The daily Post

Introduction

Let’s say you’ve just started your business here in South Wales. You’ve printed business cards, and the company vehicles, such as your van, have been signed and written. There’s just one thing missing, yes, that’s right: your company website.

Now, you’re thinking, how long does it take to get a new website designed and built?

Well, you’ve come to the right place to find an answer to that pressing question. We are not new to this game but have built websites for local businesses for over ten years. Our experience puts us in a prime position to offer sound advice on how long it takes to design and build a brochure website.

In this article, you will find ways to help your web designers accelerate the web design process and explain why going cheap rarely pays in the long run.

So, without further ado, let’s examine some factors that dictate the time it takes to design a new website.

Have you got a clear vision?

A clear idea of what you like can make things a piece of cake for your web designers. Some businesses don’t have the foggiest idea, so everything from the colour schemes to how they want the company logo to look must be discussed in long meetings.
Yet, having a clear idea of what you want can massively accelerate the web design process.

So, to further help you along with your web design journey, here are some of the things you may wish also to consider:

– How many pages do you require to be designed
– Do you require a company blog?
– Do you have a business address you would like added?
– Have you already got a company logo designed?
– Have you got a colour scheme in mind?
– Who’s going to be writing the content marketing

Who’s going to be hosting the website?

Most web designers, including our web design agency, can offer you a low cost for hosting the website. However, not all web design companies are so fair. Sometimes, the monthly fee to host the website can be very high.

So you must consider this: if it’s going to cost £500+ per year to host the website with that web design company, do you want to use them?
You need to carefully consider this from the outset simply because many businesses choose web design agencies based on the website’s cost. Rarely do companies consider ongoing expenses, such as domain name renewal and hosting costs. For some businesses, these costs can be chicken feed, which is nothing worth worrying about.

Some other businesses’ hosting costs could be high. When you add up the hosting cost over the years, you have the website with them; you could be talking thousands of pounds.

So, to cut a long story short, consider the hosting and ongoing maintenance costs with that web design agency—if they are too high, go elsewhere.

Who’s going to be writing all of the text?

Thousands of words sometimes need to be written for a new website, such as an e-commerce website, which can take considerable time.
So, you have to ask yourself, will you have the time to write all of this text?
As this article discusses how long it takes to get a website designed, hiring copywriters can help save a lot of time. Often, a large digital marketing agency will have copywriters who can write all the text. This means you save considerable time and can concentrate on other aspects of running your business.

Therefore, a copywriter can work with the web developers. They will know about each page’s layout (or at least they should), and then, like busy bees, they can get to write the work.

First, before any copywriter starts drinking copious amounts of espresso and is set to work on writing everything from product descriptions to your new about us page, you will need a meeting with your copywriters. This is to discuss things like “tone of voice”—does your business want to sound professional yet funny? Or do you want to come across as a severe company? This is why we urge you to meet with your copywriters to discuss this.

Copywriters can help you save a considerable amount of time.

So, in a nutshell, if you’re in a mad rush to get your website designed, fully built, and live so your customers can start visiting it, then we would recommend hiring copywriters. The reason we say this is that some business owners say, yeah, no worries, I will write all the text, save a few quid, yet they then quickly learn that it takes up a considerable amount of time and can sometimes set back the website going live for many, many weeks. So, if you take nothing else away from this article, think about hiring a copywriter.

Talk to your friends in business.
You might be scratching your head right now, thinking, what have my friends, who are also in business, about getting a new website designed?

Well, we shall elaborate…. So, hold your horses!

Businesses up and down the glorious land we call Great Britain, our home, get talked into content management systems, CMS for short, which can sometimes be rubbish.

The CMS maybe like a 1.0 car—great if you want little performance. Yet, if you wish for actual performance, you don’t go for a small-engine petrol car, do you?

Nope, you go for a roaring 3.0 turbo or naturally aspirated if you don’t like turbo lag.
So, what’s the point we are trying to make? Even we will admit we’re going off track here…..

Well, the point we are trying to make is that you want the CMS you choose to be secure, so as your business grows and changes are needed to the website, you can make those changes; you’re not held back by a rubbish CMS that’s basic, rubbish, and just well naff.
So, this is why we ask businesses, when you’re thinking about making a super cheap CMS website, what CMS is it using? If you have never heard of it, other website designers have never heard of it, or it’s a CMS, the web designers have knocked themselves up. Well, just run and dash.

What you want is a well-known CMS used by millions of businesses. That way, even if you have a falling out with one set of web designers and heated e-mails are exchanged, you can walk away and find new web designers the same day who have experience designing websites using that CMS if it’s a popular CMS.

So we deviate, and you are thinking: What does choosing the suitable CMS have to do with how long it takes to build a website?
As the old saying goes, buy cheap, buy it twice.

Well, this 100% applies to getting a website built for your business. With the amount of rubbish, naf, and low-quality designs, the industry has tried approaching SEO agencies for quotes, and some SEO companies won’t even work on the website. It’s that rubbish.
So, pick a website content management system that’s widely used.

Take inspiration from your competitors.

Even the simplest of websites will need a main menu, a mobile version of the website, and a page layout for each page. When you think of a large e-commerce website, there’s a considerable amount to consider.

So, if you sit down with your web designers and say, well, I like how this competitor has designed their main menu. I like how the footer on this competitor’s website looks in terms of their Instagram feed; I like the page layout of this competitor; well, this is all food for thought.
Just like one giant puzzle, where once it looked like all the pieces were scattered, well, they can all start coming together, and your web designers, web developers, copywriters, and, of course, you can start to piece all of this together to make a new design yet incorporate aspects of our websites you like.

Of course, just to be clear here, we are not talking about copying any competitor’s website because they don’t do that, and it’s likely to get their lawyers contacting the website owner. Your new website needs to look different. We are talking about getting some design ideas.

Hi, yes, sorry, I forgot to mention this page. I need to be added…

As web designers who have been around the block (for those who don’t know, that means been around a bit), we often find that customers forget about an extra page they need added.

So, for example, let’s say you’re a solicitor. You’ve been working for a giant law firm for years, and now you’re setting up on your own. Well, it’s not uncommon for you to think, “O, no.” At 1 a.m., you might think,” I forgot to mention to the web designers that I need an added page for employment law or something along those lines.

So it sounds basic, but trust us, you need to do two things. One, check your direct competitors’ websites. How have they set out the pages?

How have they separated their primary services?
If you want to improve the SEO for these services, later on, have each set out on their page.

Then, sketch the main menu on paper, with the most critical services at the top and the least essential services moving down.

Now, a word to the wise, and listen up. This is a crucial piece of advice; you may thank us later. Set each leading service you offer on its page, then ask your web designers to add essential on-page SEO elements, such as page titles, internal links, H1-H6 titles, meta titles, and meta descriptions for each page. This will improve your SEO and make it easier to improve it later on.

Some move fast, some move slow, and the road is long, so choose quality

A website is unlike a soft drink; you pick it up, quickly devour it, and then drop it in the bin once it is done. A website needs to last, well, at least for a good few years. So please don’t go cheap; don’t pick a website designer who promises to design a website in the blink of an eye and then be disappointed with the masterpiece they have created.

The road is long…

Pick a web design company that doesn’t rush yet doesn’t move at a snail’s pace; you want quality. This often doesn’t come cheap, but if you’re serious about improving your company’s search engine optimisation later on, well, you need a quality website designed at the start. So, this means no copying and pasting anyone else’s text.

Introduction

Setting up a new business is an exciting time; you might have been an employee within a large company for, say, the last 25 years, and now, you’re jumping into running your very own limited company.

You have bold plans and ideas. You want to bring your company to the market and offer something new to the customer.

You believe you will have the edge over the competition and are eager and ambitious to grow your business.

You therefore want to grow your business into something that you are proud of.

When you sit back and plan your businesses growth, often the business owner often writes out a business plan for say the next 5 years. For some businesses, such as those business which are setting up in Cardiff, Wales, 100% of their customers may come via online marketing.

Therefore you may plan advertise on social media or are working on improving organic SEO, the key to the success of your online advertising is a well-designed website.

So many Cardiff web design businesses to pick from

Now, the good news is this: what is spoilt for choice when picking local website designers.

There are many freelancers which working in spare bedrooms, right through large marketing agencies in the United Kingdom that can easily employ over 300 staff.

So the price point for each company to design the website is different; a point that we are trying to make here is that there is an ample amount of web designers catering for all sorts of budgets, so your bound to find a web designer who can build a new website for the price you had budgeted.

We here at our web designers, have seen websites have been advertised for as low £300, and companies offering brochure websites sometimes well over £11,000.

We have a range of different companies out there to choose from, but this does beg the question, how do you pick a Cardiff website designer?

Well, we are not impartial- as we are a well known web design company.

Yet with that said, we can provide some helpful pointers on things you might want to consider when picking a local designer.

So, without further ado, let’s give you some food for thought on what you might wish to consider when choosing a new web developer or designer.

Can you work with that person

Now? You might think this is obvious- right?

But at this stage, you might be wondering if this blog post is even worth reading? However, hold your horses for a second, as we are going to dispense quality advice your way.

Working with a WordPress designer or another type of web designer is often not a one-off process.

You often need to liaise with that person over many months or years regarding discussions regarding backing up the website, hosting, SEO, and making amendments to the website.

Therefore, if you find a person difficult to deal with on the telephone, that they are quite, well obnoxious, or that they just don’t get back to you within a reasonable time frame, then this is an indication that you need to cut your losses and go to another web design business.

However, you should also assess at the initial meeting can you work with the web designers over a long period of time.

Choose the right content management system for your business

We are huge fans and great promoters of the content management system “WordPress”. It’s important to remember that it’s not the only show in town, and you do have to meet different agencies that may advise you to use different content management systems that better suit your businesses needs.

Take your time choosing the right CMS

Yet, for many of our clients, after seeing the admin panel and dashboard on WordPress, they often find it very user-friendly and simple to use.

As highly skilled web designers, we are sometimes shown other content management systems that are not so user-friendly, they can even be sometimes rather challenging to use, and full of glitches, and sometimes, these companies dissipate into thin air because there’s not a lot of uptake for that particular CMS.

WordPress is used by millions of companies globally

On the other hand, this is why we chose WordPress: It’s been around for a very long time.

Over our ten years we have been running our business, it’s been one of the most widely used CMS by Cardiff businesses.

It continues to be popular because people see that it is good quality, simple to use, open source, widely respected as a good CMS by web developers, and used by millions of businesses. Some global brands use WordPress.

But don’t take our word for it; step back and evaluate which content management system is best for your business. Is it WordPress, or is it the different types of CMS?

Ongoing maintenance

You might get up in the morning and have a nice refreshing cup of coffee and a croissant.
Then, for the day, you might make a list of things you want to do when at your business premises, and you’re excited to get to work to implement those things that you want to do today.

But as any good business owner knows, it’s easy to get sidetracked.

One hundred and one things can get in the way of doing what you’re supposed to do. You might get home-put your slippers on, switch on the television, evaluate your to do list you wrote out in the morning, and think, well, I can even get even quarter of that done today.

As business owners say, it’s difficult to sometimes juggle everything that needs to get done.
You often don’t have time to manage your website’s maintenance: updating the plug-ins, making backups, and fixing little glitches fixed on your website.

So, who will take care of the ongoing WordPress website maintenance?

Again, this is something you should discuss with designers because, trust us, some web designers charge a small fortune for this monthly work.

Often the business gets sucked into a supercheap web design price, so low that even the customers are thinking about how do the designers make money and do this.

Then you see them in the small print.

Sometimes, for ongoing maintenance, the designers charge a monthly fee for hosting and maintenance.

This might be £75 per month, which doesn’t sound much when you add up over the lifetime of the website; well, that becomes costly for some businesses, especially all you have is let’s say, seven pages or less.

Ask about what is the hourly rate to make amendments

As we know, sometimes staff come and go, the services your business offers may change, and so do the products, and this often means the website needs to be updated.

Now, if you receive your web design invoice for amendments made to your company website end of the month, and it shocks you in terms of the fee, so much that you have a shocked expression on your face all day, all this is no good.

Therefore, you need a web design company that offers a fair hourly price to make amendments to your website. So much so that you are not frightened to make changes to the website because of fearing how much it will cost.

Therefore, you need to check with your web designers how much they charge to make website amendments. You might need many amendments every single month. For example, you might need to amend a new staff member, or perhaps you no longer stock the product so you need it removed.

Functionality

One of our favourite TV commercials, which was on TV long ago, was created by a different advertising firm that used the strapline. Isn’t it nice when things work?

That’s an amazing strapline we think.

Because it’s true: You know things that are produced today are sometimes overly complicated, just too technical, and sometimes we lose appreciation for the simple things, things that just work.

The first thing is to pick are web designers who know how to design quality websites.

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Let’s leave you with that thought: the success of a business can sometimes be in the hands of your web designers to pick your next web design agency carefully and spend your time evaluating what they’re offering for the money.

You might be sitting with a cup of tea before checking your e-mails using Microsoft Outlook. You might be evaluating which web design quote to choose.

Prices for web design that have returned to your inbox may vary wildly. One quote might be for £750, while another is quoted over three and a half thousand pounds.

Yet, as the company’s director, you probably already know that you can’t evaluate web design agencies just based on the prices they offer. And neither should you because it boils down to the quality of the web design, whether the finished design reflects what your business can offer, and how well that website will serve you over the long run.

As the old saying goes, buy cheap, and you often must pay twice.

At the same time, you don’t want to cough up more than you need to.

Therefore, picking the right web design company requires balance, and making this choice is not easy.

The benefits of working with a highly experienced web design agency in Bristol

Functionality and design

If you buy a high-performance car that costs a small fortune, you often want high performance but also want it to work every time the switch is on. There’s nothing more frustrating than when something doesn’t work.

Now, this is the same for web design. You might have a website designed that initially looks impressive, so much so that it blows your socks off.

Yet if it’s full of glitches and the people keep emailing you to say there are problems with the website, this can be a real headache over the long run.

So, first things first, you want a web design company that simply builds and designs quality websites and offers functionality that works perfectly, with all the coding glitches, whether it’s Javascript or anything else, fixed. This often means picking the right content management system, but by having highly experienced web designers, we can ensure that everything works as it should.

Does your business require SEO services?

If a company gets most of its work from the public sector, it might not need to invest in organic SEO. The reason is that the business doesn’t need to advertise or be ranked high on Google for various keywords if most companies work from the public sector.

However, suppose a business relies more on the private sector, such as a plumbing, construction, or scaffolding business. In that case, you should hire a web design company that can also work hard on improving your company’s search engine optimisation every month, as your business may rely on advertising the business on Google for your company to gain work.

So, whether your business wants to improve its local or organic SEO, you will often need a marketing agency to help.

Long road

SEO is a long road; it must step into a long-term process; nothing happens quickly, and every month, you must work hard to improve your rankings on Google. And where your business ultimately ranks is dependent on Google’s algorithms. So, you could work, burning the midnight oil for months, and your company doesn’t rise that much in Google’s ranks. That’s until Google rolls out a major algorithm update; if the SEO work is done right, you can rank higher in Google’s results.

Many companies say it can take over six months to see solid results from your SEO, but how well your search engine optimisation improves depends on the company you hire.

Plus, before any SEO work starts, you will need a quality website; this is where our web designers in Cardiff are often hired. Whether a £950 WordPress website or a £7k WordPress website, our web designers will always design a brilliant website for any business we work for.

Supersonic

Websites today need to be supersonic fast, and whichever web design company you choose, you must ensure you’re getting good quality website hosting.

Purchase quality

You can buy a new winter jacket that is cheap and quickly falls apart at the seams.

However, you could pay more and buy quality, such as a wax jacket made by a British company that might last decades.

This is the same with company websites; often, if you buy cheap, you end up paying twice.

You want a company website that could potentially last a business, say, the next seven years. So, you need a quality website, and thankfully, today, when you pick web designers like W&P Web Design, you can gain a quality WordPress website for your business that doesn’t break the bank.

Mobile and desktop

The website’s mobile and desktop versions must work perfectly and be designed to a high standard. We are experienced web designers based in Cardiff and can create a high-quality WordPress website for your business in less than four weeks.

Contact the team for a quote today.

Date: 02/July/2024

Introduction

Regardless of your business size or structure, the speed of your company website is a critical factor in improving its SEO.
A fast website is essential for a business to appear on the first page of Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs). The company website also needs to be fast on mobile and desktop. A slow website not only hampers your chances of being ranked on page 1 but also leads to a high bounce rate, potentially resulting in customer loss.

Here’s what can happen if your company website is slow:

-Google will not rank it as high
– Your companies bounce rate may well be very high
– You could be missing out on sales
– The time of site on Google Analytics could be slow
– The average number of pages the shopper goes on could be less
– Your business could be disadvantaged, as Google’s algorithm may rank your business much lower in Google’s SERPs.

Purchase good quality website hosting.

In today’s digital landscape, websites need to be supersonic—think Concord speed. Achieving this requires a significant investment in high-quality hosting and reliable hosting providers—don’t just opt for the cheapest hosting prices, as this could damage your business’s search engine optimisation.

This article will explain fully how you can improve your business page speed:

What is Google’s recommended page load time?

Many SEO consultants and leading web design agencies agree that Google (Alphabet Inc) hasn’t stipulated an exact page load time for which to aim. However, Google and other large search engine companies, such as Microsoft’s Bing, have clarified that they want company websites to be as fast as possible.

Google, for example, has provided “Google’s Page Speed Insights,” a perfect tool for assessing the speed of your company website and recommending ways to improve it.

Therefore, especially on larger e-commerce websites, web developers spend thousands of hours improving the website’s speed and lowering bounce rate to enable a better user experience; therefore, it’s all about having a fast website, and slow hosting or a slow website has no place in 2024.

If your business is serious about getting on page one of Google.co.uk or Google.com, you need fast hosting. Businesses also sometimes have an AMP (Accelerated Mobile Version) of the website designed.

Don’t opt for super cheap/low-cost hosting. It’s often a false economy.

Sure, there are also hosting companies that offer super low prices for low-cost monthly website hosting, yet if the website is so slow that it puts you at a direct disadvantage behind your direct competitors, then it’s a false economy.

Therefore, as a small business owner, investing in supersonic website hosting is well worth the extra expense. It’s also a good move, as it could help improve your company’s SEO. While it may be triple the price or more, the benefits to your SEO and user experience (U.X) are invaluable.

Some things can’t be improved.

Let’s say somebody is in the middle of a field at a rock concert, and the signal on their smartphone is not that good. The website owner cannot control how fast, say, the 4G network is in that particular area.

The business can control the design of the website to ensure it loads quickly, so you may want an AMP version of your website. Take the example of a content management system, which can sometimes be bloated with unnecessary plug-ins. These can be identified and removed, improving the load time, and a web developer can exercise this control to improve the speed of your company website.

Remove unnecessary WordPress plugins (get your web designers to do this, as it could affect how your website works)

These could be unnecessary WordPress CMS plugins, which, when present and not being used, could slow down the load time of every page. However, these are issues that a skilled web developer can address and improve upon.

Therefore, the key to good website design is not just aesthetics but also speed—this is why we recommend using Google Page Speed Insights to see how you can improve the speed of your company website. It’s about finding the balance to ensure your website is visually appealing, has a good design, and is supersonic fast.

Many SEO agencies and web designers fully understand that Google Page Experience is now essential to the web design process. Therefore, the website must visually stabilise quickly, be mobile-friendly, and have a rapid page load speed. If not, the website should be improved; yes, this can take hundreds of hours of a web developer’s time, which is sometimes vital if your business wants to improve its organic SEO.

While many web developers can help your website do this, it should only be undertaken by highly qualified and experienced web developers.

Compressing images

Let’s say you have a website; there are ten images on each page, say on the homepage of your WordPress website.
The homepage could take a long time to load, which could seriously disadvantage your organic SEO if your website is now slow because of the large pictures you have included on it.

Let’s say you run a holiday cottage somewhere rural in the middle of France. You might have thought you were doing an excellent job by adding all those pictures to show potential tourists what the place and the surrounding countryside look like. You’re happy because you designed the WordPress website yourself, and you may think you have done an excellent job.

But at the same time, if the website is too slow to load because of too many large images of your holiday cottage in France, another competitor with another holiday cottage with a more basic website may rank higher on Google.fr. So, you would work with a web designer from the start to make that website faster. The web developers will most likely use Google Page Speed Insights to make the website faster.

HTTP Caching

This can mean that if a shopper returns to your website, for example, somebody might browse around and buy or visit, say, ten different online retailers of washing machines from various online retailers. But let’s say that your company website has had “Browser HTTP Caching enabled”; this will likely make your company website much faster if the shopper returns to your website, offering a better user experience.

Most definitely use Google’s PageSpeed Insights.

You should definitely use Google’s PageSpeed Insights; it’s free and can help improve your website’s performance. It even gives a list of recommendations to help optimise your website. Therefore, most web designers and SEO agencies use this tool to improve the page’s loading speed.

So, what does a web developer mean when they’re talking about page speed?

It simply refers to how long a blog post or page takes to load in your browser. Therefore, it’s widely considered that the faster, the better, as it offers a better user experience, which can help reduce bounce rates.

How can this help to improve the business’s marketing?

In the early days of Google’s algorithm, when they used Google PageRank, Google’s algorithm didn’t consider how fast the website was—so it was not a ranking factor.

In 2024, most SEO agencies and web design companies would agree that Google’s algorithms are using the speed of your company website as a ranking factor.

This means Google is working out how fast your company website is and using this information in its calculations to determine where to rank your company in the SERPS. Therefore, you need fast and good-quality website hosting.

Do you need a new website designed?

When we design a brand-new website for a business in Cardiff, South Wales, we carefully contemplate the user experience—in terms of how to design the WordPress website to offer a good U.X. So, whether it loads on an Android Smartphone or an Apple iOS, it loads quickly.

Therefore, if you’re looking for a well-designed website built in Cardiff, we are most definitely the web developers to talk to.

Written by: Dave Sanders

Date: 01/07/2024

We can build a stunning/fantastic website for your business

As expert web designers, we know that a website doesn’t just have to look good; every aspect must work as it should. So, if your business is looking for a leading front-end web development agency to design a brilliant website for your business, do call us. Businesses normally have to wait a month before we can start work, yet we are worth the wait, as our websites are amazing and well-designed.

Good User experience is critical.

So, today, what separates the top brands, which are ranked highly on Google, from businesses on page 7 of the search results is often down to whether the website offers a good user experience.

Is the website well designed?

Do you want a piece of cake when getting the product or service page?

A website that’s slow to load, difficult to use, or doesn’t answer the question the shopper wants answered will slowly start to move down Google’s ranks.

A website that does not offer a good UX is not going to get on page one of Google.

There’s a reason why businesses of all sizes flock to W&P Designs: We have some of the best web designers here, designing amazing, well-designed websites. We always consider UX, so we don’t aim to be the cheapest but to design a quality website for your business.

Make sure the website is responsive:

You need a website that works on every type of device, from smartphones to Tablets to Windows/Apple desktops. If your company website is not responsive, it won’t work on phones and tablets, and if this is the case, you could be missing out on sales. So this is another reason Cardiff businesses choose us.

The reason is that the fee to make the website responsive is always included in our web design costs. Therefore, we don’t bury this cost in the fine print of our contracts; we always say that if we design a website for £950 or £9500.00, all websites will be responsive.

Designed fast

Businesses that contact us to design and build a WordPress website often want it designed quickly. They may be start-up businesses that are already up and running and working for clients. They may also be working from their personal e-mail addresses right now, so they need our team to design a website quickly.

We can design a website for your business quickly, often in less than one month. Most of our £950.00 brochure websites can be designed in less than one month. Our customers are often impressed by how fast we can work. We offer the complete solution, including website hosting and WordPress websites, as well as ensuring the website is responsive. Our web design company offers amazing value for money.

Benefits of working with our Cardiff-based business

We build fast; we build quality websites.

Whether it’s a 7-page brochure website or a 100-page e-commerce website, we build our websites fast. We can also work to save the customer time because we have highly experienced copywriters in-house.

This means that whether it’s 1,000 words or 10,000 words, we can help save you time. Our business can, therefore, take care of everything: designing the desktop version of the website and the mobile version of the website. We can write the text, and we can offer affordable hosting.

It is clear why businesses in Cardiff, ranging from used car dealers to dentists, ask W&P to design their websites. We create quality websites fast. Our WordPress web designers design quality websites, which start from just £950.00

Don’t choose a web design company that will design an essential website for your business.

Today, whether you run an MOT station or a hairdresser, customers have plenty of businesses to choose from on Google.co.uk.

It’s important that your website impresses the customer, not just to obtain more sales but also because you don’t want a website with a sky-high bounce rate.

Too many businesses hire web designers just because they are cheap or because they can offer a super cheap web design price. Yet, as the old saying goes, if you pay cheap, you end up paying twice.

Instead, get a quality website built; here’s why so many businesses hire us:

– We can take care of the copywriting
– We are experts at designing WordPress websites
– We can offer you affordable website hosting
Come to us to get a quality website built.

WordPress is an excellent CMS. It’s been around for a long time, and millions of companies worldwide have chosen this content management system.

We have WordPress designers who can design a fantastic website for your business. Call us today:

Introduction

As we all know, the construction sector is fiercely competitive. Whether you’re a builder, plant hire company or tradesman, you will be competing with hundreds of other businesses in a capital city like Cardiff.

Two things are crucial for a construction business to not just survive but thrive in this competitive sector: a well-designed website that can outshine many of its direct competitors and a reliable SEO partner, be it a freelancer or an agency. These are not just options but necessities in today’s digital landscape.

The benefits of a well-designed website and a robust organic SEO strategy are immense, offering a business the opportunity to generate more sales.

There’s often a vast difference in price between what an SEO agency charges and when comparing that to an SEO freelancer. Yet, in terms of which one to go for, it doesn’t matter as long as that business gets you onto page one of Google.

What truly matters is the quality of the company’s work, as Google’s algorithms are now so fine-tuned, so well-engineered, that if the work is deemed as “spam”, you can get removed from Google in the blink of an eye if the SEO work is completed incorrectly. So, it’s crucial to prioritise quality over price for your website and your SEO strategy.
So, quality is not just a factor; it’s the name of the game.

Your business needs a quality website and a company offering top-notch search engine optimisation services.

Well-designed

Businesses often attract new customers through personal recommendations or online advertising.

A well-designed website plays a pivotal role in the latter, as it can instantly impress potential customers and significantly increase their likelihood of contacting your business.

An overly basic website that doesn’t offer much information will likely put off customers. Also, if the content marketing is not high quality then the business will never get on page one of Google.

When a customer lands on a well-designed website that showcases your business’s capabilities, it can significantly enhance your chances of acquiring new customers. However, companies often opt for super cheap web design services, leading to a poorly designed websites with slow loading times and unengaging content and means they cant rank well in Google’s organic results.

It’s important to note that paying a high price for a website does not guarantee quality neither. However, on the flip side, choosing a web designer solely based on their low prices can lead to subpar results.

Consider this: how much time can a web designer can spend designing a website, if the designer is offering super cheap prices to design the website? Therefore, you might end up with a very basic website.

Where will your customers be coming from?

When a new business is launched, the business will often have written a detailed business plan.

Part of this business plan will detail how it plans to market itself. Often, at the core of this will be what the company plans on spending on digital advertising. Therefore, a website often isn’t like purchasing office furniture, where the quality of the desk, chairs, or the canteen table doesn’t really matter to the running of the business, as long as it all works, right?

However, a website is different; sometimes, it can mean the difference between the business thriving or possibly even the failure of the business, if the company is solely reliant on their website to generate income.

If a website doesn’t have a good design, Google’s algorithms will quickly notice that the bounce rate is high. Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave a website without visiting another page. A high bounce rate, which can be caused by factors such as slow loading times, spammy content marketing, or poor web design, this can all negatively impact your SEO ranking.

As soon as Google notices that the bounce rate is high for a sustained period, it’s likely that Google will start to move that business down Google’s organic ranks.

And therefore, this is why you need to have a website designed that offers the following:

– Well designed, looks impressive, will make the right initial impression with your customers
– Has a low bounce rate
– Has high-quality content marketing, which follows the advice of Google E-EAT
– Has a good layout, where each distinct service/product has its page
– Has good on-page SEO
– Has good off-page SEO
– Is very quick- the web design company are using a website hosting company that offers fast hosting
– A well-designed mobile version of the website has to be designed

And the list goes on and on.
So, our motto here at this web design business is simple: often, if you pay cheap, you end up paying twice.

Be helpful

What’s crucial, especially since Google’s Helpful Content update and Google E-EAT, is that the information on your company website helps your customers.

This can be achieved in many different ways. It could be something as simple as a well-written product description, a blog post that answers common customer questions, or a video tutorial demonstrating the benefits of owning a product. It could, therefore, be YouTube videos with a company employee explaining the benefits of owning that product or a series of FAQ-style answers on a page.

When you offer, helpful, and well-written advice, you find that the bounce rate within Google Analytics can decrease, the time spent on the site can increase, and therefore its more likely your business will obtain more quality backlinks.

Now, if you do get quality backlinks, let’s say from a reputable source like the BBC, these can quite supercharge your business’s SEO and get your company can get ranked higher on Google. Quality backlinks are links from other websites that point to your site. When reputable sites link to your site, it signals to search engines that your site is trustworthy and authoritative, which can boost your SEO.

It has to be fast
The website needs to be fast, this is important consideration when designing a website, whether for a plumbing business that may only employ a handful of people or you run a multi-national brand with thousands of employees. There are many ways to improve the speed of your company website; one is to obtain an AMP or accelerated mobile page, but you may not want this.

One of the best ways to improve the speed of your company website is to choose fast and high quality website hosting simply.

Fast hosting is normally more expensive, yet how fast your website is an important factor when deciding how good your companies SEO is.

Pick a web design business that has created websites for companies in the same business sector.

Now, you might have a direct competitor; where you like there website design

Yet, at the bottom of that website, there will typically be a link to the web design company’s website in the footer.

So, it’s worth calling that web design company and explaining that you want a bespoke website built.

That web design company may well be better able to understand your business sector because they have already built a website for a direct competitor of yours.

Responsive websites
We think that the upward trend of more and more people buying services and products from their mobile phones will only continue and increase as smartphones have become so much more convenient for purchasing items form. Therefore, whichever web design agency you hire, ensure that the price that they quote for the web design, is a price to make the website “responsive”.

This definitely needs to be included within the web design quote. Also, monitor the mobile and desktop version bounce rate, if it’s very high, then do make design improvements to try and lower that bounce rate.

Homepage design

It’s imperative that your construction website instantly communicates exactly what size construction projects you take on. A good way of doing this is having an auto loading video on the homepage, which shows the typical type of buildings that you build. Whether that be a single house, or a multi storey block of offices.

Now, often, customers make a snap decision on whether they want to stay on our website. You have seconds therefore to convey what your business can offer.
Simple to use the main menu

Regardless of whether your construction company or another business, it’s imperative that the main menu works flawlessly and simply on your company website.

It should allow shoppers, with minimal amount of clicks, to get the page they want to find.
Therefore, it is crucial that the main menu is well-designed and works brilliantly on a sale iPhone or, let’s say, another Android smartphone.

Keep your construction website updated

When you look at the multinational, really large construction companies, they often regularly release regular news articles onto their website. A good reason for this is to promote their business and the new construction contracts that they have taken on. But at the same time, the business is also improving its organic search engine optimisation.

So, before you agree to a web design quote, consider whether you need help improving your business’s SEO as well. Some web developers don’t offer this service, so you might want to choose a digital marketing agency that does.

Social media icons, Facebook, X and also LinkedIn

Your construction company may have several construction projects that you are working on at this moment in time.
With this in mind, you will want to keep your visitors to your website updated on the latest construction projects that you are undertaking in Wales.

Therefore, the social media icons, such as your Facebook or your businesses LinkedIn account, or X account, should be prominently displayed on the website’s header section.

Therefore, you can readily post on your social media accounts, and visitors your company website can visit your companies social media accounts, and see what work your construction company or demolition company is completing at the moment.

Come to a highly experienced company

We have highly experienced web designers, SEO consultants, and copywriters, web developers and social media managers all under one roof.

With prices starting from just £950 its clear to see why so many businesses in Cardiff hire us to get their website designed.
Come to us, a highly experienced web design agency

So whether you are a plumber or running one of the country’s biggest construction companies, it would be great to speak to you about how you would like your website to be designed.

Introduction

It might be the case that you have just emerged from a relatively long meeting with your web designers.
You’re tired, as for hours, you have been explaining how you would like your new website to look. You’ve gone into every conceivable detail to explain how you would like the website to look, from how the main menu should look to how you want the footer to look.

You walk away from the meeting, feeling that you have accurately conveyed precisely what you want.

You’ve enjoyed a good chat with them, and if you think they can now go away, design a brilliant website for your business, and it will look a million dollars in, say, a month.

And this should mean you end up with a web design you are obsessed with.
However, suppose the website is not carefully planned, you haven’t had regular meetings with your web designers, wireframes haven’t been created, and design suggestions haven’t been sent to your e-mail.

In that case, the web designers can create a design they think the client will like, but when they see it, there may well be a look of massive disappointment. So, to avoid this, its important to clearly plan how you would like your new website to look.

Have a detailed plan

This is why it’s essential to have a detailed plan, setting out how many pages are needed, you need to work out who will be writing the all the text, and the layout of the pages. Therefore, carefully planning how your website looks removes a lot of ambiguity. For example, by using wireframes you can gain a good idea of the page layout regarding pictures and text.

Food for thought

During a meeting, often scribbling down pieces of paper, how you want the website to look is not going to work. For example, a company director might scribble down an A4 piece of paper as they want the page laid out.

However, it can sometimes be much better for the business to say what aspects of the competitor’s website they like and how they may want a similar design for their own business. Of course, we are not talking about copying a competitors website, no, no no.
Instead what we mean is taking design inspiration.

Therefore, the client might step forward and say I like how the video also loads on the homepage of one competitors site, I want a video showing a walk through of my offices on my website.

I like how the main menu works on this competitor’s website, I like the page layout on this particular competitor’s website. The web developer can then start to gain a good understanding of the design you want built for your company.

This provides a much clearer understanding of what the client wants and how they want the website designed. Therefore, web developers can get straight into designing wireframes for you.

The problem with openly discussing how you would like the website to look in a meeting is that it is ambiguous. What the client wants could be misinterpreted, so the final design may not be satisfactory.

So, we found an excellent way to start or kick-off the web design process to stipulate exactly how you want your website designed. Perhaps a screenshot of certain aspects of a competitor’s website will give your web developers a good idea of how you would like your new website designed.

We are Cardiff web designers who have designed countless websites for Welsh businesses. Because of this, we always ask, which competitors’ websites do you like? What do you like about the web design? What unique aspects do you want added to the design.

Then you get a combination of the functionality you like, such as well-designed main menu, or a footer design you like. Then we can bring to the design the aspects you like, such as nice colour green used across the website, or a nice font, or lets say a nice page layout, showing your friendly staff across the website.

Think about colours you want used when designing your company website.

Perhaps you have seen a shade of colour you like on a particular soft drink can, or within a glossy magazine, or on a competitor’s website. Screenshot a picture of their colour or take a photo on your i-phone and bring it to your web designers so they can match it when designing your website.

Ask for updates

During the web design process, your web designer should be in to send you links to see the part-built website. What’s great about this is that the web design process does not need to be complete; and you can say throughout the design stages which changes you want made.
It’s worth asking web designers for say weekly updates.

Testing

It’s essential before the website is set live that it has a lot of testing to make sure that every aspect works as you would expect.
Therefore, every button must be pressed, internal links clicked, and everything checked to ensure the website works correctly on smartphones and different operating smartphones. The website must therefore work perfectly on desktops and laptops. Therefore, checking the website on various browsers is essential to ensure it works correctly and as expected.

Quality

The final point is that investing in a high-quality website is essential. Don’t go out shopping for a cheap web design company, as the website that you get might be too basic.

When purchasing a website for your business, you don’t want to aim to save money on it. A well-designed website is often crucial to the company’s success, so it’s worth paying more for quality.

That’s why so many Welsh companies come to W&P to get a website designed because we design quality websites here in Wales.
Sure, some companies offer cheap website prices, but they might well be too basic and built in an absolute rush: the website may have little text, a bad design, and looks terrible. This can mean that you often need to repurchase and have a website redesigned in a short period of time. So why pay to have a website designed, and then have to have redesigned because it looks, well, a bit rubbish.

Therefore, if you would like quality website designed, and often we can build most websites in less than 4 weeks, then do talk to our Cardiff web designers today.

Introduction

So, let’s say the bank has just approved your business loan, and you’re well over the moon. Are you ready to plough all that dough into getting a brand-new website designed for your business? We think you should hold your horses for just one second.

It’s a common pitfall for businesses to overspend on high-end website designs, and you might be wondering, why would a web design agency discourage this? The answer lies in the potential for success that strategic budget allocation can bring. This approach empowers you to make the most of your resources, setting your business on a path to prosperity and a brighter future.

Well, we are not. But also, it’s crucial to consider the long haul and short haul, and we shall explain what we mean by that in just a second. This thoughtful approach can guide your decision-making and ensure your marketing efforts align with your business goals.

Don’t spend all your dough on just one form of advertising

Many businesses, especially start-ups, think getting a well-designed website is all they need to do to get your customers flocking into your business.

However, it’s more complicated than that. When you have a brand-new website designed, Google’s algorithms may initially place your business on say page 10 of Google. This is where the importance of search engine optimization comes in. Without it, your potential customers might not find you, and your business could be left in the shadows.

The phones will be growing dust and cobwebs, and the sales staff will be filing their nails; bored is not the word.
So, you have to keep some, well, a lot of your marketing budget back for how you plan on promoting your company website.

There’s search engine optimisation, for example, yet this is a slow process, so don’t expect results any time soon. It can often take well over six months to get a company onto page one of Google’s organic results. But remember, good things come to those who wait, and the results will be worth it.

So, if you are going to invest in SEO services, make sure you keep a decent amount of your marketing budget back. Businesses often make the mistake of thinking their SEO agency will get them onto page one in a jiffy—however, it can take a very long time.

This means you do need to budget for that long period where the SEO company is moving the business from, say, page 10 of Google to page 1, as this may take many, many months of hard work.

Google Adwords

Businesses like the fact that they can specify which keywords they want to appear on Google, set a monthly budget, and instantly have their business appear on Google.

However, this, of course, does not come for free; you do have to “pay-per-click”- and if you operate in a very competitive business sector, let’s say you run a dental practice, you’re a solicitor, or let’s say you’re a hairdresser in a large city, well often the cost per click costs more. The reason is that more businesses will also want to appear there, so you usually have to pay more per click if more businesses want to promote their companies simultaneously.

Social media advertising

Sure, you can set up a free page on Facebook, say, and we recommend that you do this. It doesn’t take long, and you can mention your business’s NAP information, which can help improve your company’s local SEO.

However, to promote a post or product your business is selling, you may want to “boast your ad”—now, you often have to set a budget to do this.

So, again, this is why, right at the start of this article, we said don’t splash all your marketing budget on just getting a website designed. You often have to promote that website via search engine optimisation, PPC (Google Adwords), social media marketing, or a combination. Therefore, you usually need a budget for designing a new company website and then a budget for promoting your business.

All of these services are under one roof.

There’s a reason so many businesses choose W&P Web Design: We have brilliant web designers, SEO consultants, and people who can manage your business’s social media. With web design prices starting from £950.00, it’s clear why so many businesses come to us to get a quality, well-designed website built.

Come to the web design experts in Cardiff.

Talk to W&P web design today.

Our 7-page brochure websites start from £950.00

Our e-commerce websites start from £1950.00

Call us today, and we can offer a quote if you would also like to hire us to improve your business SEO.

Introduction

As all builders, demolition companies and tradespeople know, it’s fiercely competitive for work. For example, if somebody wants something as simple as a property single-storey extension added to their home, they may go out and get many quotes.

For builders, demolition companies, and tradespeople, it’s not just about surviving in a fiercely competitive market but thriving. A well-designed website is a powerful tool that cannot only set you apart from the competition but also showcase your business’s unique strengths, instilling confidence in potential clients and making you proud of your business.

Therefore, This article is aimed at builders, construction companies and demolition companies to give some food for thought to what you need to think about when hiring a local web designer to design a new website for your business.

Must be mobile-ready / well-designed responsive website

When looking for local builders or tradespeople, people may sit on their sofas looking for a local company. However, it’s crucial to note that they will most likely be using their smartphone or Apple tablet to find a local business. This underscores the immediate necessity of having a mobile-ready website, making it a top priority for your business.

When customers shop for a local building company, the website must be fast, easy to use, and answer all the questions they are likely to have about having a loft conversion built.

When customers shop for a local building company, the website must be fast, easy to use, and answer all the questions they are likely to have about having a loft conversion built. This is where the importance of a responsive and well-built website comes into play. It’s not just about having an online presence, but about offering a superior user experience that reassures your potential clients and sets you apart from the competition. So, what often separates the cheap websites, built for £500.00, from the better quality websites is that sometimes the web designers can spend more time improving the website’s U.X. so that the website offers more quality information, more helpful information, which may translate to the company making an increased amount of sales.

Each service should have its own page.

This is critical if your business wants to improve its search engine optimisation (SEO) later. SEO is not just a buzzword but a crucial element that can significantly impact your online visibility and, consequently, your business’s success. Some web designers may offer super low prices to design a one-page website, yet we wouldn’t recommend one for a construction or demolition business, and we shall now explain why that is so.

A construction company often offers various services, such as building a loft conversion, property extensions, or a brand-new house.

Therefore, it is essential that the web designers you hire set out each service on its page. This helps us to improve the business’s search engine optimisation, as Googlebot can crawl and index each page, and because each service has its very own page, the H1-H6 tags, the meta title, meta description, alt text, and much more can all be optimised for each distinct service that your business offers. So, for example, a whole page can optimised for, say, “loft conversions”, “roof replacement”, or, let’s say “, property extensions”.

Well designed

Often, a shopper looking for, say, a demolition business or a construction company to hire will decide in a matter of a few seconds whether they wish to stay on that website or leave. Often, this comes down to the design of the website. A poorly designed website that’s just very hard to use or a website that looks dated or overly basic, well, these are the websites that have sky-high bounce rates, which is very bad for the business’s search engine optimisation, as Google’s algorithms will detect that the bounce rates are very high. The company may move down Google’s SERPs.

Content marketing

We highly recommend picking a web design agency in Cardiff that can also offer copywriting services. Whether you want the text written for the website when it’s initially designed or perhaps you want to partner with the web design company for their assistance in writing monthly blog posts, hiring web designers with copywriters in-house is crucial.

Writing text, say 2,000-word blog posts, is massively time-consuming. Therefore, you need to hire web developers with in-house copywriters who can help write evergreen content marketing, blog posts, or product descriptions.

Remember that since the Google E-EAT updates, it’s now more important than ever to write high-quality, 100% original content marketing that shouldn’t be copied and pasted from another website.

The content marketing, therefore, should be:

-100% Original

– Well written

– Written by an expert

– The author should understand Google E-EAT

How we can help:

Construction web design

If your business operates in the construction sector, we can design a well-designed website. Prices for a brochure website start from £950.00. Welsh web designers designed and built all our websites in Wales.

Why not call us today?

We can design a brand-new website for any business if you would like a new brochure website for your construction business.

We have worked with many construction businesses, plus demolition companies. Our clients like how simple we make the process; we can design the website, write all of the content marketing, and work with the business continuously to improve their search engine optimisation (SEO).

If you run a construction company here in Wales and need a new website, why not call today?