Web Design and SEO Thoughts and IdeasHelp us make this a place for exchanging unbiased thoughts and ideas.

This has to be one of the most frustrating things going – designing and perfecting html forms. How many people have ended up with some less than attractive looking thing because they had to accept they just couldn’t do anything with it. And it’s not even the grand things like hiding emails to avoid spamming or creating captchas. No it’s getting space between those blasted text boxes!

Why am I talking about this now? Well because I had cause to create some whitespace between the rows of a form the other day and I wanted to see if there were any new developments on form designing. I searched for ages to find something that talked specifically about increasing or decreasing the space around table cells in a html web form.

It was painfully sparse and I spent a good half an hour looking. So I thought I’d help a few of you out. Beware, this is a tad on the complex side!

Formatting the space around cells in a html form table.

If you want to increase the amount of space between cells in your html form table, hover your cursor over the lines of the cell you want to increase and just drag it downward. Voila! You have now successfully added space in between the upper text box and lower text box.

Sometimes the simplest of things can seem so annoyingly difficult, yet its often because we overlook the most obvious solution.

Ok, so this solution assumes that all you want to do is make space around an already sized form element. However, when you want to resize the actual width or height of the text box or input element, that’s a different kettle of fish. Its still simple enough but its worth a post on it’s own.

If you need to know just mail me and I’ll create one for you.

Hi folks,

I’m writing this from my phone so apologies if make a few spelling mistikes…………ah, gotcha! Ok, so that kept me interested for all of 5 seconds!

So, my title, what does it mean? Well, simply put it means there are too many web designers out there designing for their own gratification. Strutting their stuff, showing off their technical brilliance, pluffing their feathers up. (ok, so pluffing isn’t a word, who cares, it sounds like it should be)

I’ve seen more than a few websites where I’ve asked myself the question; “why would you design it that way”? The reason I ask this question is because once again I’m looking at a site that has been over-engineered.

An example: a client has a very small brochure website. It’s doesn’t change much, has a basic set of pages to convey what the company does. It has the usual navigation and that’s about it.

The designer who created this site was someone who wanted to make it so super efficient that he wrote everything in php files. Now that’s not necessarily a crime or justification for going and telling him he’s a donkey’s rear end (apologies to the donkey owners).

Php is a great and wonderful coding method, if it’s done with the right aim in mind.

Take me example, the designer had engineered the site so that it was easy to make a change to something that is standard on every page. The main common element is the navigation menu. Great idea after all, you want to be able to amend it once and update all pages together.

However, this particular web design specialist wasn’t that up on search engine optimization (seo) and therefore made all the meta-tags the same on every page, a big big no no.

This is only a small snippet of the glaring mistakes made by this chap in designing the website. But, to him, it made complete sense in order to reduce the amount of modification for elements that were standard across all pages. Except meta-tags shouldn’t be standard across all pages.

The website designer in question is probably very technically capable. However, if you rely on internet traffic for revenue then this approach could cost you dearly.

We have always been and will continue to remain a rounded approach company. “What does that mean”? Well, it means we need to understand all aspects of your business from how important it is to be found online through searching, how often you plan to update your website content, do you intend to expand your site.

These and many more questions help a designer understand what type of coding, programming and platform to use in order to best fit your needs. This type of investigation will tell them what is ok to build into your site (video intro) and what isn’t (flash movies), again depending on your needs.

An over-engineered site can cost you a lot more than you bargained for when it comes time to modify parts of your site.

Flashy functionality won’t always result in a better customer experience and if you rely on google might do you more harm than good.

If you are thinking of getting a website created and are unsure what might be the best approach for you, drop us an e-mail and we’ll help you. We won’t do a hard sell on you, just give you plain ole fashioned good advice. We might ask you though to plug us to your friends or sing our praises on your facebook profile!

Honestly, I don’t want to keep fixing over-designed websites just because some ego driven designer got the go-ahead from a less than expert customer. What I want to do though is help you prepare the groundwork properly so you get a site that not only looks great but it delivers on your expectations.

Tip of the day: Hire a business consultant and ask them to build you a website and see the difference in the approach and results.

Till next time

Andy H

Welcome to the first step in learning search engine optimization (SEO)  for yourself.

If you are reading this article then you are likely to be someone who:

• Already has a website
• Has the time to invest in optimizing your website
• Isn’t earning enough to afford professional seo….yet!

Ok so, my name is Andy Hughes and I’ve been doing SEO in one fashion or another for around 5 years, which by my reckoning and the speed at which things change, makes me a veteran.  That make’s me feel old and I’m not, well not that old anyway! Still, I have spent a lot of time and invested a lot of sweat, tears, mistakes and more tears to learn what I know about Search Engine Optimization SEO and I’m still learning.

I have been building and running websites since 1995 when I bought my first modern home pc and got hooked on surfing and messing about with web design programmes. Back then it was very basic and Microsoft was really good. Nowadays I would urge everyone to avoid MS Frontpage! In my early days I was mostly just interested in putting something on the internet and I didn’t really care whether it appeared in a search engine. Basically because there weren’t really any search engines back then like we have today.

Over the years programmes became more sophisticated and intuitive and I continued to develop my knowledge but largely as a hobbyist. It wasn’t until I set up my own business consultancy, and needed a website that performed, did I really start to pay attention to search engines and rankings and traffic. So I built my company website, started to use keywords in the right places, put lots of content on the site and submitted it to search engines. Sure enough I was soon starting to see my site rising up through the rankings.

There are lots of people who would tell you that everything has changed with search engines in the last few years and SEO is now a trade in itself. This is a half truth, yes search engines have become more sophisticated and yes there are lots of SEO companies now in existence. The fundamentals of optimizing a website though hasn’t changed hugely. It’s the competitiveness that has changed drastically. More companies and individuals are now paying attention to SEO and investing time and money on it. Therefore, what was once relatively easy to get a ranking for is now taking a lot more effort and perseverance.

The last and probably most interesting thing to note about search engine optimization is that there is no formal qualification as such for it. Sure there are people offering certificates for demonstrating your knowledge, but unless they are offered by the best in the industry, many of them are not worth the paper they are written on (if you get a written copy!). The good thing about this lack of qualification is that it means you don’t have to train to be good enough, you can just do it for yourself, hence the reason your’re reading this.

And so to begin.

How Important Is SEO?
Well, imagine you are a retailer sat at home in your front room with boxes of christmas socks piled all around you. You busy away counting your stock, checking the packaging and eyeing over your brochures. Every so often you look over at the phone………..but nothing. No calls, no bring bringing, no messages, no nothing. The phone is silent. Why? Because nobody knows you exist! Your potential customers can’t see you sat there, can’t see your boxes of fine products and to all intents and purposes you might just as well not exist. You’ve spent money on stocks and brochures with nothing to show for it. Now some may just give up, in fact many probably have. I know I’ve spoken to a few who weren’t far off.

This little example illustrates exactly why Search Engine Optimization is so important (no apologies for the US spelling of Optimization by the way, I’ll explain in a later article) and why you can’t afford not to do it, even if you are poor and broke like I’ve been!

You see, the search engine is your potential high street. Page One Of Google is the main street with all the really big names on it and the big spenders. Page two is a little side street with some interesting shops, who’d love to be on the main street but can’t afford it. Page three is a little back street farther from the centre of town which has some interesting shops that you can’t quite remember. Once you get past page three you might as well sit in your front room and try to sell your wares from there because you’ve got as good a chance at that point!

If you’re going to sell online and you want to be successful you’ve got to grasp SEO by the scruff of the neck and make it work for you. There is no two ways about it!

Consider this:

• Google dominates the search engine market with around 80% of daily searches.
• Most people won’t look past page two.
• A large proportion of people don’t look past page one.
• Around 70% of customers will buy from one of the top 5 websites on page one.
• Your website traffic will rise exponentially when you make the shift from page two to page one.
• Being on page one doesn’t guarantee sales, great content, great products and a strong sales message do.

So, what is SEO and What is it not?
Well let’s start with what it’s not and get that out of the way.

• It’s not a quick fix.
• It’s not going to go away.
• It’s not about stuffing your keywords into your page over and over and over again.
• It’s not some secret art or magic that is only beholden to a special few gurus.
• It’s not just a case of paying for a thousand links and hoping.

There are many companies out there offering to optimize your site and who aren’t very good at it. However, as your knowledge may be limited, they successfully manage to dupe many people into thinking they can change your fortunes. The reality is, often they take your money, tinker about and fail to show much in return.

I learnt a valuable lesson a long time ago. Remember I told you I built my own company website when I first set up my company? Well, a couple of years in I decided it needed a face lift but I didn’t have the time and so I employed the services of a guy to do it for me. His proposal was good, he created some good design templates for me to get a feel for his ability. I was sold and so I signed and off he went. The website I got back was great looking and I was much happier with the overall look and feel of the site. That was until it got uploaded!

Over a matter of a week I could see the traffic had dropped dramatically. I looked for it in the search rankings, nowhere! What was going on? I started looking behind the design into the code and found that there were major flaws in all sorts of areas. No keywords; no meta descriptions; all the page titles were the same; all of the image alt tags had “nav” written in them (don’t worry if some of what I’m saying doesn’t mean anything, it’ll become clear later!). I did a little test and typed in the keyword I wanted to be ranked for and followed it with “nav” and sure enough I popped up at number one! (image alt tags are important, but we’ll talk more about that in later sessions).

This web designer had made a monumental error. He’d approached my website from a design perspective and not from a business perspective. He’d applied minimal optimization. He’d missed all sorts of best practice standards that should be factored into any web design. And he was qualified. And he had a healthy client list. Frightening! Even I got tricked, how dumb do I feel!

So clearly SEO is not to be taken lightly if you depend on the internet for your income.

What is SEO then?

• It’s about creating easy to read, relevant site content.
• It’s about creating just enough content to allow you to say what you need using your keyphrases or keywords.
• It’s about making a well structured site with good layout.
• It’s about presenting a solid theme for your site that is “on topic” and relevant.
• It’s about giving other websites reasons to want to be linked to you.
• It’s about regularly updating content on your site to keep it fresh and appealing.
• It’s about helping the search engines to see and index your site as easily as possible.

I will introduce you to a couple of terms known as “black hat” and “white hat” SEO. These terms represent the dark side and the good side of SEO. Stay away from anything which is Black Hat tactics, it’ll get you banned! White Hat is the good, honest, reliable method incorporating all of the list above but in an ethical way. You can read more on the internet about Black Hat methods if you choose, however, if you stick to what we cover in these sessions you won’t go far wrong.

It’s a simple case of walking on the right side of the fence. If you hop over to the dark side, expect Google to ban you or at least send you hurtling down the rankings for a good while.

Professional SEO or DIY?
A good question, should I pay for a professional or do it myself? Well, my honest answer will always be to pay for a professional (one you’ve checked out properly) because they are experts and spend all day, every day doing SEO. However, as is often the case, client’s can’t afford the kind of outlay needed to invest in this kind of support. They are forced to either ignore it or do it themselves.

If you’re not really a techy and don’t understand website design and search engines then this can feel like quite a daunting prospect. But it’s like anything, with a little knowledge and some practice you begin to understand and it becomes easier. Professional SEO companies will have all manor of software, systems and processes designed to make SEO quicker, better managed and more reliable but that’s because they are working for a number of client’s and need to create efficiency. Doing DIY SEO, it’s a case of how much time and how well you organize yourself.  As an immediate starting point you can look up most search engine optimisation companies and get an SEO Report done on your website. Many of them provide a basic free report which will highlight where you’re website is not as well optimised as it should be.  These are useful as a starting platform in beginning your optimzation.

This series of articles will be about helping you to plan, do and review your SEO efforts in the right way to give the best chance of succeeding.

In the next session we will get into looking at arguably the most important element of SEO, “Keywords”. I will help you identify lists of keywords and work out which ones are the right one’s to use for your site. This session will include:

• How to identify lots of keywords
• How to rank your keywords
• How to choose the most effective ones
• How to check your rank for your keywords
• Tools for keyword identification

That’s all for this session.

Enjoy the next one

Andy Hughes

PS. We are now offering SEO Coaching, which is designed as a mix of telephone and web conference sessions with me where you’ll learn practically how to apply SEO principles.

 
I had an interesting call from a lady the other day asking to speak to David something or other from Google.  I politely explained that we weren’t in fact Google, but merely a clever little web design and seo company that prayed on people looking to contact Google!!  Ok so that’s a little bit elaborate!

Anyway, this lady asked me if I knew how to contact Google and so I asked her what she was interested in talking to Google about and so the story began.

This lady has two young children, lives in the Yorkshire Dales with her husband who repairs and services Agas as far as I can tell.  She decided some time ago to set up a website selling lighting, kitchens, bathrooms etc online.  She paid a web design company a reasonable sum of money to design a website and optimize it for the search engines.  Five years later, she now has 6 or 7 domains, one rather confusingly constructed website that ranks nowhere significant in the search engines.  The web design company she is using seem content to keep asking her for more money and providing a poor service.  In the five years she’s been online you could count the number of enquiries she’s had on one hand………….with three fingers chopped off!!

As our conversation unfolded I could tell that she was desperate to find out why her website was doing so poorly and why there were no enquiries.

Over the phone I started to look at her website with her and soon discovered a myriad of issues that were impacting on not only the site’s ability to rank effectively but also confusing the selling message to potential customers.  By the end of our conversation I was being asked to put together a proposal to sort the problems out. The only difficulty with that is the fact that I need to charge a fee and she has very little money left to invest.  Not to mention the fact that she’s also apprehensive about yet another web company.

The great news for her is that I’ll find a way to make it work for her and get her back on the right track.  I just need to find my ole top hat and a white rabbit from somewhere!

This conversation is not the first I’ve had of this kind and it got me thinking about why it happens and what I can do about it. So I thought I’d do a tips and tools for choosing a good web company, so here goes:

• Any good web designer will be designing web sites following the W3C standards of design. Simple test: select a website from their portfolio, right click anywhere to the side of the main page. Somewhere down the list, near the bottom, you should see something listed as “view source” or “view page source”.  Click on it and it’ll open a window full of wierd programming language stuff.  At the top of the page, the first thing you should see is a Document Type.

Example:

“>”-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1 strict.dtd
 
This piece of code gives you a very small sign that the design company works to proper standards.  This is no guarantee on its own, but it’s one of a list of ingredients that help to determine the quality of the company

• Ask them if they use tables or frames in their designs.  Current thinking is that websites should be tabless in design. That’s not to say that tables are evil! But a good web designer will keep the use of tables to a minimum because they are not as easy for Google to index.
• Check their own website to see if all the links and functionality works as it should.  For example: gallery of designs that doesn’t function properly, links to sites they’ve designed that no longer work.  All of these are signs that the company doesn’t keep it’s own website up to date.  For a web design company, their own website should be their greatest marketing tool.
• Are they transparent with information?  I have had a number of clients who say their existing provider tells them that their website is receiving so many hundreds of visitors a month but yet there are no sales.  Ask them to provide evidence of the claims on a report other than their own in-house one.  No web or seo consultancy worth their salt should worry about sharing information if it’s genuine.  Google analytics is a great tracking tool for your website.  It’s free and takes a short amount of time to set up for a medium sized website.  You should be given access to this by your web design agency……after all, it’s your business information!
• If you’re looking for web design services, select 2-3 previous clients from their portfolio, ring them and ask them what the experience was like and if they would use them again.  For seo services, do the same but always ask what the improvements have been like since the agency started providing seo for the client.
• Ask to see their qualifications. For some of the older individuals this may be less easy to come by given the time period. However, they should still be able to show you some qualifications or accreditations even if it’s a certificate saying they are Google AdWords certified or W3 certified.
• Do they really take the time to understand your business, understand your competitive environment and your marketplace?  Or, do they just sit there and say “yes we can do that” and “yes that’s no problem”.  A sure sign that you’re hiring a designer rather than a consultant.  A good web design and seo consultancy will approach your design from a business perspective first. I.e. what’s are you trying to sell, who to, who do you see as your competition, how competitive is your idea.  All of these questions are getting to the heart of understanding what needs to be achieved.  Only then can you begin to suggest appropriate routes for design.
• Get quotes from different companies, even if you really like the first company you speak to.  A great salesperson can make you think your getting genuine goods and service yet rob you blind.  A design or SEO company’s quote should be somewhere around market rate.  If there is a wide variance in prices, question it, ask why they are either so much more expensive or cheaper.

The above is just a snippet of things to consider in finding the right sort of web company, but if you work on the above you’ll definitely be heading in the right direction.  Alternatively, if you are already using a web company and want to know if they are up to the job, give us a call and we’ll vet them for you!  Yes I mean it, we want the best for you whether it’s with us or someone else.

Have a great day!

This was a situation we had with a client recently.  They’ve been wanting to move their website from their current web host to a new one.  We spent some time advising them on which hosting provider and package would suit their needs.

Once we found a suitable one we offered them the choice of setting up the webhost for them or they could set it up themselves if they felt confident.  Needless to say they did it themselves and a few days later we have an e-mail informing us of the change of hosting and the details required to access the new server.

We left it a couple of days to allow the change to take effect and then set up our access to the clients web space.  “Oops this link appears to be broken” said Google.  So we waited another day and then tried it again, same thing happened and then again for the next couple of days.  At this point warning signals are going off in my head, “they haven’t changed the content over”.  I ring the client and explain the situation to which they reply, “we were told it would automatically show up once the change had occured”.

First Lesson: If you change your host from one company to another, your just changing the place your website name (domain name) looks at when it’s trying to load your website into the browser.  In simple terms, your website address (www.mydomain.co.uk) will be pointed to a server, the server then links your domain name to your website files on the server.  If there aren’t any files there, the domain won’t have anything to point to.

So I checked with the new web host to see if there was any truth to what the client was saying and sure enough, there wasn’t.  The reality was, they had paid for space on the new web host’s server and told the old web host to point their domain to this new server, only there was no content on the new server.  Why? Because they hadn’t loaded any!  To top it off, the old web host had deleted all the files.  To doubly top it off the client had failed to renew their website domain name which was now suspended and at risk of being released back into the wild!

Fortunately, being of sound body and mind I always make back ups of a clients site whenever I do any work on it.

Second Lesson: Always take an updated backup anytime you make any alterations to your website.  Never never ever rely on the security of your webhost to protect your website.  Make a backup on a re-writable disk and then every so often start another disk so that if one disk ever fails, you have another.  It may not be as recent a backup but it’s better than none at all.

So once I’d discovered quite what the state of the situation was, I got the client’s login details, went into their account, renewed the domain name which meant that there was now a holding page from the new host when you typed in the website URL (domain name).  With a live domain, I was now able to access the control panel for the new hosting and begin uploading the backup onto the server.  7 hours later (it’s a big site!), the website is uploaded, live and working perfectly again.  A bit of a downside is that in the time it took to understand the problem (missing website), work out the solution and then get the site up and running again, Google had been and indexed the site.  Now, if the site is not even there, Google will think it’s a non-existent site and drop it down the rankings.  Basically because the links on the site don’t point anywhere.

Third Lesson:  Never have broken links on your pages, Google doesn’t like it and will penalise you if you have “broken links” (links that don’t point to something that Google can find).  Also, if you do have to take your site down for a short time, plan to do it the day after you know that Google has just visited.  If you have a small or medium sized business chances are Google won’t index it for another couple of weeks.

Now I have to go and repair some of the search engine optimisation (seo) work I’d done before to rescue some of the search places back from the competition.

Fourth Lesson:  If your website is an important contributor to your income, check that you’ve got all your Is dotted and your Ts crossed before you make such and important change.  Plan for all the key eventualities, seek expert advice on what to consider in such changes.

Summary

1. Domain names (website name) are bought through a registrar.  They are separate to a web host and web site files, although many we hosts also offer a service for you to buy domain names.
2. Web hosting is just space on a server, it still needs to be populated with website files in order for anything to appear in a browser.
3. When changing web hosts, it’s essential to ensure you upload your website from the old host to the new one, otherwise when your domain name begins to point to your new host there won’t be any files on the server to find.
4. Always make a regular back up of your website.  Not just because you might need to change hosts, but also because web servers are not perfect and there are chances (slim as they are) that your site could be corrupted or deleted accidently.
5. Check each and every link that’s meant to point to somewhere on your site or external to your site.  It’ll potentially damage your rankings if Google can’t find the file on the other end of a link.
6. Finally, plan, speak to people, try to identify all the different aspects and impacts that will come from making a change to your website, before you do it.

If in doubt, call us and we’ll try and help guide you through.