Introduction

When a business is starting up, it will often need a website up and running as soon as possible. Yet, something usually baffles and perplexes many business owners: Why does the price of a brochure website vary so much?

Why does one company offer a super low price, yet another charges ten times the price for what seems to be the same?

So, getting a website designed is different from buying many other services or products. Today, shoppers are very price sensitive. If you sell a pair of trainers slightly more expensive than another major retailer, that £3.00 price difference could drive thousands upon thousands of shoppers directly to a competitor’s website.

So shoppers are very price-sensitive, yet businesses, when looking to get a website designed, are not so price-sensitive. The reason is that for some companies, the quality of the website can be make or break.

A good website could mean the difference between clinching that sale and someone going elsewhere. This is why your national household brands spend millions, split testing that’s A/B testing their websites, making small gradual changes constantly to improve the design, the U.X the search engine optimisation.

So, let’s cut to the chase: what are the different types of web design companies out there?

Web design companies that design websites using one CMS

So, what’s a CMS?

A CMS is like an engine to your car. It does all the mechanical stuff; it drives the vehicle. A CMS drives your website; it’s what powers it and what your web developers will use to make changes. It’s important. British businesses’ central content management systems are WordPress, Magento, Shopify, and Drupal. The list is endless, yet these are some of the main ones.

Do you want web designers who specialise in your industry?

There will be web design agencies that only work for, say, estate agents, the automotive business sector, estate agents, etc.
So, this could have its pluses and its drawbacks.

The pluses are that web designers specialising in that industry are likely to better understand your business sector than some other web designers. However, the drawbacks are that if you have a company serving the same business sector and they have three estate agents who are all competitors in the same area, this could be a conflict of interest if they are working on improving the company’s online marketing.

For example, working on improving the SEO of three businesses in the same area, where they’re all competing with each other, could be a conflict of interest. So, you do have some web designers/ SEO companies that will only work for one company per city, so they are not working for the businesses’ direct competitors.

Responsive website design

Let’s say you use good-quality SEO tools, such as Moz Pro or Google Analytics, and you spot that most shoppers come to your website via mobile devices such as tablets or mobile phones. You then spot that over 75% of the organic traffic is coming via Android and iPhone devices, in which case you might want to hire a web design company that specialises in responsive website design.

A responsive website design company will often pay close attention to the following:

– How fast your company website is
– Making it as simple as possible to use
– Making sure it has good design
– Working to reduce the bounce rate

Marketing agencies that offer the full range of marketing services

Many company directors won’t have the time to manage an SEO business, a web design company, a social media management company, and possibly a company that’s also managing the business’s Google Analytics.

So, to help you save time, you may wish to hire a digital marketing company that can offer all of these services under one roof. These companies are often referred to as digital marketing agencies, and they can often provide the following services:

– Web design
– Responsive mobile design
– Organic SEO
– Local SEO
– Management of your business social media accounts, such as on LinkedIn, X, and Facebook

How we can help:
We are a web design company that can also improve your business’s local or organic search engine optimisation. We specialise in designing WordPress content management systems. We can design a brilliant, well-designed CMS WordPress website for a starting price of just £950.00. We have been designing WordPress websites for over 10 years.

We have experience of working with the following business sectors:

– Dental practices
– Automotive companies
– Construction companies
– Solicitors
– And much more

 
Website Design: Key things to think about

There’s so much to think about when designing a brand-new website, such as writing content marketing, choosing a website hosting company, and creating a memorable and well-designed company logo. There are a million and one things to think about, so you do need to hire designers who walk you through the process and help you think about each part of the web design so that, in the end, you end up with an awe-inspiring, well-designed website.

A quick word on SEO

A lot of businesses hire us because, quite simply, we have fantastic SEO consultants. Website design is often just one of the services the company hires us to design. Then, just as the website is finished, the company sometimes hires us for ongoing work, such as improving the company’s organic and local SEO.

Therefore, if your business is going to use SEO to generate more customers, you have to pay attention to the following when designing the website:

– You need a fast website, so you’re going to need fast hosting
– Well-written content marketing
– Content marketing is written with Google E-EAT in mind
– White hat SEO must be applied

So, how do you create a well-designed company website that stands out from the crowd?

We believe you shouldn’t skim and save on a website. Sure, many web designers offer cheap prices, but as the old saying goes, you often get what you pay for. Usually, the website will look cheap, essential, and thrown together, and because of that, your customers won’t get the wow factor; they may click off the website and visit a competitor’s website.

Think about colour schemes

The first thing a shopper will see is the colour scheme of your new website. Have you opted for black and gold, producing a luxurious feeling across the website? Have you opted for white and a lot of spacing to make the site feel less cluttered? Have you chosen a bright colour scheme that sticks in your mind and produces memorable company branding?

Designing a good company logo is very important.

A company logo is not just a company logo; it should be eye-catching and memorable. You should be able to recognise that logo. If you see it on a company van, shop front, or a website, you should instantly be able to identify it. Many company logos today are not that memorable; you might forget about them quickly after you have seen them.

So, instead, you need a well-designed, unique company logo.

Many web design agencies, including ours, don’t include logo design within their quote for a new company website. That’s because sometimes it takes many hours to design a company logo. Often, the logo has to go through many revisions, so this is why many web designers, including ours, charge separately to design a company logo for a business.

Spend time creating a well-designed main menu.

Have you ever been on a website that looks amazing and well-designed, yet when you use the main menu, it’s challenging, and you can’t find the products you want? Instead, finding the right page and the product you tried to buy takes longer than you wanted.

You might even get annoyed that you can’t find the right product, so you leave the website, which increases the bounce rate.

A high bounce rate can cause business to drop in Google’s ranks. So, for example, let you run a website that sells car parts, and there’s a section that sells car exhaust systems. Now, if the exhaust section of the website has a very high bounce rate, many shoppers are landing on that page and leaving quickly.
This means that Google will know that the page has a very high bounce rate and may decide to rank it lower in Google’s SERPs.
Therefore, offering a good user experience is essential when designing your company website.

Here are some of the areas you may wish to consider to offer your customers a better U.X

– A main menu that’s simple to use
– The website should be fast
– A homepage designed to take a shopper to a page as quickly as possible; for example, if you’re an electrical retailer, and the main selling item is fridge/freezers, you should have a picture of a large fridge freezers customers can click on
– Make the mobile version of the website well designed, simple to use
– Use split testing to reduce the business bounce rate gradually

Good photographs

So, let’s say you run a dental practice. Customers want to see pictures of your staff and the inside of the practice. This will instantly give them a sense of what your business is like.

Therefore, hire web designers who offer good photography so that they can design a website that instantly communicates what your business offers. A good slider on the homepage could show the inside of the business premises, the principal dentist, and perhaps an award you have won. This is great. Complement this with well-written content marketing, and shoppers are likely to want to spend longer on your company website, reducing the bounce rate and perhaps increasing conversions.

Typography

A boring font can mean a shopper doesn’t want to read the font longer. A boring font may deter the shopper from reading another page, yet a good font can say something about your business; if it’s a modern font, a nice Google font, then this can enhance the website, combine this with a good company logo, good well-written content marketing, and this can make a website look much better, increasing the dwell time, that’s how a shopper spends on the website.

So, when choosing a font for your new company website, think about the following:

– If you are a business that wants modern branding with bright colours, go with a more contemporary font; ask and make sure with your web design company that the font works across multiple different browsers
– If you run a more traditional business, such as a solicitor’s practice, choose a more conventional font.

Mobile Friendliness

So, whether it’s an e-commerce website or perhaps a brochure website for a local business, the website must be mobile-friendly. It must be responsive and work on Apple iPhones and Google’s (Alphabet’s) Android operating system.

Your company website must be mobile-friendly, but you also need to hire web designers to create a well-designed mobile version. It should be simple and fast, so ask your designers about designing an accelerated mobile page for your business.

Make sure that you own a fast company website

Your company website should be fast

How fast is your company’s website?

So, we highly recommend using GTMetrix or Google’s tools to see how fast your company website is. Google will use how fast your company website is as a ranking factor, meaning you can rank higher if you have a super-fast website. However, with that said, Google’s algorithms will use over 200 ranking factors to determine how vital your business’s SEO is and how fast your company website is just one of these ranking factors.

However, talk to any good web designer, and they will tell you that to lower your business bounce rate, you often need super-fast hosting, and the website needs to be fast.

So, when hiring a web designer, choose a business that offers fast hosting.

We offer our clients free hosting for the first year, another reason so many people hire us to design their websites.

The colour scheme

It’s really important to think for a long time about which colours you want to use for your new website. It’s often popular to go with a white background and keep the design simple so that the page doesn’t look overly cluttered.

However, a new company starting up might be operating in a very competitive business sector, so it may want to stand out and create very distinctive branding. Therefore, the branding needs to be different, perhaps using bright colours and a really well-designed company logo, and therefore, the company branding becomes memorable.

So, therefore before you even hire a web designer, you might want to get a set of company brand guidelines created.

Sometimes, a different company is hired to do this work, and you can create a company logo, choose different fonts, and create a colour scheme. Then this can massively help your web developers because, instead of having to spend time with clients discussing colour schemes and hex codes, they will know which colours to use and can start to design the website.

The brand guidelines should, therefore, stipulate the following:

– Which hex codes should be used
– What the company logo should look like
– Also to state which fonts should be used, such as font size for titles and a different font for the main paragraphs
Regardless of which CMS you choose, the brand guidelines will be super helpful to your web designers. If you choose WordPress or Drupal, you can select the right font and the company logo and start to design the website according to the brand guidelines. So, before you hire a web designer, we recommend hiring the same company to create a set of brand guidelines or simply hiring a marketing agency to develop a set of brand guidelines for you.

How you want the homepage to look

The homepage must be well designed, and your web developers, whether the site is made using Drupal or Joomla or, let’s say, WordPress, that the homepage is well designed. The homepage is often the page which gets the most views, so you want the bounce rate to be low, you want the dwell time to be high, you want to have CTA on the page so that you gain the customer’s e-mail address and phone number so that you can increase your business’s chance of making a sale.

How much you’re willing to spend

So, the cost of a website can increase sharply when you start adding different functionality. For example, you may want an AMP version of the website, you may want to hire copywriters to do the work, you may want to hire a photographer for the day, or you may want to hire an SEO company. So often, a lot of different staff will be needed, and therefore, the cost can increase.

So, having an obvious idea about your budget would be best. Then, you should allocate your marketing budget to cover your web design and copywriting and work on improving the business’s search engine optimisation. The reason we say that is simple: You could splash all of your marketing budgets on getting a website designed and then not have any money left to promote the business, say, on social media or to improve the company’s organic SEO.

So, sit down from the outset and make sure you allocate enough money to cover what you want to spend to promote your business.

How you want the mobile version of the website to look

We highly recommend that you get a well-designed responsive version of the website when you hire a web developer. This is because more and more shoppers buy services and products on mobile phones. So, make sure your company website is mobile-friendly, simple to use, and offers a good U.X.

Text: Will you write the text or be a copywriter?

So, when you think of a 10-page website, let’s say a brochure website, if you were to add all of that text into one Word document, it could be thousands upon thousands of words. This would take the business a very long time to write. Sometimes, the directors or company employees would not have the time to write all of the business’s text.

This is why they hire copywriters. Some web design businesses employ copywriters directly, and some use external copywriters. Regardless of which copywriter writes the text, it must be of good quality and written with Google E-EAT in mind. That means that the text must show experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. The work must be well written.

Social media accounts

So, when the web developers are designing your website, often they will need to know which social media accounts, such as Elon Musk’s X, formally known as Twitter, Facebook or Instagram, which social media accounts your business will be using.

Then, the web developers can add the social media account buttons to the header, and perhaps you want these added to the footer as well. What they do is allow a shopper to go straight to your business’s social media accounts. They may wish to follow your company before they make a purchase. This is your business’s opportunity to then advertise to the shopper about new products and your company’s services.

Contact forms

Adding a contact form to each main page is a good idea, making it super simple for a shopper to ask a quick question. For example, you may sell cars, and the customer may send a quick question, such as enquiring whether air conditioning comes standard; this then presents an opportunity for a sales staff to call customers to help them further. This may result in a sale; otherwise, if you didn’t add a contact form on that page where the customer could quickly ask a question, the shopper may have just left without asking your business a question.

How many pages do you require?

This is important to work out at the beginning of the web design process. It helps the web design agency form an accurate quote. What can sometimes happen is that the customer states they want a 7-page website, but when you sit down and plan how you want the website designed, you might actually need to double that number of pages. Therefore, the initial web design quote will increase in price.

Therefore, to get an accurate cost for a web design company to build a brand-new website, you must know how many pages need to be designed. We recommend using a large whiteboard. Start with the essential pages, such as the homepage, about us page, and contact us page, then write which other pages you need and create a site map. This will help you contact your web design company and state how many pages you need to design.

Your web developer will find the site map very useful; it will help to set out the pages. Using that layout, they can design the main menu in WordPress. It will also help the web design agency get back to you with a quote much quicker because some businesses only require a one-page website, whereas some solicitors may need a 25-page brochure website built. Therefore, the quotes for WordPress website design will be very different.

One of the first questions a web design agency often asks when you call them to get a brochure or e-commerce website built is, “Do you know how many pages you need?” This gives the business a very rough idea of how much work is needed to design your new company website.

Site map

We highly recommend that you add a site map to your new company website and regularly update it.

We recommend adding a site map to your company website to help Google index new pages. This can help improve your business’s search engine optimisation by getting Googlebot to index all of the blog posts on your site, so that if there are any improvements made to the pages, Google will pick up on this.

Cookie Policy

You will need to add a cookie policy to your website. Your web designers can help you with this. Often, a link to this page is added to the footer.

How we can help:

We have been designing quality, well-built websites for a wide range of businesses based in Cardiff. We offer very affordable prices and aim to turn websites around as quickly as possible.

If you would like to obtain a quote for our SEO services or web design, then why not call us today. So if your looking for a website design company why not call us?

How well your website is designed can sometimes strongly influence how successful your business is.

You might think that is a bit of an overstatement, but is it?

When you stop and think, how do your customers find you?

Or how do you want to market your business?

Sure, some customers may come via word of mouth; perhaps your business gets 10% of its business from recommendations.

However, many businesses rely on digital marketing, whether their website, SEO, Google Adwords, or advertising their business on social media, for example.

So, a company website and which web design company you hire is something you should mull over and carefully consider which web design business you want to hire.

Here are some things to think about when choosing a web designer:

What funds do you have available?

So, when writing articles like “10 things to think about when hiring a web designer,” some web design businesses often go around the house. This means they make recommendations but leave out an important part—that’s brass tacks, what the client has to spend.
How much your business has to spend often dictates whether you hire a freelancer, an agency or a full-hog digital marketing agency.
Yet, regardless of your marketing budget, you need to obtain good value, so with that in mind, there is some of the things we think you should ask your web designers, regardless of whether you are spending 1k or 100k on getting your website designed:

– How many pages will get designed for my fee?
– Who’s writing the text?
– Does the quote include getting a mobile version designed?
– How much does hosting cost per month or year?
– Who’s making the website back-ups, the client or the hosting company/website designer?
– Who is supplying the photos?

So, if you have a brochure website designed, these are some of the questions we recommend you ask. Of course, there are a million and one other things to think about, yet these are just some of the things we think you should ask.

Is your plan to rank high on Google and higher than main competitors if so SEO is needed

If you bring a donkey to a horse race, you’ll lose. It’s as simple as that. The donkey may try its best, but it’s going to be a non-contest up against trained horses, ready to gallop faster than some cars.

This is the same as when you go to the bargain basement, get the cheapest website design, and then want to rank high on Google.

So, if you plan on drawing in customers via SEO, that’s organic or local search engine optimisation, the website needs to be designed from the ground up with SEO in mind. so what do we mean by that:

– Good page structure; each service has its page
– Well written content
– The web designers need to understand Google E-EAT
– Need Google Analytics or Google Search Console integration
– Need strong backlinks
– All the on-page and off-page SEO must be white hat and top-quality

Keep things simple

If you visit a web design agency and they give you a headache after every meeting, they are not very good at what they do. Even for the most significant web design projects, we think web designers should aim to keep everything simple. There’s an art form in simplicity.
We don’t mean the customer needs to obtain a fundamental, rubbish website, no, no, no.

What we mean is that everything needs to be carefully planned, time spent on planning, everyone on the same page, and then a quality website is built, with marketing jargon such as Javascript and PHP kept to a minimum and talk about AMP kept to a minimum.
Please keep it simple. Design a website that your customers will be amazed by and find simple.

Maintenance

A kitchen or a car soon becomes a mess if not maintained. Well, the same is true for a company website. It needs maintenance, or it will not function correctly and possibly allow a hacker to access the site.

So, websites need maintenance. And even if website maintenance is lacking, things go wrong, websites go down, things get hacked, and things don’t work as they should. So make sure you hire a web design company that offers website maintenance, good customer service, fast replies to e-mails, etc, so that you feel you are getting the right level of support from your website designers.

Call us for a quote:

If you want a quote, call us to get a new website designed. We have built quality CMS websites in central Cardiff for over ten years.

Designing a solicitor’s website is no different than creating a brochure for any other type of business. Therefore, web designers often ask the same questions that they would ask if they were designing a website for a hairdressing saloon: how many pages are required, who’s writing the text, and have you got photos ready for adding to your website?

Prices typically vary, with our web design agency charging anywhere between £ 950.00 and £5k, depending on how much functionality is needed, how many pages, whether we are writing the text, and how many service pages need to be added. Therefore, often a meeting is needed to gain a very clear understanding of what the customer would like.

The price to design a solicitor website, therefore, is often calculated on the following basis:

How many pages are needed

What functionality is needed, i.e. does a mobile version of the website need to be designed?
Who’s going to be writing the text? The client or the web design company?
Does the client need help improving the business’s search engine optimisation (SEO)?
How many pages are required?

You can actually have some solicitors’ websites that just have one page; these are often much quicker to design. On the other hand, you can have large law firms that offer multiple different services, and these all need their own page and text written for every page that is designed. Therefore, the cost to design a new solicitor’s website is often based on how many pages the customer requires.

Functionality

Some law firms may require just a brochure website to be designed; however, other businesses may want web chat, a mobile version of the website, and CTAs, such as the ability to enter a mobile/phone number on each page.

Content marketing

Ever since the Google E-EAT update and the Google Helpful Content update, it’s more important than ever that the content marketing is really well written. For large solicitor websites, often a lot needs to be written. This could potentially take hundreds of hours to write and proofread, so therefore, the cost to design, say, the new WordPress website for the solicitors will be dependent on who’s writing the text.

How intricate is the design going to be

Just as you can buy an essential car, on the other end of the spectrum, you can buy a hypercar, which is possibly a thousand times the price; this is also the same for website design. You could have a simple 7-page website, or you may want a mammoth website built that’s very intricate, where web developers, SEO consultants, U.X designers, WordPress designers, management, copywriters, and social media managers may spend hundreds of hours to help design a website.

Therefore, a meeting between the web design agency and the solicitors is often needed to understand the amount of work required. Usually, an excellent place to start is to create a site map; determining how many pages are necessary is a beautiful way to determine the amount of work your web designers need.

Does your business need help to improve its search engine optimisation?

It is worth knowing that sometimes, a web design company can design a brand new website for your business in less than one month. However, businesses based in Wales and worldwide often need an SEO company to get the website to the first page of Google. This requires ongoing work to build links, write content marketing, improve the on-page SEO, and improve the technical SEO.

So, if your business requires help improving search engine optimisation, we recommend hiring a web designer or a web design agency that offers this service. Some freelance web designers may not provide SEO services because they require much time. So you may find it better to hire a business that offers both services. Usually, these are your larger agencies, perhaps with 10+ staff, because with SEO, you need link builders, copywriters, and technical SEO experts, so often you need multiple staff to improve a business’s organic search engine optimisation. Therefore, larger agencies commonly have a large team of SEO staff.

What are some of the ongoing costs that our business needs to be aware of?

Hosting:

Website hosting can vary massively in cost; there’s the cheap hosting, and then there’s the super-sonic hosting that large companies offer. We recommend paying for top-quality hosting because Google will rank websites higher in Google’s SERPs, which is faster. The company website needs to be fast on mobile and desktop, so talk to your web developers about their website hosting options. Plus, chat with your marketing agency to see if they can design an AMP version of the website.

Who’s going to be making backups?

It’s essential to make regular backups of your company website because it could get hacked, a plugin could cause a glitch, or simply a change to a part of it could cause it to no longer work. This could cause the shopper to see a 404 page not found error, which could impact your company’s sales.

Plus, if your website has too many 404-page errors, this could damage your company’s organic search engine optimisation.
So, often, you need to hire web designers to help with regular back-ups of the website and offer ongoing support. You may, therefore, want to hire web developers/web designers who provide a monthly package that includes ongoing support, help if needed, and regular back-ups, say once a month. This is because if the website does develop a glitch, you can restore that backup.

Does your business need a new website?

We have worked with countless businesses to design amazing websites, starting at just £950.00. Many businesses hire us simply because we can handle the whole web design process from start to finish. This means we can write the text, offer photography for your company website, and offer SEO services. Prices for our brochure websites vary between £950.00 a month and £ 3k.

We can design websites for any type of business and can also design a brand new website quickly. So, for example, let’s say you are starting a brand new business and need your website live as soon as possible. Often, our web designers and web developers are able to design a new brochure website in less than four weeks. Other websites, such as e-commerce websites, can often take longer for us to design.

Why should we choose your company to design our brochure website?

We have been designing quality, well-built CMS PHP WordPress websites for over ten years. We are simply the bee’s knees when it comes to obtaining a quality website here in Cardiff. Plus, because we have also offered search engine optimisation services for the same length of time, we have vast experience getting companies onto page one of Google.

So, if you want to hire a local business that offers web design and search engine optimisation services as well, why not give us a ring today?
How much does your website hosting cost?

Most web designers we know charge between £ 40 and £ 70 per month for quality website hosting. We offer some of the best prices in Cardiff. For the first year, we often offer our web hosting for free. Then, after that, we offer a fixed yearly price of £140.00.

How much does it cost to get a WordPress website designed by your website designers?

We can offer to design a WordPress website for £950.00, which is for seven pages. We can also design larger brochure websites and e-commerce websites.

Can you write the text for our new website?

Yes, whether you run a solicitor’s practice or any other type of business, we can design a quality website for your company. We can also write the text for your business, helping you to save a lot of time. Even a simple brochure website, with seven pages, can sometimes take a long time to write all of the text. So we can do this work for you. This is another reason why so many businesses hire W&P to design their quality websites.

Why should we hire your digital marketing agency to help improve our local/organic SEO?

We have some of the best SEO minds working for us in Wales. That’s because we have been improving our clients’ organic and local search engine optimisation for over ten years. This monthly service has a minimum pricing of £500 PCM. All businesses considering investing in this process need to know it’s a long-term process that requires the business to be aware that it can take several months to get onto page one of Google.

Do you have experience working with lawyers?

We have worked with law practices to improve their websites for over eight years, so we have experience working with solicitors’ practices based in Wales.

Introduction

Many start-up businesses, especially, face the problem of spending all of their digital marketing budgets on getting a new website designed.

Now, you are probably thinking, well, since we are a web design agency, surely we would strongly recommend spending as much as possible on getting a new website designed, right?

Well, not really, because here’s the thing: If you’re an electrician, you’re going to compete with hundreds, in some cities, thousands of companies. So, a website alone is not going to cut the mustard.

You must think about how you will promote your website; otherwise, it will not attract any visitors.

So, are you going to:

• Spend on social media advertising?
• Are you going to invest in SEO, that’s search engine optimisation
• Are you going to spend on Google Adword advertising?

So, if you have, let’s say, typically a business has around 5k for a start-up business to get their digital marketing rocking and rolling, and you spend all of this on getting a website designed, well, how are you then going to promote it?

This is why, here at W&P, we design brochure websites suitable for start-up companies. We can build these for a starting price of £950.00. Then, we can offer fixed monthly SEO packages, which vary in cost depending on how much competition your business faces.

For the purposes of this article, we will discuss why your company website may not be appearing on Google.

A common question that many businesses ask us is whether SEO is included when our website is designed so that our company websites appear in Google’s results.

The simple answer is SEO is omitted.

So, SEO, which stands for search engine optimisation, involves a massive effort on behalf of an SEO consultant/ agency to get that website on the first page. The reason for this is as follows:

• SEO takes a considerable amount of time
• Your competitors may have invested for donkeys years before you, so you need to beat that standard of work
• SEO is hard, in terms of it needs constant work every month

So, is SEO included in our web design quotes?

The short answer to this question is no; it’s not included. A lot of web design businesses say that “basic SEO” is included in the quote for the website to be designed; this often only means the following:

• They will send the website for indexing
• They will add basic onsite SEO, such as page titles and meta descriptions

This is often not enough work to get any business on page one of Google. In fact, when Google first indexes a website after the web designers have built it, it is more than likely going to be beyond page 10 of Google. So, this is where the work starts in terms of moving the website forward towards page one.

Now, bear in mind that depending on the level of competition, this can take anywhere between 6 months and over a year. So SEO moves at a snail’s pace, but in our experience, if the work is done correctly, that is, white hat, it does take a considerable amount of time.

Here are some of the tools that our web design business uses when we are tasked with improving a business’s local or organic SEO. Please note that search engine optimisation is a separate service that we charge separately for, separate from the web design work.

We use Google Search Console practically every hour of the working week. Namely, it’s a tool made by Google, so the SEO information, such as the incoming links, which pages are indexed, and the average position information for keywords, is 100% accurate.

Yet, Google Search Console is how we communicate with Google; for example, if our web designers have just finished building a website, we need to say to Google, “Hey, we have just built a new website; can you index it?”

You need to link your business’s Google Search Console account to your website to do this. Now, your web designer should be able to help you with this. This is a crucial first step, as you can request manually that some pages get indexed. This tells Googlebot to crawl and index this page now. This is essential because if Googlebot can’t crawl and index the page, then it will never appear in Google’s results.

So, to get a page or blog post indexed, you manually request that it be indexed. We recommend that you use Google Search

Console for this. If the page cannot be indexed, you should get a reason why, such as leaving the no-index tab on.
As you can imagine, if the website is brand new, you may have a number of issues stopping some pages or blog posts from getting indexed. These must be fixed if you want your website to be indexed by Google.

So, with Google Search Console up and running, you can find out the following information:

Have all of the pages/blog posts been crawled?
Are there crawl errors?
Are there any redirect errors?

Contact your web developer if there are any crawl errors:
When you first get your website indexed by Google Search Console, there may be crawl errors. This must be fixed if you want those pages to appear in Google’s organic results.

Is duplicated content marketing holding your business back?

We have met with businesses that have spent a fortune on having their websites designed, yet the phone does not ring, the SEO is extremely weak, and there are no sales coming via the website. Sometimes, this could be because all of the pages, such as the blog posts, have duplicated content marketing.

This could be text copied, let’s say, from a direct competitor or, let’s say, a supplier, yet this can massively damage your business’s organic search engine optimisation. Google does not like duplicated content marketing; on your website, it’s to be well-written, high-quality information.

Google E-EAT

If the web design agency you hire is writing content marketing, they must understand the advice stated by Google E-EAT. This means that if you want your company website to rank high on Google, then you need text that shows that you are an expert in what you are talking about.

Is your website mobile-friendly?

We highly recommend using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test because if your website is not mobile-friendly, it will not appear in the mobile results. Now, when you think that over 50% of shoppers, when they are looking for a business, use their smartphone, then if you don’t have a mobile version of the company website designed, making the website mobile friendly, you could be halving the number of visitors your website is getting.

So, the website does need to be mobile-friendly.

Could low-quality backlinks possibly be holding your website back?

Some businesses, after they have had their website designed, sometimes try to improve their SEO themselves.

Sometimes, they just hire the wrong SEO company that builds low-quality links. This can be disastrous for a company’s search engine optimisation. Building spam links can be problematic because the business can get a link penalty.

A link penalty can mean the website is taken off Google’s results.

This is called a Google Penguin penalty—it must be avoided at all costs, as it can cause long-term damage to a business’s rankings.

Why not hire us?

There’s a reason so many companies based all across the city of Cardiff have hired us: we build unique, quality websites at very affordable prices. The other reason is that if a company chooses to do so, they can partner with us over the long run so that we can start to improve the company’s search engine optimisation. As we alluded to in this article, it is worth noting that SEO is a slow and lengthy process, so businesses need to keep in mind that they could be investing for a very long period before the sales increase.

Yet there’s a reason why companies have hired us for over eight years to improve their SEO: when SEO works, it can generate many sales for that business.

So, if you need a new website designed or help improving your company’s organic SEO, why not call us?

Date: 03/09/2024

Topic: Web Design

Contents:

• Why it’s so essential to hire the right web designer
• How the web design process works
• Suggestions for things to think about when picking a web design agency

Introduction

So, there are many things that businesses do every day that are crucial for the day-to-day running of the business but often are not deemed that important.

Yet, having a website designed or redesigned can be a make-or-break situation for some businesses. That’s because some of the company directors we speak to say that 100% of sales come online. A well-designed website could potentially open up new avenues for your business, reaching more customers and increasing sales.

So, if they hire the wrong web designer and make a mess of it, they could be losing out on business.

So, here is some food for thought: here’s why you need to hire the right web designer

So, web design is not just about web design anymore; that’s because when you talk to the top web designers here in the U.K., well they will tell you web design is now a balance of the following:

– Offering a good U.X
– Keeping the bounce rate as low as possible
– Writing and adding content marketing that is written by Google E-EAT
– Must be fast, so that you will need super fast website hosting
– Must be mobile-friendly
– Must have good local SEO
– If a national business, you will need good quality national SEO

Here’s how our web design process works. The web design process is a crucial aspect of creating a successful website. It involves several stages, from initial planning to final implementation, and ensures that your website is not only visually appealing but also functional and user-friendly.

So, as with most web design agencies, you will be in the initial stages of the design and, throughout, need to work with the company’s web developers and web designers. Now, it might be that as soon as the brand new websites are designed, you might want to start pushing up Google’s ranks so that an SEO consultant might be involved from the outset as well.

Conversations will need to be had about the following:

– The website’s navigation, for example, do you want a burger menu?
– Who’s writing the content marketing?
– Have you got photographs ready to add?
– Which content management system do you want to use?

– How long it will take the web designers to build the website.

Good web designers stop you from getting bogged down in the detail

Running a business, any business, is hard. It doesn’t matter if you’re a retailer of items or you run a gym; price pressures imposed by suppliers, managing staff, and unhappy customers are massively time-consuming.

So, when you’re having a new website designed, you often don’t want to get bogged down in the details. You don’t want a web developer talking at length about JavaScript the next day about a PHP glitch that’s been encountered. You just want a well-designed website that you like and that your customers like.

In our experience, the excellent digital marketing agencies focus on one thing: your customers.

They ask:

– How can we make their lives easier? Could it be a staff member explaining that product on a YouTube video?
– They ask how they can make the main menu simple to use
– Does the website look brilliant on a smartphone

So, a good web designer asks all these questions. They should then start creating a fantastic website for your business without giving you a headache about the technical side of web design, such as why you need an AMP website.

A good web designer can quickly get to grips with the functionality your business needs. They should also keep an eye on the competition; for example, if they have a CTA stating input your mobile number, one of our sales team will call you back the same day; this functionality should be suggested for your business.

So, a good web designer, we believe, has the following charismatics:’

– Good at knowing exactly which functionality/features your business will need
– Suggests functionality you may need based on competitor research
– Choose a CMS that best suits your business needs now and in the foreseeable future
– Can also offer an SEO, that’s search engine optimisation service if later required
– Offers clear pricing
– Offers affordable yet very fast website hosting

Make sure you’re on the same page

So, when you are shopping around for web design quotes from a local web design agency, you might write an e-mail that goes a little bit like this:

“Hi, Bob Jones
We need a new website designed for our dental practice to help improve our rankings on Google. Can you please give us a quote for a brochure website and a monthly quote to improve our organic search engine optimisation as well?
Kind regards
Karen”

So, that sounds fair, right?

Well, yes, but what’s going to happen here is that you’re going to get wildly different prices from each web design agency and perhaps stupidly low prices from businesses trying to grab your business.

So, instead, add the following details:

– How many pages are you going to need if you are unsure have a look at a competitor’s website, to get a rough idea
– Do you need help to improve your SEO?
– Do you need a mobile version designed? Most of the time, the answer is yes. But you guessed it, often web design agencies exclude this cost in the initial quote
– Do you need hosting?
– Do you need the web designers to buy the domain name?
– Have you got photos ready to use?
This will then provide your web design agency with much more information, and they will be able to make a much more accurate quote based on your business needs.

The problem with some web designers

Some web designers offer what seem low prices, yet when you add on the cost to get the web designers to make the website responsive, to get fast website hosting, plus for them to write the content marketing, well, that initial quote of, say £500.00 is likely to turn out closer to £2k very quickly indeed.

Check out the web designer portfolio.

This will give you a good idea of the quality of the web designers’ work. You might also spot that they have worked for similar businesses or even companies you may know in Wales. For example, you might be a groundworker who knows the owner of a plant hire company. Then, it’s just a matter of you asking that company director for their opinion on using that well-known web design company.

The portfolio can give you a sense of the type of websites the web design business is building. Are they modern or look a bit dated? Do they all look unique and built for that business, or do they all look, well, rather much the same, just with a few different photos?

Do the web designers state they want content marketing for the business?

If so, what’s the quality of the content marketing? Is it good? Does it match the business’s style?

Does the text appear professional, informative, and engaging if it’s a serious business, such as an accountancy practice?

Is the tone of voice different if it’s a new business offering clothing?

Read reviews about the business.

Often, web designers have a Trustpilot or Google Business account and are also members of a web design award website. There, you may see feedback that previous customers have made. Of course, you must deliberate whether you want that business to build your new company website.

Look at their website.

So, a web designer’s website is like the outside of a florist’s, your place to show off how good you are, how creative you can be, and how good you are at your craft.

Yet, so many web design companies have dated websites.

So, you might want to skip to a company that uses the latest web design trends and has a well-designed website because then you know that those features can be added to your company website.

Do also ask the following questions:

Do you have SEO experts in house:

So, a website without SEO is a bit like a bacon sandwich without bread. It’s not even a sandwich.
Well, a website is a bit like this because if you don’t invest in quality search engine optimisation, nobody—and we mean no one—will be able to find it online.

That’s unless you’re lucky enough to have a business that’s super non-competitive, so you jump straight onto the first page of Google’s organic results within a month, which, let’s face it, is unlikely.

It’s unlikely because, in a major city, you often face stiff competition. So, this is why you need a web design company that also offers SEO.

Now, you might want the web design agency to refer you to a “trusted partner” company and the designers working with them because, well, they might be making a profit from just referring you.

So often, businesses want a web design company that has SEO experts in-house. That’s precisely what W&P has. We have some excellent web developers and search engine optimisation consultants, so we can offer both services in-house.

Who’s going to be managing the website hosting?

Good website hosting is essential. Without it, the websites will not be live, meaning shoppers will get greeted with a 404 page not found error if the server goes down. So you need good website hosting, and as with everything else in life, you do get what you pay for.

There’s the super cheap, which often means the hosting is slow and annoying. This could potentially result in you losing sales, as your business is offering a poor user experience.

Then there’s the super-fast, more reliable hosting, which is more expensive but a must, in our opinion. It’s just like buying super cheap engine oil for your car—why would you do it?

Your engine is essential, so you will want to buy top-quality engine oil. Well, take this same mindset when purchasing website hosting. You want the hosting to be reliable and quality, so do purchase cheap hosting from a hosting company that has servers based close to your customers.

Make sure the website is responsive.

We have heard of local web developers charging 750 to make a brochure website responsive, yet the customer may have initially thought this

was all included in the initial quote. So, we include this cost, that is, to make a brochure website responsive, in our quote. So our customers get a great deal when they pick W&P to design their website.

We at this web design agency have an extensive amount of experience designing websites for the construction industry. Yet, as you already know, the construction sector is extremely competitive. Whether you’re a plant hire company, small builder, or massive construction business, you will face a huge amount of competition.

So, how do you stand out from the crowd?

Well, you do need a professional website. However, your web designers need to think carefully about the following:

– Company branding
– Which font will you use? We highly recommend Google Fonts
– How will your company logo look
– Which colour scheme, so hex codes, will you use?
– Videography

Colour scheme

Many construction companies opt for yellow and orange colours when they have a new website designed. This seems to be the default position when designing a website for a demolition company, construction business, or roofing business.

However, for your branding to be memorable, you need to stand out from the crowd, have distinctive branding, and have a good shade of purple accompanied by a good company logo and an auto-loading video on the homepage.

When you look at some of the top construction companies here in the U.K., they have often gone to well-known marketing companies like ours, which tells them to stand out from the crowd, to be different, to use good fonts such as Google fonts, to have a well-designed company logo, and also to have good construction videography.

Typography

So, here are some of the fonts that we would recommend for your construction website:

All the fonts mentioned are all Google fonts

– Anton
– Roboto
– Work Sans
– Oswald
– Bebas Neue
– Montserrat
– Poppins

Hire a good web designer who can offer videography

So, let’s say someone is shopping to add a brand new extension to their home. Well, imagine on the homepage that some excellent drone footage was taken of the large property and the extension you built.

For example, the web designers may have added an autoloading video onto the homepage that shows the time elapsed while your construction company was building a new extension.

That instantly tells the customer about the service your business offers; it’s also likely to grab the shopper’s attention. So much so it could positively impact your business search engine optimisation in the following ways:

– The time spent on site could improve
– The bounce rate may decrease
– You may get a shopping visiting more pages

Don’t get an essential website; get a website designed to impress your customers.
Just for a second, how will you gain more customers?

Via social media?

Via Google Adwords?

Via organic search engine optimisation?

This is all well and good, but where do all those customers end up? Well, that’s one place: your company website. You could spend a small fortune on advertising your business, let’s say on social media, yet if the customer visits your website and is disappointed due to bad design, then your company’s bounce rate could be sky high.

So, when you spend a lot on promoting your business, say, Google Adwords, it’s crucial that the website is well designed. Whether it’s a construction business or any other type of website, your web designers must ensure the following:

– The website is responsive, so it works on Android and iPhone devices as well as tablets
– The website should be fast
– The website has a font that’s simple to read and works on all browsers, such as Mozilla
– The website should have content marketing written by a highly experienced copywriter who understands Google E-EAT
– The text should be well-written and never copied
– The website design agency should understand white hat search engine optimisation methods
– You want a quality CMS, such as WordPress.

Do add a lot of calls to action

So, regardless of the type of website that we are building, whether it’s built mostly using HTML5 or perhaps the web developer is building a WordPress website for you, what’s important is that the page has a lot of calls to action.
So, for a construction company, you may want to add the following CTA

1) Add on social media, such as on Facebook

Now, hiring a builder, let’s say, to build a 70k extension onto your home is a considered purchase, that’s for sure. So, by the web designers adding social media icons and a CTA saying, “Why not follow us on Facebook?” you may increase the number of engaged followers that you get on social media.

This allows you to show your latest work and your latest construction projects. What can happen is that the construction website may only have the projects you completed, let’s say, six months ago.
Yet if the shopper adds you to their social media account, they are much more likely to see your more recent work.

2) Request a callback CTA

Your web designer’s code to write code so that embedded into the actual page is a call-back feature.
So it might simply say, “Would you like us to call you back.”

Then, the shopper can leave their name and their phone number. The web developer can then design the contact form so that you know the shopper left that request for a callback on the page which sells loft conversions. Then, you can have a sales team member call that shopper back.

Have a well-designed company logo.

So, what’s really important when you hire a web designer is that they can also offer to create brand guidelines. This is so that your construction company can get a well-designed, bespoke company logo. The marketing agency should also specify which font to use and what colours to use.

How much should we expect to pay for a new construction website to be designed?

The vast majority of the websites that we build are for construction-related businesses. So, for example, our highly skilled WordPress PHP designers have designed websites for roofers, construction companies, and demolition contractors.

Now, the cost that our web design agency charges is calculated after asking the following questions the client:

– How many pages do they require to be designed?
– Will you be writing the text in-house or with us?
– Do you require ongoing help to improve your business’s search engine optimisation?
– Do you require hosting
– Do you own the domain name, or would you like us to purchase it?
– Do you require videography services?
– Do you require a company logo to be designed
Once one of our sales team members has gained an answer to these brief questions, we aim to write back to you with a quote. Often, construction websites will range from 1k for a small builder, yet we have also designed websites for construction businesses over 10k, so it comes down to asking the above questions. A member of our sales team can calculate a cost very quickly.

Does your company offer website hosting?

We most certainly do, and our website hosting is fast. This is another reason so many construction businesses hire us: when we offer you a quote for our web design services, we can offer a low price to host that website for you.

Does your web design agency have SEO consultants working for you?
We most certainly do, yes.

Many construction companies hire us because we have organic and local SEO consultants. This means that our web developers can design a new construction website, and then, once built, we can start improving the organic search engine optimisation.

So, we could design a WordPress website, and once built, we could hand it over to our SEO consultants, who could start working on improving its SEO.

How long will you design a website for our construction business?

So, if a company hires us to design, say, a 7-page brochure website using WordPress, the cost is often around 950.00.

Yet often, the business will want us to write the text, design a logo, or design the company branding. This will cost a lot more. We would need to offer you a quote based on your business’s requirements.

How do we obtain a quote:

Sometimes, we can offer a quote after a quick telephone conversation. However, sometimes, we need to meet the client and discuss the options we can offer, such as the different content management systems, whether the client requires SEO, and whether they want us to write the text.

Why not call us today:

Why not call W&P? We are a highly experienced web design agency

It’s one of the questions our designers get asked the most.

You guessed it, how long will it take for you to build our brand-new website?

And there’s good reason for that. Every year, we work with many start-up companies. These businesses might be construction companies, solicitors, or, let’s say, a new dental practice opening somewhere in the fantastic city of Cardiff.

Now, even though all of these businesses are different because they are start-up companies, the directors often go through something similar. That is finding offices, having them redecorated, hiring staff, finding suppliers, and yes, hiring that local web designer or digital marketing agency so the business can sing from the rooftops about what services or products it is selling.

So this is where we step in. Often, we are told that doors open on a new shop or business venture in just over a month, and there’s a rush to get a new website designed. This is where we can step in. With highly talented web designers and some of the best SEO experts in Cardiff working for us, we are well-placed to start promoting your business for you.

So, in this article, we thought it would be an excellent idea, to elaborate on some of the factors that determine how long it takes our web designers to build a brilliant, brand new website for your business:

So, let’s jump into it: how long does it take to build a brand-new website?

Content marketing

So, what’s one of the slowest parts of the web design process?

Are you designing the responsive mobile version of the website?

Are you designing the homepage and using JavaScript?

Is it adding the video that automatically loads on the homepage?

Nope. From our experience as highly experienced web designers, it’s the writing of the content marketing. Even if the website is, say, ten pages in total, when you add up the word count on every page, the cookie policy, the legal page, and the main page content, you’re looking at sometimes in excess of 4,000 words even on a small brochure website.

And because the company director often has one hundred and one things going on at that time, when they first launch the company, they often don’t have the time to write the content marketing.

But do not worry; this is also where we can help.

We can add the text to your WordPress website for an additional fee.

So, how many pages does your business require?

Sometimes, we can design some PHP WordPress CMS websites from start to finish in less than four weeks for a client. However, on the other hand, a large business selling thousands of product lines may need an e-commerce website. Now, this might have well over one hundred pages, which means it will keep our web developers busy for at least six months.

The reason for this is:

The client may want us to:

–            Add on-page SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)

–            Add pictures

–            Add text

–            Alter the wireframes

–            To add functionality, such as contact us boxes

–            So, the more pages, generally the longer it will take our web developers, SEO consultants, web designers and managers to work on the website

How much coding time is needed?

If we are coding a website, say using HTML5 or Javascript, the website will be really complicated because, let’s say it’s an e-commerce website with 100 pages, and the customer wants the ability to sort whether items are in stock by low to high prices and also by brand. All of this requires a lot of coding.

So, when a business in Cardiff approaches us to get a new website designed and built, we have to work out how much coding time is needed. How much functionality the client wants- for example something that may seem simple, as sorting items by whether they are in stock or not, is not that simple from web design perspective. There’s often a lot of coding that’s needed, so if we are coding using HTML5 or Javascript, it will take us a lot of time and increase the web design cost.

How many web design/marketing companies are involved?

Sometimes, a business in Cardiff will want to hire one company to improve the search engine optimisation, a separate web design firm, or another company to manage the business’s social media.

So, there’s a lot of separate companies involved, there’s a lot of input from separate companies, all working to complete the website, this can slow the web design process down sometimes a lot. That’s simply because often one company will be waiting on the other, a web design company may well be waiting on a copywriter. The social media company may well be waiting on the copywriter to publish a piece of content marketing so that they can promote on say the businesses Facebook page.

Branding

Sometimes, the company does not have any brand guidelines created. Often, they need to create a company logo, know which font to use, and create a colour scheme for the business.

Then, our web developers will know which hex codes to use when designing the website. Also the company logo can then be added to the website. Then, the same font can be used on, say, the business website, the company business cards, as well as also say on letterheads.

So, we need a website designed, but where should we start in terms of planning?

So, you need to think of your brand-new company website a bit like how you would plan to build a brand-new structure.

When planning a new building, you often hire an architect to design it and draw up a set of plans. Those plans will be used throughout the construction of the structure.

This is the same for your website; you need to create what is called a “site map.”

Now, if you have a brochure website designed for solicitors or a business offering a service, we recommend getting your team around a whiteboard.

Then just begin to scketch out the pages which are needed.

You will begin to see, in the layout for main service pages, that you need an about page, a cookie policy page, and a page for your company terms and conditions.

And then you can start to think, well have we left anything out?

A staff member might say, “Well, we were thinking of expanding our range of services. Shall we add those pages now?” So, sitting down with your team and brainstorming how you want your new website to be designed will help you think about how you want the site map to look.

The site map will help your web developers.

Whether your hiring a freelancer working from home, or a huge, national web design agency, what’s for sure is a site map, provided right at the start, will allow them offer you a much more accurate costing for how much it will cost to get that website designed.

This is a really good idea because sometimes a business, let’s say one located in Cardiff Bay, might get a quote from a web designer, and they say that for that 7-page brochure website to be designed, we would estimate it would be 2k.

Then, once the web design process gets underway, you might start to require new pages, because you see that you have forgotten you want extra pages, such as meet the team, company history page, and also pages which expand into allowing to talk more more your staff, and the skills they have.

A 10-page website may initially be what you think you need, but as the meeting progresses with your web developers, you soon see that you need more pages added, and the web design cost may double or even triple.

So, this is why it’s a good idea to get that whiteboard out, create a site map, get your staff to say around bean bags, and ask them if they require more pages.

Do you require a website to be designed and built here in Wales?

We work with a lot of Welsh businesses every single year. From garden room companies to solicitors, we design unique websites.

Here’s why so many companies, hire us to be their web designers:

–            We build websites fast

–            We can also help improve your company’s organic SEO

–            We are WordPress experts

–            We have been building WordPress websites for over 10 years

How much does a new website cost for you to build?

We can design an amazing, well-designed website. Our prices start from just £950.00. There are other web design packages available. Most websites we build cost £ 2k. Larger websites, such as a new e-commerce website, will cost more.

How much does your website hosting cost?

So, we are quite different from some other Cardiff web developers. The reason is that here at W&P, we often offer the first year of website hosting for absolutely free. This is a massive saving for some businesses because other companies might charge between £40 per month and £70 per month for fast website hosting.

If you get a website designed by us, for say £950.00 and there’s free website hosting, then this is a massive saving for the customer.

Can help to improve our companies SEO once the website has been designed?

Yes, we can. SEO takes a considerable amount of time, depending on how much competition your business faces. For example, it’s much more straightforward to get a local dentist on the first page of Google organic results than getting a car insurance company on page 1 of Google.co.uk nationally.

So if you face, say, ten competitors who are investing in SEO, then it’s much simpler to get that business on page 1 when compared to, let’s say, a car insurance business, which is up against thousands of companies.

So, our monthly fee for our SEO services is dependent on how much competition your business faces.

Do you design WordPress websites, if so how long do these take to build?

So, the vast majority of the websites our web designers build in Cardiff are WordPress website.

We think WordPress is the bee’s knees. It’s an amazing CMS, and that’s why you have thousands of web design agencies that specialise in and build WordPress websites. They know that it’s a really good CMS, and many company directors insist on using WordPress because it’s widely used globally, has been around a long time, and has proven itself as a brilliant content management system.

So, we would say most of the new brochure websites that our designers design every week, whether for a construction business or a solicitor, let’s say, use WordPress. Often, the company also hires us to manage hosting to improve the company’s search engine optimisation.

Introduction

Some things businesses buy the same items on a routine basis, such as a stationery order, yet for businesses, a website might be something that they purchase, let’s say, once every ten years.

Therefore, the company director may know that the current website looks a bit tired and dated and is in need of replacing.

The company may, therefore, want to redesign the website, yet not know how the web design process works exactly here at W&P.

Some people may say the web design process is straightforward. It is surely just a matter of explaining what you want and letting the web designers get on with the work.

However, most websites require a range of different people and skill sets to design and build the website. You might need new copywriters to write all of the text, a videographer to make the video from the autoloading video on the homepage, a web developer, a web designer, and a U.X, that’s user experience expert all working to build the website.

What type of web design company do you require?

Therefore, how many people you require will often dictate what type of web design company you will need. For example, do you need a freelancer because you have a rather restricted marketing budget?

Would you need the whole hog, everything from a web developer to an expert SEO consultant? If so, you may need to hire a web design agency.

So the first thing we would say is that you have to think about whether the company you wish to hire has all the skills you need to design the website, and whether other companies will need to be brought into the mix.

So, first things first, consider the following:

– Do you need a photographer?
– Do you need a videographer?
– Do you require a copy writer?
– Do you require an SEO expert?

Why do so many businesses come to W&P to get their website designed?

The simple answer is we are a recognised name, a trusted brand, and a trusted set of hands to design the website because of our long standing within the web design industry. With over 10 years of experience, we’ve been designing websites for a very long period, building a rock-solid reputation for quality.

So, in a nutshell here’s why so many companies hire us:

– We specialise in designing WordPress websites
– We also offer SEO services
– We offer very competitive pricing
– We can take care of writing all of the text
– We aim to offer fast turnaround times, whether it’s a brochure website or a large e-commerce website we are building
–
As an agency, we not only design quality websites at speed but also offer long-term partnerships. We can work with you to improve your organic and local search engine optimisation, ensuring your website continues to grow and evolve.

Do set timescales

So the next thing we would encourage you to think about before the web design process even begins is to ask how fast the company can design the website. If your waiting an eternity to get a brand-new website built, well, you may have wished you had gone else where.

And sure, there are web design agencies quick to send you the link to make a deposit payment, but before you do just that, do enquire how long it will take to complete the wireframes or the design.

As we have heard of companies waiting over 6-months for a basic 10 page brochure website to get designed and built.

Now, it’s all good to get a website designed for as cheap as chips, but if the website is put on the back burner for, let’s say, multiple months, it’s worth paying a bit more for a company that can design the website faster?

Well, we think so, this is always why, when our web designers get super busy, which normally is during lead up to Christmas as the peak of summer, we always honest and transparent with customers, before taking a deposit. We always try to honestly estimate how long it will take us to complete the website, rather than those web designers, where sales agents on commission and just want to take a up-front desposit, then having you hanging waiting for months for website to be designed.

Speed and quality

Then you have to balance speed and quality; the last thing you want is an overly basic website, so you need it designed fast, but don’t settle for an over simplistic website.

Kick-off meeting

Sometimes, a relatively simple website needs to be created; let’s say there will be an up-coming event in Cardiff, or a famous comedian is coming to town, or a music event; therefore, a rather simplistic website is needed to promote the event.

In this case, the client might state to our web designer over the phone what they want, and with a few emails, they can start writing the code that PHP to design a fantastic website for that business. So sometimes, we don’t need multiple meetings for the more straight-forward type websites.

However, more often than not, a much more intricate website is needed, a website this going to have to last the test of time, let’s say, the next 10 years it may well be serving that business. So often, they need to be a kick-off meeting, and when we say that we’re not talking about football, we’re talking about starting to whittle down what the client wants in a meeting with our web designers and the client.

So, in this meeting we often talk about typography and how many pages will be needed, the site structure, and brand guidelines, as well as discuss who will be writing the content marketing for each page.

Design the website

So often, before the designer even starts to write one piece of code or add a paragraph to the website, a lot of conversation is going on beforehand to make sure us web designers and the client are singing from the same hymn sheet.

Again, if it’s a rather simplistic website and sometimes our web designers can get on with that after, let’s say, a phone call or a few emails.

However, if the website is more technical, with many pages and complex features are needed, then many meetings will be needed. We’ll need your input and feedback at every stage. Your understanding of your business and your audience is invaluable and this will need to be incorporated into the design, and we’ll work closely with you to ensure the website meets your expectations.

We will also need to talk about which CMS, that’s short for content management system is right for your business
There is a huge range of content management systems out there. You’ve most probably heard of Squarespace, WordPress, and Drupal, to name a few?

So, there needs to be a conversation about which content management system you want, which will work best for your business, what will suit your businesses needs now, and in the foreseeable future.
Often, most brochure websites we build, so that’s a website that doesn’t take online payments, normally most of the time we recommend WordPress.

With that said, WordPress is now so well known, that many company directors will have owned several WordPress websites, and want the same CMS used. Often this is because, they find the WP Dashboard really well designed and laid out, plus, often the business may have had this CMS for say the last decade, so they now want WordPress again, as its served that business well.

Hosting

One of the next conversations is about hosting, as hosting prices can vary quite massively depending on the website’s speed.
So, depending on the budget, we can recommend different website hosting we can offer. We would recommend paying more for fast, reliable hosting.

Low quality, cheap hosting, we think is a false economy. If the hosting so slow, it is holding your businesses organic SEO back, well, we think this is not good, and the business should pay more for better quality hosting.

Copywriting- who’s going to be writing the text?

A considerable part of the web design process is getting the text right- or as web designers call it adding the content marketing. This too much text can be off-putting to the shopper, so much so that they leave the website and are overwhelmed by large blocks of text, this causes a sharp increase in the companies “bounce rate”.

However, on the other hand, if you don’t provide enough text information, which might not answer the customer’s query, leading to a high bounce rate again.

So its about getting the balance right, not too much text, its over whelming too the reader, not too little, that it doesn’t answer the customers questions.

Google E-EAT

So, because of the “Google E-EAT” update, copywriting, that’s the content marketing needs to be written by an expert, and we here at W&P are a web design businesses like ours work closely with the company to ensure the content marketing is high quality.

Final design
Once you’ve added the content marketing, added the photos, and worked with the videography company to the homepage,

it’s often then time to hand a temporary link to the customer.

A temporary link will then show what the website looks like, and the customer can request any adjustments they may want made.

Sign off and then the new website goes live

After the customer is happy with the final draft of the website, and then it’s just a matter of launching a website and placing it live so your customers can see it.

This means our web developers can then put the website live on that domain name.

Have you designed many websites?

With over ten years of experience, we’ve been designing content management systems for many local businesses, for a very long period of time.During that time, we’ve accumulated solid organic SEO skills, making us a reliable agency to work with.

In terms of designing websites, we’ve worked on a huge variety of websites ranging from large online retailers, retailing product lines in excess of 1000 products, right through to working with smaller construction-related businesses.

I haven’t got much time. Can you handle most of the web design process with little input from us?

This is a question that is really important to answer because it’s a situation that a lot of company directors find themselves in. Often, when you need a brand-new website designed, the website needs to look absolutely amazing, but it is often needs to be designed at a time when a director is starting their business, so they haven’t got much time.

The company director might, for example, be looking for suitable office premises, interviewing a lot of staff, or just setting up a shop and adding stock to it, which can be hugely time-consuming. So, this often comes a time when they deal with everything from shopfitters through to estate agents.

So often, the customer hasn’t got the time to work that closely with the web design company to finalise the design or even be able to write the text. Therefore, the client needs a web design company that listens carefully during an initial meeting or phone call and then can translate that into wireframes of designs the customer can look at and improve.

Thankfully, at this business, we pride ourselves on our ability to quickly grasp your business, its DNA, and its culture and start to come with design ideas.

Many clients like this because they are often so busy with other tasks that they want a web design agency like W&P to start making decisions and implementing ideas without going through multiple meetings.

Meetings are often needed, such as a kick-off meeting and multiple other meetings, if we designing larger e-commerce websites, using WordPress and Woocommerce.

What about website hosting and updates? Who takes care of this?

Here at this web design company, we can offer managed hosting via A2, we can charge a monthly or yearly fee for this service. We recommend managed hosting because we can make regular website backups, but this is more expensive than just regular hosting.

Again, the customer needs to carefully consider how much they’re willing to spend on website hosting.

How long an average does it take to design a brochure website from start to finish?

So, somebody might be just taking the plunge into self-employment or starting a new business venture, and often, they quickly learn that a lot of web design companies, they often make them wait a minimum of three months to get the website designed.

Often this is due to back-log of work, or that the company hasn’t got enough web developers in, to work on starting your website.

However, because we have such highly skilled PHP web developers working for us, we can sometimes, and this is more often than not, design a website in less than four weeks from start to finish.

What CMS does your business use the most and comes highly recommend by your web designers?

Like many web design agencies, we highly recommend WordPress. We’ve used this type of CMS for a long time now, so we have an excellent working knowledge of how WordPress works.

How much does a seven-page website cost?

We can offer a quote of £950 to design a seven-page website.

Does writing the text cost extra?
Yes, we can write the text as part of the where design process, but this does cost extra. Generally £75.00 per page, where our copywriters are required to write the main pages.

What type of businesses have you worked with in the past in Cardiff?

We work with everything from leading dental practices to well-known solicitors to construction companies. We work with a massive range of businesses because we’ve been designing websites for over ten years and have worked with diverse companies in that timeframe.

If we want amendments made to the website later, is this possible?

Most definitely, we charge a fixed hourly fee to amend the website if needed at a later date. For example, the customer might want a new product page added, so we can charge a fixed hourly fee and offer an estimate before we start any work.

Are you able to design an e-commerce website using WordPress?

Yes, many e-commerce websites use WordPress and Woocommerce, we can design a quality WordPress site for your business.

Why should we choose your marketing agency?

There are hundreds of different web design businesses located all across Wales. These businesses may well be freelancers, right through to an agency employing more than 80 staff. The reason why so many people choose us is because we aim to make the web design process as simple as we possibly can for our clients.

We keep things simple

We know that many companies use a lot of marketing jargon, which clients often don’t like. Many businesses also don’t like it when an agency hides extra charges within the fine print, such as making a website responsive or charging high costs for monthly hosting fees.

So, there are two main reasons why people choose our business: we make the web design process simple and straightforward and are very transparent with our prices.

For example, our website hosting costs are some of the most affordable available in Wales, and then there’s the fact that we design all of our websites for a fixed price and we always make them responsive for that set fee. This is quite unusual because many web designers charge extra for making the website mobile friendly.

So, break down the web design process into four simple steps for us?

The first stage is a kick-off meeting

This is to understand how many pages are needed, who will write the text, which website hosting you want, and then get a good idea of the design you want.

The second stage is for the designers to start designing the website

The designers can begin adding the text code and new pages to design the website

Can you create a website and write the text in Welsh?

We are often asked by the client who wants a combination of the English language and the Welsh language translation added to the page. Therefore, we can add the Welsh language to any page you like, and you can do this for everything from the About Us page to writing the legal text at the bottom of the website.

Have you worked with many large Welsh businesses?

We most certainly have are working with some well-known companies and brands right here in Wales.

These brands work across the U.K and are, therefore, national companies, and we have experience working with them.

Do you have experience improving a businesses marketing from start to finish and helping it grow over a sustained period of time?

We most certainly have taken businesses which have more or less started as self-employment-type business structures to help them grow over a very long period.

Therefore, we pride ourselves on partnering with the business in the long term to help it grow. Web design is a stand-alone service, yet what often happens then is often the company wants to come on board with us for us to improve the companies organic SEO, we can offer this service, which is charged monthly.

How can we obtain a web design quote?

We can provide you with a web design quote quickly. We often aim to turn around quotes within three working days. For a brochure website, we can usually offer a quote immediately on the phone.

If you would like to obtain a quote for any of the following services, then do contact us today:

• Local SEO,
• Organic SEO
• Web Design

Introduction

Business is hard!

We know that’s quite a statement, but getting any business off the ground takes grit and determination.

Yet, many businesses we think fail simply because they go to the wrong marketing company in the very early days of the business’s starting up. They either get a cheap website built that says nothing about the company or the brand, or they get their search engine optimisation is not done right; the company might use what’s called “black hat” methods, which means sooner rather than later, the business gets what’s called a “Google algorithmic penalty”- which basically means, often it gets de-indexed, removed from Google altogether on the organic search engine results pages.

So, with that said, how can our web design agency help you:

Branding and website design

We know that most start-ups and entrepreneurs are strapped for money at the start, but does that mean you need to choose an overly simplified, basic, and rubbish-looking website?
Well, we think not.

That’s because there are web designers out there who will give you a website that’s so basic, bland, and boring that the bounce rate will be super high.

But we are not like those businesses. We design high-quality WordPress websites with up to 7 pages, are well-designed, and offer a starting price of just £950.00.
We are sure you will agree that at that price point, it’s an amazing price that most start-up companies can afford.

Help to improve your company’s Search Engine Optimisation

So, we are not one trick ponies here at W&P- why do we say that with so much confidence?

The answer is simple: We have SEO consultants with over ten years of experience. So, you could hire one of our super-talented web designers to design a fantastic website for your business.

Then, as soon as all the pages have been designed, the logo put on, and images and text added, our SEO consultants can start working on improving your company’s ranking on Google.

Is SEO a fast process?

The answer is no.

SEO is slow, very slow. Now, that’s not to put you off; here’s why. Stay tuned.

If done right, SEO can place you on the first page of Google, which, for some businesses, is a massive competitive advantage. However, we can overemphasise the phrase “if done right” because it needs to be done in a white-hat way that follows Google’s WebMaster Guidelines.

How our web design agency can help:

Well-designed websites starting from £950
Start-up businesses often have many things they need to purchase, such as office premises, stock and hiring staff.

Therefore, we recognise that some companies will want a website set-up that looks amazing but may not want to fork out thousands of pounds. This is why we can design and build up to 7 pages for £950.00. Most websites we create are built in less than one month.

So, whether you are opening a hairdressing saloon, a new restaurant or an accountancy practice here in Cardiff, we can design a fantastic WordPress CMS website for just £950.00
SEO packages available from £550 PCM

Many start-up companies and entrepreneurs know that most of their customers will come via Google.co.uk.

A lot of businesses hire us not just because we have really good web designers working for us but also because we can help improve your business’s search engine optimisation. For example, we can help get your company onto page one of Google here in Cardiff. We have worked with many businesses based right here in Cardiff. We offer our organic SEO services, which are white hat, starting from £550.00 per month.

Help to promote your business on social media.

So, let’s say one of our copywriters writes a long article, say 3,000 words, and it helps to improve the business’s organic search engine optimisation. We can also promote that article on social media, such as Facebook, to get even more visitors, generate more brand awareness, and help improve your company’s digital marketing.

Why choose our web design business?

Why not call us if you’re about to start a new business? We can design quality content management system websites starting from £950.00. We can then help to improve your organic and local SEO, with starting prices for our white hat

SEO, starting from £550.00 per month.

If you want to know more about our web design and SEO packages, call us today.