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.

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?

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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.