business sector, and solicitors. We design amazing websites at affordable prices, so why not call our web designers today?

It’s important that your company takes the time needed to choose a content management system, or CMS for short, that is right for your business. Your company’s CMS is a bit like the engine of a car. It’s what you use to create pages and manage them, and it controls the dashboard. There are many different content management systems to choose from. In this article, we’re going to discuss some of the most popular and widely used content management systems.

What should our business consider when choosing a CMS for our company?
Simple to use:

You will need a CMS that’s simple to use, so for example, when your company wants to add a new blog post / news article, that you can do this in a matter of a few minutes and simply. Some content management systems make this process difficult, so make sure you use a CMS that’s simple to use, when adding new pages or perhaps a new blog post.

Widely used:

We would recommend using a widely used CMS, like Magento, WordPress or Drupal.

You can update:

Choose a CMS that with just a click, you can update it.
You can make back-ups

Choose a CMS where you can make back-ups.

Great looking website offering a good U.X can be designed using this CMS:

Choose a CMS where you

Things to consider when choosing a CMS for your business:

You find it super simple to use

There’s no point in choosing a content management system that you find difficult to use. That’s because most businesses often have to add blog posts, update plugins, and make regular backups of the CMS. You don’t want to log into the admin area and find that it’s super difficult to use, and you have to phone your web designers every time you want to make a simple change, such as adding a new blog post.

So, what you should look for when choosing a content management system for your business:

– Simple to use
– Widely used, so you can also find a web developer who has experience designing websites using that CMS
– That you can make back-ups yourself, so if the website does go down, you can restore a backup

Popular CMS Options

WordPress

There is a massive number of businesses right around the globe that have chosen WordPress as their CMS. In fact, WordPress is used by quite literally millions of businesses globally. Many different businesses use WordPress, from PLC, massive household names, to people running personal blogs about their hobbies and interests.

Therefore, you could have a multi-billion-pound brand that has chosen WordPress for their leading site, right through to a runner who blogs about their running adventures across the United Kingdom.

Here at this web design business, we would say that most of our websites, which our web designers, web developers and SEO consultants work on, are WordPress websites.

Drupal

Drupal is another very popular content management system. It’s an open-source CMS that is widely used by many well-known companies, such as Tesla and NASA.

Magento CMS

A lot of businesses right around the globe use Magento. It’s a brilliant e-commerce platform, and it’s used by giant multinational companies and smaller businesses as well. It’s a brilliant e-commerce content management system.
How to make the right decision

Your business should most definitely take its time to choose the suitable CMS. We have worked with many companies that need help with their search engine optimisation and, therefore, have their websites designed by other companies. Sometimes, the CMS is built by that individual web design agency, and it can sometimes be difficult to use, full of glitches, and may cause the business many problems.

Therefore, don’t rush into choosing a CMS. Our best advice is to use a content management system that’s widely used, used by millions of businesses. The reason we say that is simply because if it’s one of the world’s most commonly used content management systems, like

WordPress, then it’s widely used because it’s perfect and brilliant at what it does.

We can help your business.

Whether you’re starting an e-commerce company or a local coffee shop, we can design an amazing website for your business. We mostly build quality WordPress websites, yet if you would like a website built using Magento or perhaps Drupal, then we can help.