Introduction

So, we know the score. Everyone likes a good deal. After all, why pay more for something if you can get it for less?

Well, we fully understand that fact.

However, there are some things you can save a few quid on- such as not buying that designer-label shirt.

That kind of decision is not going to affect your business, yet if you opt for a super cheap website that’s slow and doesn’t advertise your business in the best possible way, well, this happens:

– Super high bounce rates (this will damage your business SEO)
– Not generate sales
– Might be slow, therefore offers poor U.X

First impressions
Whether they’re buying a mountain bike or a set of ski gloves, shoppers are spoilt for choice in terms of the number of online retailers they can choose from.

This is good for the consumer, yet for a business, it means that they must have a well-designed website with good SEO; that is, good search engine optimisation offers a good U.X and is well-designed.

So, can a cheap website achieve this?
Probably not.

When a website costs, say, £500 or less, how much time can a web designer and developer realistically spend on it?

Well, the answer is often not that long at all.
The result is often an overly essential website that probably doesn’t sell your business.

A mobile-friendly website is essential.

Your company website must be responsive. Whether you run a solicitor’s practice or a trendy hairdressing saloon in Cardiff Bay, you will need the website to be mobile-ready and responsive. So, whichever web design agency you hire, when you obtain your quote breakdown, ensure that the website is responsive.

Your business will, therefore, need to have a company that is:

– Responsive
– Well designed and has a low bounce rate on smartphones and tablets
– Should be a piece of cake for the shopper to use

Content marketing

For example, writing 3,000 words for a new website can take time.

So, when you obtain quotes for your new website, ask whether that includes copywriting services.

Well-written text is essential to promoting your business’s products and services and to helping keep shoppers on your company website for a long time, improving dwell time.

When you talk to any good and established web design agency, they will tell you that a good website needs high-quality content marketing. This should be written in a white-hat way, and the author should know about Google E-EAT.

Good quality content marketing should have the following

– Be unique
– Written by an expert
– Have a very high Google E-EAT score

The website could have high ongoing costs.

So, many web designers and web design agencies sometimes offer super low prices to design a new company website.

Yet, the ongoing costs, such as the monthly hosting costs, can sometimes be quite expensive.

For example, you might have a website designed for just £700.00, but if the ongoing hosting is 40+ pounds per month, this is close to £500 a year.

So this is what some web design agencies do: They offer special prices to build a website for businesses, say, in the construction sector. Yet, when you look at the web design contract, you might see that the domain name renewal costs and hosting cost every month can sometimes be quite high.

So, when you choose a website design company like W&P, you will find that we offer very competitive prices for our web design services.
We also offer low prices on our website hosting and domain name renewal costs.

So if you want a want website designed for your business in Cardiff why not give us a ring?

Some company directors may have set up multiple companies in the past. This means that they may have a go-to web designer who knows exactly what they want. The company director also knows which CMS they want and the information that the web design agency will need to get the ball rolling.

However, many companies may never have had a website up and running before. So now, they are on Google looking for “web design Cardiff” and trying to whittle down the list and work out which companies to hire.
Yet, before you pick up that dog and bone—that’s your phone—and start getting talked into a website by a smooth-talking salesperson, we recommend sticking the kettle on.

That’s because you do need to mull over what your business needs and what you need the website to do so that you can tell the website designers exactly what you want. This way, you don’t go through the whole web design process and then go, hang on a minute, I forgot about, say, having a responsive version of the website built.

So planning is essential, but if it’s a 7-page brochure website, you haven’t got to go overboard on planning. You need to think about the following:

– Will your website be taking payments? if you so, you need to think about which e-commerce CMS you need
– Who will be writing the content marketing that’s the text
– Will you hire a photography company, or can the web design agency offer this service?
– Will you require help improving your SEO? If so, does the marketing agency offer this service?
– Which font would you like?

Put yourself in your customer’s shoes; what will they need from your company website?

For example, the website will most likely need to be responsive.

In addition, how are you going to design the product pages so that they offer useful product descriptions?

How do you make the website easy to use for selecting items, such as whether they are in stock, price, size, etc?

All this needs to be thought about from the start, including what functionality you will need, because if not, the web designers normally consider this extra work and add it to the price.

What is the competition doing well?

So, take a look at your competitors. We would never recommend copying your direct competitors.
However, think about this: let’s say you’re about to start a brand new company, a solicitors practice in Cardiff Bay. You will know your main three competitors; they may well be ranked on the 1st page of Google. Have a look at their websites and consider the following:

– How many pages do they have?
– How have they set out their services in terms of pages?
– How much text is added to each page?
– How is the text added to the page?
– What parts of the design are good? For example, is the main menu a piece of cake to use?

What features will your business need?

So, every business owner who comes to us to chat about the new website they want designed often wants something different.

For example, one customer might call us in the morning and want a minimalistic, professional-looking website for an accountancy practice.

Another business owner might call us in the afternoon and be setting up a new insurance company and want bold, bright colours used.

Our customers often want something completely different, so you will need to think about how you want the website designed.

However, with that said, all businesses will want the following, so do make sure that this is included in your web design quote:
– Responsive/mobile-ready website
– Super-fast website, so will need fast hosting
– Good logo design
– Who will be writing the text?

These points are essential to consider when designing a website. However, when you chat with our web designers, they can often recommend the suitable CMS for your business and other functionalities you might need. For example, some businesses might want a company blog section built as well.

Come to an established web design agency.

If you’re opening a new car dealership or perhaps a construction business in Wales and you want to hire an established Welsh web design agency, then do talk to us. We mostly build WordPress websites, yet our company can also offer SEO services and copywriting services. Come to W&P; we have some of the best web designers in Cardiff working for us.

Author: W&P Marketing
Date: 14/11/2024

Many companies are asked whether they want a blog section added when they have a website designed.

As this blog post will inform you, having a blog section can be beneficial to a business in terms of helping to draw in more customers.

However, managing a blog, in terms of keeping up with writing blog posts, can be massively time-consuming, and the blog posts may need updating. For example, if you have added, let’s say, “10 best tents for camping in 2018”,- well if this attracts many organic visitors, you may want to update the blog posts occasionally.

Writing and keeping blog posts up to date can be time-consuming. Yet, a blog can be your business’s opportunity to show off your knowledge and expertise. This is precisely what Google E-EAT advises: It wants a company to show it has real expertise and knowledge about the products or services you are selling.

These websites, which have a high Google E-EAT score, will be the businesses that rank higher on Google’s organic results.

Freshness

As any good SEO business and web design agency will know, it’s essential not to let a website get delayed if you want to improve the business’s organic search engine optimisation (SEO). The website needs to be kept fresh; one way to do this is to add blog posts regularly. For example, you may want to add a social media feed that shows your business’s latest Instagram posts on a page.

The benefits of adding a blog to your company website

SEO and rankings

So, why do businesses spend a lot on creating content marketing every year?

The answer is simple: If done right and the work is high-quality, it can potentially help attract many organic visitors. If the marketing business attracts many organic visitors, the company can turn those visitors into paying customers. So, for example, if you have expert knowledge about a product or service, you can turn this into helpful and engaging blog posts.
Whether it’s about how to change a car’s oil filter or which hair conditioner to buy for split ends, what matters is if the customer finds the work valuable and helpful.

If content marketing offers the following, it can help improve your company’s SEO.

• The work should have:
• High dwell time
• Low bounce rate
• Good CTR from the meta title and meta description

Building backlinks

If you were to ask a top web design agency or an SEO expert, what’s the most challenging part of improving a business’s organic search engine optimisation? They would probably say, “Building backlinks.”

The reason is that backlinks need to come from another website, and the backlinks must have the following attributes if they are to improve your company’s SEO: they are:

• Must be good quality
• Built using white methods
• The websites they come from must be relevant

Now, by writing numerous high-quality blog posts, you can earn backlinks.

So, for example, if you have written an excellent, well-written article that’s high quality, then readers may want to link to you.

So, for example, let’s say you sell oil filters and parts for servicing high-performance cars. If your business writes a series of blog posts saying why your car parts, such as the oil filters, are high quality, this will likely interest many people who own high-performance cars. For example, they may own blogs regarding track day racing, rally cars, and car tuning. These websites may link to your website, meaning that you obtain backlinks.

Gaining leads

Google has released a significant update called the “Google Helpful Content Update.” This means that Google’s algorithms now reward pages and blog posts that offer helpful information.

Also, from a business standpoint, if your business offers helpful advice that helps customers with questions they may have, they are more likely to buy from you.

It could be “Which are the most energy-efficient washing machines in the UK?” or ” Which is the best kitchen blender to buy?” No matter what it is about, if you write helpful advice, customers will likely read it. They are more likely to purchase from you if they find the information useful.

So, what are some of the downsides/drawbacks of owning a blog?

Well, we wouldn’t recommend using A. I do write blog posts. If you want to write high-quality blog posts, you must do the work manually.
A significant downside is the time it takes to write this work. Consider, for example, the top solicitor practices in any significant city in the United Kingdom.

You will see on these solicitor websites that, because the business sector is so competitive, they regularly invest huge time and marketing budgets in writing helpful guides and articles.
If you want good quality work that’s well written and has a high Google E-EAT score, 20+ hours could be spent writing just one long blog post. It might involve a lot of solicitors or a partner in the company. Then, the SEO agency has to do its bit and optimise the work, which costs quite a lot when done right.

So, what’s the downside of having a blog?

We would say the time and expense of writing and creating the work. Some businesses don’t have the time to write, say, 2500 words and then monitor the SEO performance of that work in Google Analytics to monitor the bounce rate, the time on site, and the number of links obtained using an SEO tool such as Moz.

It is half-baked

So, writing blog posts and well-written content marketing needs to be well written. It needs to tick all these boxes:

– Very low bounce rate
– High dwell time
– High Google E-EAT score
– Have many good quality do-follow and no-follow links
– Needs to be written by an expert
– Have good on-page SEO, such as meta titles, meta descriptions, anchor text, etc

The work cannot be half-baked, but that’s exactly what many businesses and even some web designers produce for their clients.
It becomes a bit like a production line. The main competitors publish three blog posts a month, so they feel they need to keep up.

However, this is not the approach to take when creating content marketing. It’s not about quantity or writing blog posts as regularly as possible; it doesn’t work like that.

Quality always pays

It’s, therefore, better to publish quality work than to try and write, say, four blog posts a month that are rubbish and half-baked.
So only publish good quality work.

Have an evident vision of the visitor/shopper you want to attract?

So why are you writing 2,500 words?

What’s the purpose of writing such long blog posts?

That is the question you must ask: what customers do you want to attract?

What are the questions that they most often ask your business?

Then, can you write a perfect answer to that question? If it ranks on the first page of Google, it may attract thousands of organic visitors, and you could potentially convert some of those shoppers into paying customers.
So, don’t just write, say, 700 words of absolute marketing waffle; instead, put yourself in your customer’s shoes and ask yourself:

– What are the questions they most often ask?
– How can you answer that question in the best way possible
– How can you create a piece of content marketing that your shoppers will find helpful?
This is why we always say it’s better to write a perfect piece of content marketing than to try multiple low-quality pieces that will not help your business attract customers.

Google E-EAT.

Have multiple staff member’s input.
You know earlier that we mentioned Google E-EAT. Well, Google now wants the author of any blog posts or pages to show that they are experts on whatever they are writing about.

This is why it is a good idea to have multiple people within your company provide input or completely write the work.

We say that because within your company, you will likely have different experts in your services or products.
For example, a large solicitors’ practice will likely have family, employment, and business lawyers.

Now, all of these skill sets are different, so we recommend having a “content calendar,” which ensures that you write about your business’s different services.

So, let’s return to the example of a solicitor’s practice. You might want to obtain more work for the employment law team, the family law department, and the business law staff. So, to optimise the business’s organic SEO, it’s a good idea to create a content calendar that sets out who’s writing what and when.

This means you can optimise your organic SEO for multiple keywords rather than writing many blog posts about one thing.

How we can help:

WordPress web design

Many businesses in Cardiff have come to us to get a WordPress website constructed. Whether you run a construction business or accountancy practice or are about to start your law practice, we are here to help. We can build quality WordPress websites, often in less than three weeks.

SEO: Our business can also offer SEO services, such as organic and local SEO, which require a monthly payment. We have some of the best

SEO consultants working for us.

Would you like a quote?

If you would like a quote to design a new website or perhaps you would like help improving your business’s organic search engine optimisation, why not give our web design agency a call?
 

Introduction

Let’s face it: start-up businesses often don’t have the budget to spend money on expensive photography shoots. Sure, they may do this later when the bucks start rolling in, but they often want to get a website up and running for now.

This means that web designers are often tasked with finding the right stock photos. Adobe Stock Photos is a brilliant site for really high-quality stock photos that are not free.

We have used these on most websites we build, yet they are not offered for free.

Some of the websites we recommend below, however, are offered for free. So, if you’re about to design your own website or perhaps you hired a web design agency, but they want you to pick out some photos for your new company website, well, these websites are brilliant for getting stock photos.

Unsplash

Website: https://unsplash.com/

So, a viral stock photo website is Unsplash; it is brilliant. It has been around for a long time, since 2013. Unsplash originally started as a Tumblr blog, but now it’s a website that web designers all around the globe switch to when they need stock photos. The reason why is that the website now has a huge, gigantic collection of stock photos, over 1 million high-quality photos.

Unsplash is brilliant, as it has a very simple-to-use website. When you search for stock photos, say of an excavator, that’s exactly what you get.

You might be thinking, shouldn’t all stock photos do that?

The answer is no; ask any good front-end web designer when tasked with finding a stock image of something generic and basic, such as a garden fence. Some other stock photo sites sometimes show gardens, ponds, lawnmowers, and anything they think is remotely related to a garden fence.

Now, as you would imagine, this can get rather annoying when designing a new company website because, well, it can take a long time to find the right photo.

However, this is why we like Unsplash so much. We often go straight to this website when we need stock photos simply because the results are accurate. When you’re looking for a picture of an excavator, that’s exactly what you get back.

We highly recommend Unsplash. It offers great stock photos, accurate results, and is simple to use. Our web design team here at W&P gives it a massive thumbs up.

Pixabay

Website: https://pixabay.com/

Another really popular website is Pixabay—it’s massively popular with web design agencies. The reason why is that it has over 1 million free stock photos.
This is important because when designing a website, the designers will often need choice. Whether it’s a picture of a car dealership or a Christmas tree, it’s always good to have a choice. This is exactly what PixaBay offers: a lot of choices.

Freeimages

Website: https://www.freeimages.com/

Getty Images owns free images and has a massive collection of stock photos. Therefore, it’s very popular with web designers.

Pexels

Website: https://www.pexels.com/

Pexels is one of our favourite stock photo websites. We have built numerous websites for clients using Pexels photos, and there are a massive number of stock photos to choose from.

Pexels has been around since 2014, and this is important because the more established websites have a large number of stock photos.

Does your business require a website to be designed?

We know exactly what it’s like; even though some business owners could build a website themselves, do they have the time?
Even searching for the right stock photo of someone passing over a bunch of flowers takes time.

This is why so many businesses come to us in Cardiff: We can design a fantastic website with a starting price of just £950.00. We can select the stock photos, helping you to save time. Therefore, we can assist you whether you’re a plumber in a hurry or a solicitor with a diary full of meetings.

Most of our websites are designed using the CMS called WordPress.

Have you never heard of WordPress?

Well, you are most likely to have been on a WordPress website. Over 40% of all websites are built using this CMS. It’s trendy, and we have already built many websites for various Cardiff businesses using this content management system.

Why build it yourself?

So, if you read an article about free stock photos, you might be thinking about building a new website yourself.
Yet, writing all that text and selecting all of the stock images can take a lot of time. So why not let us design the website for you?

We can design a new CMS website in a very short amount of time. Most of our websites are built and designed in less than three weeks from start to finish, which helps you save time. With a starting price of just £950.00, our websites are very affordable.

Why not contact us for a quote?

Our web design company can offer the following services:
– WordPress CMS web design
– Drupal website design
– Organic search engine optimisation
– Local SEO
– Logo design
– Cardiff business

Date: 12/11/2024
Introduction

What’s the longest you’ve been away from a screen today? An hour or more? Well, that’s unlikely because most of us check our smartphones as regularly as clockwork.

We are all checking screens more often, whether on our smartphones, iPads, tablets, Macbooks, desktops, or reading messages on our Apple smartwatches.

Whether it’s a social media update or a vital work e-mail, shoppers and smartphone users expect the website or mobile app to be responsive. This, in a nutshell, just means automatically adjusting to the screen size and resolution.

Shoppers, therefore, expect the website to snap to that screen size almost instantly. Businesses that fail to do this don’t adjust to the correct screen size. Well, the bounce rate is likely to go through the roof, and if sustained for long enough, the business has no chance, no chance at all, of getting on page one of Google.

So, if that wasn’t clear enough about why you need a responsive website for your business, we will hammer home the point even more. We’re not really; we want to give you the info you need to ensure your Cardiff web design team designs a well-designed website that should work across various devices.

Over half of visitors now come via a mobile device.

Plumber, hairdresser or solicitor practice, no business can afford to turn away half of its visitors to its website. Yet, unless you have a responsive website, this is precisely what you do. Plus, as soon as Google crawls and indexes the website and sees no mobile version of the website designed, this will result in lower search engine rankings.

Let’s reword that: your business might now appear in the mobile results if you don’t have a responsive website. So now, with over 55% of organic traffic coming via mobile devices, your business in 2024 must have a well-designed, mobile version of the website. And with web design businesses, like W&P, offering to design mobile responsive websites for as little as £950.00- well, there’s no excuse why your website

is not mobile-ready already- even rhymes.

Out the window with fixed width layouts

So, back in the day, we remember when our company owner, over twenty years old, designed his first website. It meant using fixed-width layouts and stating how long a wireframe section should be. This then got replicated on the shoppers’ desktop screen.
Well, I had a mobile responsive website that changed all of that completely.

So whether it’s a 4 K desktop monitor or a small iPhone screen, your website must work on various screen sizes. The width can’t be fixed anymore; the website must be responsive.

Google rolled out mobile-first indexing.

Google has made it clear that it wants a company website to be mobile-ready and responsive. It rolled out its mobile-first indexing update in 2018.

This means, in a nutshell, that the mobile version of the website, such as that new blog post you’ve just added to, will get indexed first. If your website is not responsive and mobile-ready, it will likely have seen a massive ranking drop since 2018.

This was when businesses in Cardiff and globally dashed to get on the phone with their web designers to make their websites mobile-responsive. It was dubbed at the time Mobilegeddon—a bit dramatic, we know.

Millions of businesses feared they would be left behind unless their websites were mobile-ready. However, many were already mobile-ready. For example, the countless WordPress websites we designed for many Cardiff businesses were responsive before the update.

Fluid grids are now the way forward.

Fluid grids are now the way forward. Remember early on in this article that we mentioned fixed widths and why this doesn’t make the website responsive?

Well, our web developers and designers are using fluid grids, which fix the issue by using percentage-based widths for your website rather than having them set in stone and fixed with pixel values. So, nearly all of most websites will now use fluid grids rather than fixed widths.

Hire W&P to design your responsive website today.

Our digital marketing agency can design a brand-new and impressive WordPress website for your business and offer SEO services. Most of our brochure websites can be live and completed in less than three weeks. Therefore, if you’re looking for a local web design agency, why not call us today?

What’s the main difference between UX and UI design?

Introduction

Some marketing agencies describe both UX and UI design as the same thing. However, even though they are peas from the same pod, they are still very different. That’s why you will have other people with these job titles on web design agencies’ websites. Therefore, we thought it would be a good idea to write a short article explaining the difference between UX and UI.

First things first, what is U.X Design?

So, UX design is simply short for user experience design; it’s about creating a good user experience.

So, just as an interior designer is called in to, say, a big department store to help design the layout, say, where’s the best place to sell certain products, and where to place advertising boards, etc., this is the same for a UX designer. However, the UX designer doesn’t work inside, say,

John Lewis or any other physical store for that matter; instead, the UX designer aims to create the best user experience online.

So, for example, a UX designer or user experience designer should make the website as simple and intuitive as possible. Here’s the thing: if you make it difficult for a shopper to find a product or service, they will leave. So, a UX designer’s job is to put themselves in the customers’ shoes and make it an absolute piece of cake to get the right products or services they want.

But the work for a U.X designer doesn’t stop there:

They have to:

– Make sure that the product descriptions answer the queries the customer wants
– Make it super simple to use the main menu
– Think about the main products/services you sell to get a shopper from the home page to that page as quickly as possible
– Make the website fast so shoppers do not have to wait for it to load.

To complete this work, the U.X designer will have to work with the web designers to do the following work:

User research:

• Who are the main customers? How have the competition designed their websites? How can you make your company website better?
• Wireframing
• This is like a rough sketch of the website, what it could look like

Usability testing:

This is all about making sure everything works as it should

Continuous improvement is achieved through split testing, also known as A/B testing.

U.X designers should work with the web designers to use A/B testing to see how the website can be improved. Therefore, when a business purchases a WordPress website or any other CMS, such as Drupal, you should work with the web designers to see if the design can be further improved. Many businesses, especially well-known company brands, use split testing to make minor and gradual improvements to the website design.

So, what is UI design?

UI design is user interface design, focusing more on the visual and the interactive part of the design. A UI designer, therefore, has the job of improving the aesthetic appearance of the website.

So, a UI designer will use various design software to design the buttons and the fonts, decide which hex codes and colour schemes to use, and how the page layout is designed. This can dramatically affect how long shoppers spend on the company website, yet if the design is not good, this can mean that the bounce rate is high; this can then have a negative knock-on effect on the business’s organic search engine optimisation.

UX Designers and UI designers often work closely together

When you walk into any large digital marketing agency, usually the UX designers and the UI designers will have their desks close together.
This is for good reason, as both designers have to work together, and the two job roles are linked.

For example, to create a good user experience, where the shopper wants to spend a long on the website and potentially buy more products, you have to have a good website design. To get a good design, you need to have good U.I. design; therefore, both U.X and U.I designers often have to work together.

Do you need a website designed in Cardiff?

Whether you run a construction company, for example, you might be a builder, plumber or electrician, we could help you to obtain a new website. If you run alternatively a solicitor or dental practice and require an intricate, well-designed WordPress website, we can help you.

Many businesses in South Wales have a WordPress CMS website designed by our designers, and then they hire our SEO team to improve the organic SEO continuously. Improving any business’s search engine optimisation requires much work. Yet, with that said, we do have, at this digital marketing agency, some of the best WordPress web designers and some of the best SEO experts working for us.

This is why we have worked with a diverse range of businesses here in Wales, ranging from large online e-commerce businesses to some of the best and most well-known solicitor practices in the whole of Wales.

If you want to redesign your website or a new one, we can help.

Introduction

Businesses sometimes take a very long time to optimise their Google Adwords campaign; this is important as ensuring your business is displayed for the right keywords is essential to gaining more sales.

After all, if you sell car tyres online, you won’t want your business displayed on bike tyres, for example.

This will, therefore, waste your business’s Google Adwords spend. That’s if your company is displayed for bike tyres when you actually sell car tyres, for example.

However, it’s surprising how often businesses overlook the crucial role of a well-designed landing page in maximising the amount of sales your company makes.

Google Adwords and Landing Pages

Therefore, your business might need a one-page website designed as a landing page. If you however spend a lot on Google Adwords, the page needs to be well-designed, otherwise, you could be losing out sales.

Here’s our tips for designing a well-designed landing page:

Create a picture: web designer, designing homepage, on Apple Laptop

Keep things simple

When it comes to design, simplicity is key.

Avoid overcomplicating your landing page design, instead, aim for a clean and straightforward design that effectively conveys your business offers.

If the shopper lands on single page, which is overcrowded with products, then this may overwhelm the shopper and make them leave the website, if they cant find the products they want quickly.

Calls to action

Within seconds, after a shopper lands on the website, you should make sure they can easily see a call to action.

So, for example, let’s say run a personal injury business. You might want to add a CTA, asking the shopper to enter your mobile number so that a sales representative can call the person back.

Therefore, you should make it an absolute piece of cake for shoppers to use a call to action on your website. Make your CTA’s clear and stand out from the rest of the page, so think about using a different colour box.

Content Marketing

Take the time to craft high-quality copy and content marketing. The written word is often what is a crucial factor in determining whether a shopper stays on your website, or they leave soon after. So use titles, to split the text into manageable sections the shopper will want to read, plus, this allows a shopper to skip to a section they may want to read more about.

Do add internal links as well, as this way the shopper may click on another page, which is keeping the shopper on the website for longer.

It’s also important to provide the details the customer wants to hear; for example, you might want to highlight your guarantee period. If a shopper can’t find the information they want within a few seconds, they may leave your website, contributing to what’s known as the ‘bounce rate’-the percentage of visitors who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page.

Split testing and A/B testing

Creating a Google Adwords landing page should be like cooking a complicated recipe in your kitchen .

Often, the chef wont get it right straight away. It would be best to keep refining the dish, that’s until you have the recipe down to fine art.

This is the same when designing your landing page; you will often get it right immediately. It would be best if you had split testing, also known as A/B testing, to improve the design gradually. You can use split testing to improve the design, find out which design looks best, which design in generating more sales for your business.

Think about website hosting.

What if the hosting is super slow?

This can mean that during crucial trading periods, such as Black Friday sales or January sales, your website hosting might be even slower because many website visitors are simultaneously shopping at the same time, causing your company website to be super slow, if you have slow website hosting?

Having a lot of shoppers on your company website at one time can be a good thing for the business.

However, this can be a significant drain on the website’s hosting; the company website can become very slow. What this could mean is that, at the same time, the bounce rate will start to increase substantially.

So it would be best to have super fast hosting to help your business website cope when you get busy with a lot of shoppers. Otherwise, imagine spending thousands on Google Adwords, only to find that you are losing out on making sales, because the hosting is too slow.

Date: 04/11/2024
Topic: WordPress

Introduction

Many businesses want a well-designed website, yet the owners may not know which website platform to choose. This is important because some businesses will use the administration login and dashboard sometimes weekly or at more frequent intervals.

This means that you’ll want a CMS that’s simple to use. You should be able to log in and add a new blog post quickly.

You don’t want to opt for a CMS that’s difficult to use. If you can’t find, for example, how to add a blog post, it will become a headache.

WordPress is not just a piece of cake to use; it’s a delight. Its user-friendly interface and intuitive features make managing your website a breeze.

So, let’s say you plan on adding a new piece of content marketing, such as a well-written blog post, every week.

You want this to be as simple as possible. When you’ve written, let’s say, a somewhat wordy 3,000-blog post and you’re a bit tired, the last thing you want is for the CMS, that’s your website, to make it hard to add content marketing.

Believe us when we say we have seen some content management systems designed by web design agencies that are a nightmare to use, complete with glitches. These systems develop problems, such as slow loading times or frequent crashes, making even adding a blog post difficult.

So, pick your CMS wisely, and choose one that’s a piece of cake. Now, different businesses will have different preferences regarding which CMS they like. Some company directors might like Drupal, Umbraco or another type of CMS. And these are all good quality content management systems that a business can use.

Yet, if you were to ask us to get our penny’s worth, we would say go for WordPress. Of course, we would need to meet you, have a chin-wag, and discuss what the CMS needs to do regarding functionality and how you want the website to look, and then our web design experts can make a recommendation.

9 times out of 10, most CMSs we design at our web design studio are built using WordPress.

We think WordPress is the bee’s knee, and here’s why we believe that:

– Simple to use, offers a good UI
– Piece of cake to update
– Good quality websites can be built using WordPress
– A massive chunk of every website for every business under the sun has been built using WordPress

What if we don’t want WordPress? What are our other options:

– Wix
– Squarespace
– Magento
– HubSpot CMS

How popular is WordPress

WordPress is not just popular; it’s a global phenomenon. From massive brands to sole traders, a vast community relies on WordPress. Choosing WordPress means you’re part of this thriving community with a wealth of resources and support at your fingertips.

Over 43% of all websites globally use WordPress, so when you look at your direct competitors’ websites, they often use WordPress.

It’s not abnormal for a business to have seven or more of its main competitors ranked on page one of Google.co.uk who have chosen a WordPress CMS. The reason is often due to how simple the WordPress Dashboard is to use, so if a business wants to manage, say, adding new blog posts themselves, it is indeed a piece of cake if you own a WordPress website.

You say famous, but how popular?

Statistics show that over 810 million websites use WordPress across the globe.

So, if your business in Cardiff chooses to have a WordPress website designed, you will select a prevalent content management system.

Why is it important to choose a popular CMS?

The main reason is that you will want the support and help of web design agencies during the life of your website.

So, it’s a bit like choosing a new car. You might not want to select a new brand that hasn’t established a repair and service network of garages.

Because you might have a bunch of mechanics/garages, you could state something like, “Sorry, mate, don’t work on those.”

The same goes for a website: You’ll want an established brand and a website CMS, which millions of businesses have already chosen. This means an army of web developers and designers specialising in building WordPress websites.

Why are so many businesses flocking to W&P Designs?

Is it because you’re as cheap as chips?

Well, no. Many web design companies offer bargain prices to design a website, and we don’t want to compete with these.

We have seen some websites that these web design companies churn out and beyond basic.

So, they often have a few lines of text and look like an online business card; they don’t offer much useful or helpful information. This means they cannot rank on page one of Google simply because they are often poorly designed.

Are there any downsides to choosing WordPress?

No, not unless the website is poorly designed.

Yet, any CMS, regardless of the brand, can be poorly designed. Many WordPress websites are very slow because their owners have too many plugins. Sometimes, some of the WordPress plugins are unnecessary or might be redundant, but they are still slowing the website down.

So, Google has moved to reward fast and lean websites.

You might hear your web designers discussing making the website fast or lightweight. They mean making sure the load time is as quick as possible.

You can check load times using two main tools: Google Page Speed Insights and GT Metrix.

Also, a significant factor is the speed of the hosting. We would highly recommend opting for super fast dedicated hosting.

Are you able to design WordPress websites quickly?

Yes, we can often, but it depends on how many pages need to be designed. So, like most web design companies, our bread and butter is building 7-page or less brochure websites.

Like most web design companies, our bread and butter are building 7-page or fewer brochure websites with WordPress. We can design most of these websites in less than 3 weeks, ensuring you get fast and efficient service.

This is dependent on whether the client has the text ready to go. If the client needs more time to write the content marketing, it can often take a lot longer for our designers to design a website.

As you can imagine, most websites need about 3,000 words written for the main pages, which can take a lot of time. In fact, what slows our web designers down the most is waiting for the text from the client. We can, therefore, offer our copywriters to do all of this work for you for an additional price.

Have you designed many WordPress websites?

Yes, we have designed many WordPress websites. For example, we have developed WordPress CMS websites for construction companies, solicitors, and the automotive business sector.

We also offer SEO services as well.

Are you to make a WordPress website responsive?

Yes, we certainly can; your company website must be responsive and mobile-ready. Any good SEO consultant will agree that over 50% of most businesses’ organic traffic now comes via smartphones and tablets.

It’s essential, therefore, that your website is made responsive; it should also offer the customer the following:

– Be simple to use; have, for example, a simple main menu
– Be lightening fast
– Offer valuable and helpful information, answering questions the shopper wants answered.

How do you update a WordPress website?

It’s an absolute piece of cake; however, you should regularly back up the entire site. Free WordPress plugins can help you create a backup.

We recommend making a backup because what can happen is you go to update, say, a plugin, and then the website might incur a glitch, or worse, the website might no longer be live. So

How much does it cost to build a WP site?

We are typically asked to build a 7-page brochure website for a new solicitors’ practice, say, opening up in Cardiff’s city centre.

We can normally complete these types of websites in less than three weeks. Sometimes, however, our web design team is also asked to write the text, design a logo, design an AMP version of the website, and improve the on-page SEO before the site is launched; this will, therefore, take us longer.

Yet, we always offer the customer an estimate of how long we think it will take us to design the website. If we encounter anything that holds the web designers up, we always promptly e-mail or call the customer to let them know what is happening. For the vast majority of the CMS websites we design, we build them often in less than three weeks.

Do many businesses in Cardiff have WordPress websites?

There are most certainly a huge number of businesses in Cardiff that own WordPress websites. We have built many well-designed WordPress websites for solicitors, dentists, and construction companies.

We can design a brilliant website for your business with a starting price of just 950.00

Can you also offer website hosting?

Yes, we can most certainly offer website hosting. So, on the vast majority of the WordPress websites that we build for our customers and most of the brochure websites that we build, we offer one year of free hosting.

After the first year ends, we offer affordable prices for website hosting.

Why should your business purchase a dedicated server?

So, first things first, let’s explain what website hosting is, why your business needs it, and why we recommend purchasing dedicated hosting for your business.

To get a website live, it requires a website to be designed, a domain name, website hosting,

Now, many businesses, especially small companies, are designing websites themselves, so they sometimes make the mistake of purchasing the cheapest website hosting they can find.

However, like with most things, you get what you pay for, so cheap website hosting is normally slow. Some hosting companies have seen websites become so slow that they load in rectangular blocks, bit by bit!

Yes, it was that slow!

It was as if the website didn’t even know about broadband internet and was still loading as if it was on a dial-up connection.

So, slow hosting is like having a 1.0 small-engine car: annoying, with no guts, and very, very slow.

So, what are your business’s options regarding website hosting?

They have a dedicated server:

This is the best option; we shall explain later why this is the best option for your business.

A cloud server

Then you have a cloud server, so we would pick a fast dedicated server rather than this option; however, it’s still better than a shared server.

A shared server

Then, you have a shared server. This option is the cheapest, but not one we would choose. A shared server can sometimes be very slow and cause SEO issues. For example, if the website is so slow, it impacts the U.X., meaning customers might get frustrated with how long it takes to load. This could lead to a very high bounce rate, which will negatively impact your company’s SEO.

So why would your business recommend a dedicated server?

A dedicated server should serve only one business, that company alone, and host only that customer’s websites. This means that the business should then have a unique IP address, which some SEO companies and web designers think is essential if you want to improve your company’s organic SEO.

So, having a dedicated server is almost like the business owning its own server, yet it’s a lot cheaper because you’re actually paying a hosting company to manage the server for you.

So, at this web design agency, we would say that having a dedicated server is the gold standard, and it’s not something that only big businesses have; all sizes of companies should have dedicated servers.

Yes, it does cost more, yet if your business is serious about improving its SEO and making the website super quick, your company does need dedicated hosting, that’s for sure.

Now, when you look at the price difference between dedicated hosting and shared hosting, it’s a lot, yet it’s still worth paying more to get a dedicated server.

U.X and peak times

So, let’s say your business purchases shared hosting. This means that your company website is on a server with other company websites.

What could happen is that other businesses obtain thousands of organic visitors via Google. Your business’s hosting will slow down because your website is on the same server.

So, when that server is trying to load the website for the other businesses, the shopper trying to access your company website is slowed down because the server is also working for those other business websites.

Now imagine, let’s say, a Black Friday or during the January sales. Let’s say those other websites might be in huge demand. This means that because the other businesses on that server are getting so many shoppers, this will slow down your business’s performance.

This is why so many businesses choose to have a dedicated server, and our web design company also recommends it.

Why a cheap website is sometimes a false economy?

So, especially when a new business starts here in Wales, it often doesn’t have much money to spend on marketing.

The company directors might opt for the cheapest web design quote. The downside is that this could mean super slow, and we mean moving at a snail’s pace hosting.

This will adversely impact the business’s SEO because it will incur a high bounce rate. When you talk to any good SEO company worth their salt, they will tell you that because of Google’s RankBrain, a business with a high bounce rate will have weak SEO.

How much does your web design company cost to design a website?

Prices for us to design a brochure website start from just £950.00. It’s clear, therefore, why our WordPress web designers are always so busy and drinking so many espressos.

We offer great prices, design exceptional websites, and have built many websites for Welsh businesses.

If you want a website built, why not give us a ring?

Who’s better to hire a web design agency or a freelancer?

Author: W&P

Date: 31/10/2024

When a business searches Google for local web designers, it is often presented with a mix of freelancers and web design agencies.

If you typed into Google.co.uk “local web design agencies,” you would often get a list of the larger digital marketing agencies in that area.

However, if you were running a search such as “web design companies,” you would often get a mix of sole trader freelancers through to large marketing companies, sometimes employing in excess of one hundred staff.

So, knowing which one to choose can seem daunting. You don’t want to go bargain basement, as most company directors fully appreciate that it’s crucial for most businesses’ success to get a really well-designed website that offers shoppers a good U.X.

On the other hand, most businesses don’t want to get talked into a website designed by a large digital marketing agency that will charge an absolute arm and a leg. So where’s the balance? What should you be opting for, an agency or a freelancer?

As we have been busy bees in the Cardiff area creating websites for small and more significant businesses, we are well-placed to explain the pros and cons of choosing freelancers or an agency.

So, whether you’re a budding entrepreneur or a seasoned veteran of running a business, this guide will be useful as we explain the pros and cons of choosing an agency over a web design freelancer.

So, how many people will you need to work on improving your business marketing?

First, consider this, how many different marketing skill sets do you need to promote your business?

You might be a plumber who just needs a brochure website built, in which case, you can hire any type of web design company. Some freelancers can design an absolutely amazing browser website, and if you’re not worried about investing in search engine optimisation, then freelancers are most of the time the way to go if their work is good quality.

We say that because the prices are likely to be lower and more affordable, and you often get a good level of customer service from web design freelancers because they run the business and care about offering a good level of service.

On the other hand, sure, you could fork out a ton on getting an agency to design, say, a WordPress brochure website for your business. But you might ask, when this job is pretty straightforward, why are you paying agency rates to design what should be a straightforward website for a plumber or a construction-related company?

On the other hand, if you are a more significant business or a business that wants to improve its ranking in Google.co.uk, you will need to hire an agency or a freelancer with two distinct skill sets.

That’s web design and SEO skill set; now, you might automatically think web designers can do both, so wear two hats. Yet you might be surprised.

Jack of all trades, master of none

It is entirely possible to hire a freelance web designer who is just really good at what they do. Yet they may also offer local SEO services and make a complete pig’s ear of the job.

The reason is that search engine optimisation, whether it’s local or organic SEO, is not simple. Google and the other major search engines are constantly improving and changing their algorithms, so unless the SEO consultant has their finger on the pulse, you will soon be left behind.

Now, what can happen is that some web designers are good at, say, designing a WordPress website, yet the SEO methods they employ might be outdated. That’s because a freelancer business, by definition, is just one person, so can they offer a good service when it comes to designing websites and offering to improve a business’s SEO?

Well, sometimes yes, they can, but in our view, having been doing this for 10 years, it’s rare to meet freelancers who are absolutely ace at web design and SEO. Normally, it’s just one of the other.

However, exceptions exist; you can have some good web designer freelancers and SEO consultants rolled into one. Because the skill sets needed are pretty different, you will generally need an agency, which usually has a team of SEO consultants and then a team of web designers and web developers.

This is not to say the skill sets operate in entirely separate silos from each other and that the work doesn’t overlap. That’s because for SEO to be effective today, you need good web design, yet for that to happen, both teams must communicate well. So, in our view, if your business is serious about improving your search engine optimisation and you want an excellent website built, we would head over to an agency that employs separate people to complete the work.

Trust us when we say this: to be good at SEO, you need your finger on the pulse, and to cut the mustard, so to speak, the SEO expert must be reading and brushing up on their knowledge daily. Now, when you look at the global brands, the vast multi-billion-dollar companies out there, they don’t put out job adverts for SEO experts/web designers, as they know to be good, ace at what you do; these are two completely different skill sets. To be at the top of your game, you usually must choose which side of the fence you sit on; you can’t often be good at both.

Web Design Agencies Vs Freelancers

So, often, the choice between hiring a freelancer or a web design agency boils down to one crucial factor: price.

Often, there’s a huge difference in price between what a freelancer charges and what a marketing agency charges.
When you consider the overheads, some of the best designers in Wales are based in Cardiff Bay and the city centre. As you can imagine, the rent or running costs of a building will be considerable.

However, to get the best web designers with the best skill set, in terms of hiring a WordPress designer, sometimes these staff are employed by these agencies, so it’s well worth paying the premium.

However, if you’re very clear about how you want the design to look and know which CMS you want, then why contact web design freelancers for a quote?

Although the quote will often be lower than that of an agency, there’s often one very big drawback to hiring a freelancer.

There are only so many hours in the day, and working as a self-employed person means you are likely to encounter very busy periods. This means a new website that needs designing may get on the back burner.

This means that where an agency might have been able to complete the website design in two weeks, you could sometimes be waiting a lot longer for a web design freelancer to do the same work.

If you are in a rush to get the website designed, then it might be better to choose a web design agency. However, all businesses, regardless of whether there’s one staff member employed or 1000, can get very busy at certain times of the year, such as the run-up to Christmas. So, you have to get a good idea from the web designers about how long they think it will take to complete the design.

How simple or complex is the web design?

So, if it’s a relatively straightforward brochure-style website, most web designers can design it quickly.

However, if the website is more complex, say, an e-commerce website built, perhaps with a large number of product lines, then you will often need a web design agency for this work.

A freelancer will get overwhelmed if they have to design an e-commerce website with a wide range of products, do the copywriting, do the on-page SEO, and do all the needed design work. This type of web design work often requires a team of staff to work on it. Therefore, a freelancer might be able to complete the job, but it might take a very long time.

So, consider how complex the project is and also what staff you require to complete it. We say this because even web design companies vary massively in terms of staff numbers.

Some agencies might have multiple web designers who specialise in Drupal, WordPress, and Kentico. Well, some other agencies might just have one designer who only builds using WordPress.

You might also need an on-page SEO consultant, a UX designer, a WordPress developer, and a copywriter. So you might have several staff working on one website, so often for e-commerce websites, you must hire a marketing agency.

What are the main disadvantages of choosing a web design agency?

Well, if you choose a really good web design agency, there are often no real drawbacks. You have the possibility of creating a business relationship with them, where, under one roof, they can offer all of the digital marketing services your business needs for the foreseeable future.

Therefore, we are just an e-mail away if you need a job advertisement added to your vacancy page or if you want to spend more on your Google AdWords in the run-up to Christmas.

However, it often boils down to cost. Many businesses don’t hire agencies because of cost. Sometimes, they might have a minimum pricing of 10k to design a brochure website. This is obviously unaffordable for many small businesses.

So, we would say that the only real drawback to hiring a well-known and respected SEO agency or web design company is often price. These companies have often become so successful that they don’t want to work on lower-cost brochure websites. They often have a minimum price point in place to design a website, which can be out of reach for some businesses.

However, for other businesses that can afford to hire an agency, it’s often really beneficial for them to have one company managing Google AdWords, organic SEO, and web design rather than having to work with, say, three different businesses. It takes a lot of time to communicate with all of these different businesses rather than hiring one agency that can manage everything for you.

Our top tips for choosing the right CMS website for your business

Written by: W&P Marketing
Date: 30/10/2024

At W&P Marketing, we engage with a diverse range of business owners daily. Whether it is to have a quick chat about improving the company’s SEO or having a chin-wag about which CMS might suit that business best.

We’ve learned that even within the same business sector, a CMS that perfectly suits one business might not suit another company that offers exactly the same service.

For those who do not know, a content management system is integrated within a website, which normally makes it easy for a business to publish blog posts, make updates, and manage the company website.

Therefore, you need to sit down with your web design team and discuss which CMS might best suit your business.

How to choose the suitable CMS for your business

Your chosen web designer might recommend a CMS that differs depending on the size of the business.

If you lack technical knowledge and don’t know JavaScript from AMP, you’re going to need a simple-to-use CMS.

However, the web design company might recommend a completely different CMS if you have an in-house digital marketing team that might have experience using Drupal or Kentico.

Why its so crucial that your website offers a good user experience

Which CMS you choose can ultimately dictate how simple the website is. Some content management systems might have, for example, drag-and-drop functionality to make the website simple to design.

On the other hand, websites might be overly simplistic and clunky and offer a really poor UX.

When considering a CMS, it’s crucial to evaluate both the front and back ends of your website. The backend should be user-friendly so that your staff can easily update the website, while the front end must be well-designed to ensure a positive user experience and prevent high bounce rates.

How simple is the back end of the website to use?

Depending on the content management system you choose, the back end of the website is often referred to as the administration panel or the dashboard.

We recommend that you visit your web design agency’s offices, have a nice cup of tea made, complimented by a few biscuits, and ask them to show you the back end or the admin panel of each CMS.

Then ask yourself, well, how simple is it to add a new blog post or change the company address?
If you can do well blindfolded (not literally, of course) and find the CMS Dashboard a piece of cake to use, that might be the CMS for you.

Which type of CMS do you often recommend to your clients?

When we show the vast majority of our clients the WordPress dashboard, they instantly see how simple it is to use because of how logically laid out the dashboard is. Compare this to some other content management systems, and you might find them difficult to use, and some of them are not that user-friendly.

So if we are working with a business and, let’s say, they have little technical knowledge or no one with coding knowledge within the business, then we often recommend WordPress because it’s so simple to use.

Consider speed (it’s important if your business wants to improve its organic SEO)

So, if we were to predict the future in terms of what Google ranking factor will become increasingly important, we would say the speed of your website will be a top consideration for most SEO companies.
What we mean by that is that a fast website can help you climb up Google’s ranks, while a slow website could mean that you’re on page 2 or beyond.

You must have a fast website, desktop, and mobile because if the website is slow, it will offer a poor user experience.
Speed is, therefore, important. You will want a fast website. So do have a chat with your web designers about which website hosting packages they offer. And if you have the marketing budget, we would highly recommend forking out more on fast website hosting. Think grease lightning fast. Get it so that even if you have a large sale on your website, with thousands of shoppers on your website, it’s still super fast.

Don’t offer a poor U.X. It will negatively impact your business’s SEO offer in the long run.
If your website often has a poor user experience and is slow, you start to fall behind the pack, which can negatively impact the SEO and your organic SEO. So, it’s crucial to have a fast website.

How can we make our company website fast?

• Choose a CMS that’s built to be fast
• Choose a fast website hosting
• Hire a web designer and developer with experience in improving load times.
• Use Google Page Speed Insight tools to improve load times
• Use GT Metrix to improve page load speeds
• Use split testing to see if you can further improve the website’s speed.

Choose a CMS that will grow with your business.

Sometimes, the business owner reacts knee-jerk to a web designer’s special offer. For example, some web design businesses may offer unbelievably cheap quotes; to give you an example, a company might offer a content management system below £500.

Blinding, you think, that’s the one for me, right up my street; you might think I don’t want to spend much on our new website.

However, why you should hold your horses and choose the right web design agency

Now, when you are building a business, you will likely have a million and one things on your mind. For example, you might be interviewing multiple people for new vacancies within your company and driving around like a headless chicken to find suitable business premises from which to operate.

However, we would say to hold your horses, take your time, and find a really good web design company that offers a range of different content management systems. Your business may want a Drupal, Squarespace, WordPress, or Joomla website.

And we would say the cheapest is not necessarily the best option when it comes to website design.
We say that because you don’t want an overly basic CMS; you want a CMS that can change and improve as your business grows.

But it is a bit like buying shoes; it’s most definitely not a one-size-fits-all approach. So, do have quite a detailed conversation with your web designers to make sure they recommend the right CMS for your business.

Do you require an e-commerce store to be built?

Suppose you require a website that takes payments or signs a customer up for a monthly subscription.
In that case, we might recommend a different CMS than we would if it were just a straightforward brochure website design, and we might recommend a different CMS that specialises in being an e-commerce website.

What is an open-source CMS?

There are various types of open-source CMS, but by an absolute country mile, the most popular is WordPress here in Great Britain. This is a type of open-source content management system; there are others, such as Joomla which are also very good.

The great thing about picking this type of CMS, and we’re talking about WordPress here, is that roughly 40% of all websites on the Internet right now are made using WordPress. Finding a WordPress developer or a WordPress design agency is an absolute piece of cake.

The benefit is that if you are falling out with your current website designer because, let’s say, they are too slow to respond to e-mails. It is simple to find another WordPress designer because thousands are dotted right throughout the United Kingdom.

Proprietary CMS:

Then you’ve got other content management systems called “proprietary CMS”; examples would be Umbraco and Kentico, which are excellent options.

On-going cost considerations

There are content management systems that are offered either free of charge or with a monthly subscription.
Some companies sometimes charge yearly subscriptions for you to use their CMS. These are often described as licensing fees, and you must carefully consider how much you will be paying per month to use various content management systems.

We say this because when you factor in other costs related to your digital marketing, for example, you might be paying to improve your organic SEO as well. If you also have to pay quite a lot monthly for the website itself’s subscription, things can get a little bit more expensive sometimes.

So again, based on your marketing budget, you have to decide how much you are willing to spend on ultrafast hosting, subscription fees for the website, SEO, and social media management, and perhaps you’re also paying for Google AdWords.

If your marketing budget is unlimited, that’s no problem. However, if you’re a small business, you will need to work out the costs, such as the licensing fee for your website.

Who will be making the updates for the CMS?

Have you ever sat in a new electric car and seen how long it sometimes takes to update itself?
Sometimes, it can be quite considerable and take some time. Sometimes, even the whole night could be spent with the car updating its software.

This is the same with a website. Even though the website’s front-end design might not change, updates often need to be made to the content management system work.

Updates

This might be to update various plugins or to roll out a patch because, let’s say, the CMS company notices a vulnerability in the website, which means a hacker could access it.

Other updates could include updating the content management system to a new version, for example.
Sometimes, these updates go like clockwork, and within a few minutes, your website is backed up and running smoothly. However, sometimes, they can roll out, causing glitches and havoc.

What we mean by causing havoc is that the pictures on your website might not be where they were before, the text might move around somewhat and be now out of place, the whole website might be jumbled up, and it might look like cake that has just fallen on the floor.
A bit of a mess!

So, we suggest you ask your web design agency how much they charge for “managed website hosting” and how much they charge per hour to rectify any glitches that may occur on your website.

So, for example, you might have unmanaged hosting and want to update the WordPress plug-ins yourself, but this might cause your website to go haywire and develop a glitch.

So it’s always worth paying that small monthly fee to the web designers to have managed website hosting.

Does your SEO consultant/agency like working on that type of CMS?

It’s like talking to a mechanic at a garage. Often, they have a preference for what manufacturer of car they like to work on.
For example, they might like servicing a particular type of car more than another.

This is true for SEO consultants and digital marketing agencies alike. Sometimes, a marketing agency will have a preference for which type of content management system they like to work on.

For example, we like to work on WordPress websites at this digital marketing agency.

For example, WordPress offers customisable URL structures and plug-ins that automatically set up site maps for you. Plus, editing the meta titles and descriptions with WordPress is simple to improve the click-through rate.

It doesn’t matter if you don’t know what each of those items is. We are trying to hammer home here because some content management systems allow you to edit to improve the on-page SEO.

How fast your website is is now very important.

Your content management system must be fast; if it’s not, this will likely give rise to more frustrated shoppers.
If you are a frustrated shopper, this often means the bounce rate increases and some content management systems are simply faster than others.

Some are road-run fast, meaning that they offer a good user experience/

Is the CMS popular, or will you be left stranded?

We have met with many business owners over the years, and sometimes, their previous web designers heavily pushed them into a particular content management system.

Since then, the web design agency might have gone bust, the content management system they recommended might not have been prevalent, and even that company might have gone into liquidation.

This means they are left stranded with the CMS no longer being updated, and it is hard to find patches to fix website problems.
Sometimes, you have no option but to start over again with a new CMS.

This is why we often recommend WordPress.

It has been around for donkey years; we’ve been designing websites with it for 10 years. The dashboard is also very logical and straightforward, and many company directors like using it.

So, the point we are trying to make here is that if you have a web design agency that is heavily pushing you into using a CMS that you have never heard of before and that is not very well-known, then be wary.

The reason is that finding the help and support you need in the future might be very hard, such as finding a web developer who specialises in that CMS.

If the company developing the content management system goes bust, you might be left with a problematic CMS.

Come to the web design experts.

We’ve been designing websites for Welsh businesses for a very long time. In fact, we have been designing quality WordPress websites for over 10 years.

We are WordPress experts.

Whether you are about to open a fancy coffee shop or you are going to open your clothing brand in the middle of Cardiff city centre, we are the company to call. We design affordable websites with brilliant, well-designed designs. We are the WordPress experts. Give us a ring today.

Date: 28/10/2024

The importance of good web design and SEO for solicitors

It is arguably one of the most competitive business sectors for implementing and improving a solicitor’s practice SEO. That’s because, in any busy city throughout the United Kingdom, a mass of solicitor practices will be dotted all over the city. These businesses will, therefore, be fiercely competing for the top three places both organically and in the Google Business rankings.

Therefore, good, top-notch SEO consultants and agencies work with these businesses because a few places on Google can sometimes mean the difference between earning or not earning hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Then there’s the web design. You could have some of the best solicitors working for you in that region, the best minds, yet if the website doesn’t sell the business well, customers often leave a website in a matter of seconds.

Bounce rates are significant to monitor to improve web design and SEO
So, sometimes, when you start to talk about bounce rates, you might think that this has solely to do with SEO. However, lowering a bounce rate often involves improving the business’s SEO and web design.

The website must, therefore, be:

– Simple to use
– Offer the answer or product/service the customer is looking for
– Be fast
From an SEO perspective, the website must be:
– Offer helpful advice (Google Helpful Content Update)
– Must have a low bounce rate
– Be written by an expert
– Have a high Google E-EAT score

Good quality content marketing is essential for solicitors’ practices

So, some businesses might publish a new blog post or page once every three months.
However, for your top law firms, this is nowhere near enough. Top solicitors often have to work with their SEO agency to publish top-quality content marketing as regularly as once a week or even more.

FAQ

Customers often have many questions, especially when it comes to offering legal advice, such as employment law or family law advice.
Therefore, they often ask Google to find answers to these questions. If your blog post or main page appears on the first page of Google answering these questions, you will receive a lot more organic traffic.

Because there are so many questions that customers ask solicitors, this is why there’s so much content marketing that needs to be written.
Google E-EAT

Ever since the Google E-EAT update, it’s more important than ever that the written work on your company website is written with the help of or entirely by an expert on that subject.

We understand that an employment law practice often can’t have a solicitor write 2,000 blog posts monthly, as it’s time-consuming. So usually, the solicitor will liaise with the copywriter at the web design agency to have input into how the article is written.
The article must be well-written, clear, and written by an expert.

Keywords

We highly recommend using quality SEO tools, such as Ahrefs, Moz Pro, or Majestic SEO, to see which keywords your business should optimise your company website for.

Google Analytics

Ask your web designers to set up a Google Analytics account for your business. We highly recommend that this be completed at the same time as the website is being designed.

You want a Google Analytics account added at the very start so you can track whether your organic visitor numbers are improving or not every month. Also, it gives you valuable information, such as the website’s bounce rate and how long a shopper is spending on the website. Google Analytics 4 is offered for free, so we would highly recommend asking your web designers to add it.

Do pay for quality SEO

So, for solicitors’ practices, let’s say you run an employment solicitor. In a capital city like Cardiff, you will have tremendous competition. Therefore, to obtain more customers from Google’s organic results, you will need a quality SEO agency. Here at this web design company, we also offer SEO services at an affordable price.

Which CMS would you recommend for solicitors’ practices?

This does depend on the business; we would need to chat with you regarding which CMS your business has experience using. For example, the company director might have had a Drupal website and know how to use the admin panel. Consequently, you might want another Drupal website designed.

If not, after I show you WordPress and how the dashboard works, your business may want a WordPress website designed. The Dashboard on a WordPress website is super simple to use. You can update plugins, for example, with just a few clicks of the button. Plus, it’s simple to make edits to the text. Let’s say your solicitor’s practice switches address in Cardiff. You can use your WordPress Dashboard to make such simple changes quickly.

Backlink analysis

So, when you have a massive bunch of solicitors practices, all with well-designed websites costing more than 10k to build, how does Google know which businesses to rank on page one of Google and the others on page 7 of Google?

Well, the quality of the business’s content marketing, such as blog posts and guides, will be a massive deciding factor in whether that business should rank on page 1 of Google.

Don’t think for a second that just writing one blog post, say 3,000 words, will be enough for you to log into your Google Search Console account and have your business appear on page one of Google.

It doesn’t work like that.

That’s why businesses often have to write many articles and improve the business’s backlinks simultaneously.
Building backlinks takes a lot of time. The best approach is to use high-quality backlink-checking tools like Moz Pro to examine your competitor’s backlinks. Then, hire a backlink-building expert to ensure they build backlinks in a white-hat way.

When you launch your new website, set up a Google Business profile.

The technical SEO is set to a good standard when designing the website.
Make sure the website is supersonic fast.

Good web hosting and design are needed to ensure the speed of your solicitor’s website. The website needs to be fast on mobile and desktop, so the design must also be fast. Also, make sure that you choose good-quality website hosting.

Mobile responsive

Your new solicitor’s website must work on desktops, laptops, and smartphones. The mobile design must be perfect because the website won’t rank high organically if it’s not, and the bounce rate is too high. This means businesses, such as solicitors’ practices with a sky-high bounce rate, often get moved down Google’s organic ranks because the bounce rate is too high.

Keep on top of your SEO progress.

Google rolls out algorithm updates on a very regular basis. Some of these algorithm updates can substantially alter where a business ranks in the SERPs. Therefore, your SEO agency must ensure they keep up with SEO progress.
For example, there was a significant update, meaning that if your website didn’t have a mobile version of the website design, your business would never appear in the organic mobile results. This often means the company could miss out on receiving thousands of visitors.

Web design and U.X

First impressions matter, so if the web design for a solicitor’s practice doesn’t instantly show that your business offers the service it wants, this could lead to a high bounce rate. Therefore, your web developers and designers need to spend a lot of time designing the website’s home page so it instantly tells a shopper that you offer that service or product.

Introduce your solicitors via a short 3-minute video

A good idea that our web design company would recommend is that your solicitors introduce themselves via a YouTube video.
When this is embedded into the page, it can increase the time on the site. For example, a solicitor introducing themselves and the services they offer might have a video well over three minutes long. Therefore, you retain a visitor on the page for longer, improving the business’s SEO.

So, let’s say that you publish a 2,000-word blog post. A customer might not want to read a massive amount of text. They might be on the train on the way home from work and might be tired. Therefore, if they can instead watch a YouTube video that you have embedded on the page to offer advice, they may watch that, increasing the time on site.
As any good web design agency will tell you, improving a business’s SEO involves increasing the time on-site and reducing the bounce rate.

Do you need a website designed for your law firm?

We have experience designing very high-quality websites for solicitors’ practices. We can design a very high-quality WordPress website. Many of our clients then partner with us so that we can improve their search engine optimisation as well.
How much does it cost to design a solicitor’s practice website?

Our web design prices start from £950.00 for a 7-page website. Many businesses, especially solicitors’ practices, will require more pages. Therefore, we can design as many pages as the business needs. We offer affordable prices.

Does your web design company build websites?

We can also offer the following services:

Organic search engine optimisation
Once our web designers have finished designing a fantastic WordPress website for your business, we can improve organic SEO.

This is a monthly service, and our SEO services start at £500.00 monthly.

If your business needs help improving its SEO or obtaining a new website, why not call us today?

What exactly are AMP pages and how can they benefit a business?

Date: 24.10.2024

You might have heard about Accelerated Mobile Pages, which is often referred to as “AMP.” In a nutshell, this helps speed up web pages on smartphones and tablets. Sure, we now have 5G mobiles and signals, yet a super-fast website still benefits from offering the customer a better user experience, and Google does tend to rank faster websites higher.

What is HTML AMP

So, a standard webpage is made up of HTML, just like the one you are reading here. Yet, with AMP HTML, things are different. It’s what web designers call a stripped-back version of HTML, which makes it faster.

Your company website on a diet

So, a streamlined version of CSS is used, plus many web designers basically call an AMP version of a website your company website but on a diet. This means you get super fast loading times, improving the user experience for shoppers because your company website is faster.

How you can benefit from AMP pages

How can we have AMP pages designed to benefit our business?

So, if a business wants to rank on page one of Google.co.uk, it often needs to have a fast website. Google’s algorithms and Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, want to offer shoppers a good user experience. No shopper wants to wait around for a long time for a website to load, so the faster you can make your company website, the better.

This is why many businesses in Wales are asking web design agencies to design desktop, mobile, and AMP versions of their websites.

Impatient

Have you noticed how impatient shoppers get when they need to wait too long in a queue? Well, this is the same as running an online business. Shoppers simply are not willing today to wait around for very long; they will just leave. For example, 53% of mobile shoppers will go in 3 seconds if the website hasn’t fully loaded.

Do bear this in mind when designing your company website because, let’s say, on the header, you have an autoloading video of the header section, which can slow the website down.

So, for example, let’s say you run a hotel and hire a person to video the hotel using a drone. They fly over the hotel, which does give a customer a very good idea of the hotel they may choose to stay in.

However, the downside is that having an autoloading video on the homepage can massively slow the website down, meaning that the SEO might sometimes be affected.

So, if your business offers a good user experience, in that the website is simple to use and shoppers can easily find a product or a service, then they are likely to return. Therefore, if you make your company website fast, you are improving the user experience, meaning that you are making it simpler for shoppers to buy products or services from you.

Therefore, when they need to buy an item again, they may return to your company website to do so. However, if the website is slow, and for example, they may have had difficulty processing their payment because the website was so slow, then you are likely to get repeat customers.

We have a WordPress website. Can we make an AMP page?

If your business, owns a WordPress website, then it can be straightforward to create an AMP page. However, before you do this work, we would recommend hiring a web designer to do it, plus also making a backup of the website before you add an AMP page.

AMP WordPress plugin, produced by Automattic

Talk to your web design agency about which WordPress plugin they recommend using; you may wish to use a WordPress plugin called “Automattic”.

Ask a web designer for help.

Sometimes, you will need the help of a web developer to activate an AMP version of the website.

How we can help:

We are a highly experienced web design agency. Our business, that’s based right in the heart of Cardiff’s city centre, can offer your business the following services:

– White hat SEO
– Organic SEO
– Local SEO
– WordPress web design
– Web design services
– SEO consultants
– We are a highly experienced web design agency

How much does it cost to get a WordPress brochure website designed in Cardiff?

The vast majority of the websites we design will be brochure websites that are ten pages or less. We often use a CMS called “WordPress” to design these websites. The cost varies depending on how many pages the business requires, yet we can design a 7-page brochure website for just £950.00. Most businesses, ranging from construction companies to plumbers to solicitors, often need a brochure website, and we can design this type of business website in a short period of time.

How much does website hosting cost?

We offer to host the website for free for the first year. Normally, we offer website hosting for a flat fee of £100 per year for us to host a brochure website.

How much does SEO cost in Cardiff?

SEO is a completely separate service that we offer; search engine optimisation takes up a lot of time. If the work is high quality, white hat, and follows the advice of Google E-EAT, then it can take a lot of time each month. We therefore offer a minimum price of £500 per month, up to £5k per month, depending on the level of competition that the business faces.

How long does it take to design a website?

We can design most brochures and websites in less than 3 weeks.

Why your web design company should know about Google E-EAT

Date: 23/10/2024

Subject: Google E-EAT

Google does make improvements to its algorithm as regularly as clockwork. This is to help keep spam off the 1st page results on Google. However, even if a web design business doesn’t offer SEO, this doesn’t mean that it should be aware of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and Google E-EAT guidelines.

Most businesses want to improve their organic search engine optimisation; you must ensure your website has a good E-EAT score.
So, what is Google E-EAT?

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Google employs quality checkers, known as quality evaluators, who have a tick-list, if you like, for evaluating whether a blog post or page on a company website is good quality.
Therefore, built into Google’s algorithms, it works out your business Google E-EAT score.

What does Google E-EAT mean?
Experience

So, do Google’s algorithms want to determine whether the author of the work has firsthand experience of what they are writing about? For example, sometimes, it’s clear when reading a page or blog post that the author has an in-depth knowledge about what they are talking about.
The text offers clear and helpful advice. Google’s algorithms, therefore, want to place businesses on the first page that provides helpful guidance. Thus, Google’s E-EAT is looking to determine whether the author has experience with what they are talking about.

Expertise

Again, this is similar to experience; how much expertise does the author have with what they are talking about? It is 700 words of waffle about, let’s say, a jacuzzi, or it is an article that explains clearly why that product is high quality and has an in-built filtration system patented by the business to keep the water fresh.

The point we are trying to make is that when writing content marketing, the work must be written by someone with a good level of knowledge regarding what you are writing about.

So, as web designers, here’s our best advice when writing content marketing for the main pages. For those who don’t know, this is simply the text.

– Make sure the content marketing is unique; don’t copy and paste it
– Use the main pages as a way of showing your business are experts at what you are talking about
– Make sure the work is helpful to your shoppers

– Go the extra mile, write text, offer practical advice via YouTube video, get infographics created to make the page enjoyable for the shopper

Authoritativeness

For example, Google’s algorithms use backlinks to check the authoritativeness of a website or page.

For example, if a well-known company or person links to the work, it signals that they like it.

So, let’s give you an example: If Barry Schwartz linked to us from his website, SEO Round Table, www.seroundtable.com, because Barry is an extremely well-known and respected SEO consultant, this would help that page or blog post rank better in the Google SERPs.

So, Google’s algorithms use the number of backlinks and citations to determine a page’s authoritativeness.

Trustworthiness

Google’s algorithms will likely use Google Knowledge Graph to ensure that the facts and the statistics a business mentions are accurate.
This is important because shoppers want helpful advice and don’t want to make a buying decision based on false facts.
So, Google’s algorithm using Google E-EAT determines whether the facts and statistics are correct.

So why do web designers need to know about Google E-EAT?

Google E-EAT means that web designers, SEO companies, and any business that publishes content marketing must ensure that the work is well-written and high-quality.

It must be the work that shoppers read, and it must help them with a question they want answered. For example, it could help the customer find an energy-efficient washing machine by, say, writing a blog post stating the company’s four most energy-efficient washing machines.

The article could clearly state the washing machine’s features to make it energy efficient. Therefore, it would not be just 700 words of waffle trying to sell more washing machines without answering the customer’s question.
So why should web designers/businesses know about Google E-EAT?

Seo

If Google’s algorithm states that your business website has a high Google E-EAT score, your business is likely to rank higher in the SERPs. That’s why any business that wants to improve its organic SEO needs to know about Google E-EAT.

So, how can our business improve our Google E-EAT score?

This article is essential for web designers because businesses or web design agencies sometimes rush to write the text for pages when a website is designed.

This often means that you have a “content-thin” website, a page, or a blog post that offers little information, possibly just a few lines of text.
This is not good because offering such little advice means that often, you don’t offer enough information for the customer to answer their questions.

Content marketing, instead, must be helpful and well-written. Often, you need a lot of well-written text, but you should also complement this with a YouTube video embedded on the page, infographics, and bullet points.

Now, for Google to give your business website a good Google E-EAT score, here are our recommendations on what you should do.
Copywriters should work with the client closely.

So, content marketing must show firsthand experience, and the copywriters must work closely with the business’s directors or staff to use their knowledge of a product or service and incorporate that knowledge into the text.

This will make the work more helpful for the customer and show Google’s algorithms that you are an expert on what you are writing about because you will have gained help from an expert when writing about that product or service.

Demonstrate Expertise

So, again, I will work with experts on that product or service to help write the evergreen content marketing, main pages, and blog posts.
Whether you sell car insurance or run a solicitors practice, make sure that the copywriters at the web design company work with you to write high-quality content marketing. The work must be unique, well written, and show your real expertise in the product/services you sell.

Also, make sure that information is kept up to date. For example, if you add facts and statistics from 2018, well, make sure that you update this every few years; otherwise, the information starts to get old and outdated.

Build Authoritativeness

This is easier said than done because it is hard to build quality links. However, if you write top-quality content marketing, then other businesses and bloggers may choose to link to your work.

So, when you log into your backlink-checking tool, say Moz Pro, which we highly recommend, you might start to see that your business’s blog posts and main pages are starting to obtain high-quality backlinks. This is how you improve your business’s authoritativeness.

Improve your trustworthiness

To do this, incorporate reviews from customers on your website. Ensure all the facts and statistics are mentioned; you may want to add an outbound link to show where you obtained the facts you mentioned in the article.

Also, ensure that you keep the page or blog post updated and that the website is secure, so add an SSL certificate.

Do you need a new website designed

For over 10 years, we have designed very high-quality websites for Welsh businesses. If you run a business in Cardiff and need a website designed, why not give us a call?

Introduction

So, whether you sell surfboards or are a top lawyer in your area, the homepage will be your website’s most important page.

The design must be correct, as it often influences whether a shopper stays or jumps to one of your competitor’s websites.

Because our WordPress designers have been designing quality websites for a very long time—over 10 years—we are well placed to offer you some design tips.

Here we go, so before you start slapping together a homepage design, pause, take a break and brew. Have a good read of this article; it will offer you some of our best advice:

Layout is crucial

If you provide too much information and pictures, you will overwhelm the shopper, slow down the load time, and lose shoppers.
So, it’s better to balance offering advice and helping the shopper but don’t go overboard with writing a ton of text.

Hire a WordPress web designer.

So, first thing, check if WordPress is the right content management system for your business; for our web design company, we would say that for the vast majority of people who contact us, most of the time 99.9% of the time, WordPress meets and exceeds what they need from a website.

However, sometimes, it might not be enough, so get a packet of biscuits, brew, and sit down with your web designers to chat about which content management system is right for your business. And there’s a lot to choose from. Popular CMSs that many British businesses have chosen include Drupal, Squarespace, and Joomla.

Act like a signpost

So, you know, when you visit a famous landmark or walk along a famous street, say in Hollywood- well, often there are clear signposts.
That’s because tourists often don’t know the area and need guidance to get to the attractions.

So, signposts are helpful.

So think of this when designing a homepage for your business: Your business’s organic SEO could potentially attract thousands of visitors every month.

Therefore, you must consider how to direct all those visitors to the right product or service as simply as possible.
So, the homepage has to act like a signpost, be clear, and have simple-to-use main navigation. It also needs to use a call to action and have internal links.

Now, if your main selling item is, let’s say, a fridge freezer, the homepage needs super clear pictures of that item and a call to action, such as “sale now on fridge freezers,” which gets the shopper as quickly as possible to that page.

On-page SEO

So, it’s essential to offer helpful information to your shoppers. It is also important to have a perfect design so shoppers on your company website are impressed by the website and company branding.

But when you look at the companies on page one of Google.co.uk, you will see they also have good on-page SEO. They use the H1 through to

H6 tags, with well-written meta titles and descriptions, alt text, anchor text, and well-written content marketing.

So, the on-page SEO must also be good; otherwise, shoppers won’t be able to find your company on Google.

So, a well-designed homepage must have the following

– Have a good design to impress shoppers
– Have good on-page SEO
– Must offer helpful advice

Why not use drop-down menus?

One way of helping shoppers is to have an FAQ section on every page. For example, a salesperson in a shop often gets asked the same questions daily by customers. Well, this is precisely the same for online businesses.

Customers will want to know the delivery time, the returns policy, and whether the product is environmentally friendly.

Answering these questions can require a lot of text, which could overwhelm the reader if it is added to the page too soon.
So, just a design tip, why not use the drop-down boxes and offer helpful advice to your customers via drop-down boxes?

Stock photos

Most web design companies use stock photos because a business might be just getting started and might not want to spend 3k on a photo shoot and hire a videographer for the day.

So, many businesses, including those we have worked for in Cardiff, often ask our web designers to use stock photos to get a website live at a lower price.

However, some stock photos don’t suit the business. For example, if you’re, let’s say, a loft conversion company and the outsides of the houses are American-style homes rather than the properties you would usually see here in Britain, this can be off-putting for a shopper, as it’s clear that the loft conversions and construction work weren’t completed here in Britain.

Using stock photos is acceptable; however, the web design business and the client must pick the right ones. Because we have been building websites for a very long time, we can say that selecting the right photos often takes a long time. So, if you want the homepage and your company website to look good, we recommend that you work with the web designers to ensure the right stock photos are chosen.

Calls to action

So, when you walk into a car dealership in the U.K., there are many calls to action.
Such as “low-cost finance, talk to us today”, prompting the customer to discuss car finance options.

Now, you should prompt the shopper on your company website, such as “Sign up for our newsletter, or would you like us to call you back?”
Or, perhaps, just a bold, buy it now button. CTAs encourage the shopper to purchase something from you or to sign up for a company newsletter, for example. This can help the business generate more sales, so CTAs should be part of the web design.

YouTube video

So, it doesn’t matter what type of business you run. Often, your business website would benefit from having a member of staff explain the benefits of buying that item or service from you.

If you’re a small business, why not have the company director simply offer a quick introduction to introduce your business? For example, when a shopper hears that the company has been trading for over 25 years in Wales, it instantly makes shoppers trust it more.

So, YouTube videos added to the homepage and main pages help you sell and explain why shoppers should choose your business. Often, shoppers don’t want to read large amounts of text. Yet watching the company director, for example, showing you a quick walk around the showroom where you sell, let’s say, sofas instantly tell the customer more about the products that you’re selling.

Social media

Add social media buttons to your website’s header. Your web design company can do this for you. If a customer decides not to buy from you right then, they may add your business to their Facebook account.

Then, when your business is running a promotion, your advertisement may appear in their feed, and they may decide to purchase from you later. This is always why we say to businesses to add social media icons in the header, but you may also want to add them to the footer.

You may also want to add clear CTAs to tell the customer why not follow us on Facebook, X or, let’s say, LinkedIn.

Clear pricing

Offer transparent pricing; for example, if you offer a fixed-price service, make this clear on the homepage. Our web design company provides to design a 7-page website for £950.00. We make this clear on the homepage because shoppers are often more likely to read other pages and more about your services when they can quickly obtain a price.

Call us today

Here at W&P, we can offer the following services:

– Web Design for business in Cardiff
– SEO

Why not call us today:

Why is it so important for any business to have a well-designed mobile version of their website

Let’s face it: many of us are glued to our smartphones. If the battery dies, we often can’t wait until it’s charged to check our social media feeds or when our food will be delivered.

Smartphones have become part of our everyday lives as people buy the goods and services they need.
We all know that smartphones are an essential part of modern life. Yet here’s the thing: Many businesses make the mistake of thinking that getting a business website designed and making it responsive is just something that’s needed.

The website needs to be responsive, yet that doesn’t automatically make the mobile design good.

So, a conversation with your web designers might go a bit something like this:
– “Included in the price, will the website work on smartphones and tablets?”.

Now, normally, for a fixed fee, web designers will design a mobile version of the website. Yet here’s the thing: a website might be responsive, yet it might not be that good. It might have a super high bounce rate, be slow, or be difficult to use, resulting in the website falling down

Google’s SERPs faster than you can say bad design.

What are the features that make a mobile design suitable:
– Very simple to use
– Fast, your mobile version of your website must be high-speed, if not supersonic
– Have a low bounce rate
– Text and font must be simple to read
– The main menu should be a piece of cake to use
– Must have reliable hosting
– Must follow white hat SEO methods

So, what’s mobile-first design?

So, walk into most web design offices, say from the early 2000s through around 2014, and most web designers were solely focused on getting the desktop design of the website right. So when the client walks in and sees the new business website, they are instantly impressed, and the mobile version of the website—well, often, that wasn’t considered that important back then.

However, things changed.

Google introduced “mobile-first indexing”

This basically means that the company website’s mobile version gets indexed first. More and more shoppers started buying everything from new woolly jumpers to sports cars off their mobile phones.

So, in a nutshell, more shoppers started buying goods and services off their mobile phones, as the mobile phone networks around faster internet on the move. Plus, smartphones began getting faster and faster, thanks to innovations with the processors, with companies such as Snap Dragon making faster processors.

Therefore, it was inevitable that buying habits would change. Someone who needs, say, a new toaster is not going to flip open their work laptop to make a purchase; often, with a few clicks on their smartphone, they just buy that item.

So, this means that we web designers, web developers, and SEO experts have to pay a lot of attention to designing a really good desktop version of the website, but the same, or even sometimes more effort, needs to be paid to designing the mobile version of the website.

What will I learn from reading this article?

• You will learn what mobile first design means
• Why it’s important to hire the right web designers in Cardiff
• And why do you need to consider U.X that’s, user

Mobile-first design

According to StatCounter, over 53.91% of shoppers now use their mobile phones for web browsing.

So, in a nutshell, this is why it’s crucial that when you purchase a website for your business, the desktop version must be well designed, but so must the mobile version as well. Now, from an SEO perspective, it’s even more important than ever that the mobile version is well designed because of “mobile-first indexing”—meaning the content marketing and on-page SEO on the mobile version get indexed by Googlebot first.
This is why the mobile version of the website must be well designed and have good quality white hat SEO applied to it.

So, what are the main benefits of responsive web design?

Just consider how long you spend on your smartphone/tablet daily.

Some interesting statistics were published back in 2022. The average mobile user spends 4 hours and 48 minutes browsing on their smartphones daily. That statistic comes from APP Annies State of Mobile Report 2022.

So, what that tells us is simple: If your Cardiff business doesn’t have a good web design, complimented by excellent SEO and digital marketing, well, during those 4 hours, 48 minutes per day a shopper spends on the phone, your business is not going to appear.

Without investing in good quality SEO, for example, your business is unlikely to rank in the top 10 organic results on Google. And because of “mobile-first indexing,” unless you have a mobile version of your website designed, it won’t appear in the mobile Google results.

So, as the old saying goes, you need to be in it, to win it- so, its essential that whatever type of Welsh business you run, if you want to gain more shoppers, that shopping on their smartphones, then you need to have a mobile website designed for your business.

Responsive web design helps to:

How do you design a well-designed responsive website?

SEO agencies and web design agencies spend a lot of time building and designing the mobile version of a company website. Often, the designers design a good website but then constantly work on it, say every month, to improve it and lower the bounce rate.

So, for example, let’s say that you run an online e-commerce business selling clothes. Often, there will be an SEO agency or, let’s say, an in-house marketing team, which should work hard to lower the bounce rate and improve the time on site. So, to do this, web designers often use split testing, or some marketing agencies call this A/B testing.

The point that we are trying to make here is that web designers often design a responsive version of a website and work on improving design even more on an ongoing basis.

So, how to design an excellent responsive website>

Have to improve the readability

There’s no point in splashing out tens of thousands of pounds on getting a new e-commerce website designed if the font doesn’t load on some smartphones or if the font is just really hard to read.
So, whatever font you use, make sure it’s simple to read, but more than that, it should work on all smartphones and tablets.

Create a picture: people waiting in long queues at supermarkets and self-checkout areas all look unhappy because of the wait.

Supersonic

Have you ever stood for a while in a queue in a supermarket self-checkout area? Well, you often hear people moaning and groaning about the wait, which can last just a few minutes.

But because they have a basket full of milk, bread, and chocolate bars, they are often around until a till becomes available.
However, when you’re running an online business, you have to bear in mind that shoppers won’t wait around. Therefore, if your company website is slow, say on a smartphone, shoppers won’t be willing to wait. They will leave the website and often head directly to a competitor’s website. This means that the business will get a sky-high bounce rate, which is not good for the business’s organic SEO.

So, purchase fast, super-fast website hosting and make sure the web designer can build a fast website and knows how to design one.

So there you have it; we have explained why mobile-friendly design is crucial, and now here’s the good news:

So when you chat with some web designers, whether that’s a freelancer designing websites in their house or a large web design agency full of 70+ staff. Usually, they will charge you extra for designing and building a responsive version of the company website.

However, we are cut from different clothes, and we are different.

We know that when a business needs a new website in Cardiff, whether it’s an MOT station or a hairdresser, we know your customers are going to want to access your website off their phones. Whether that be the latest iPhone 17 or a Samsung Galaxy, the website must work on a range of different smartphone brands.

Here at W&P Designs, a well-known web design agency in Cardiff, when we offer a quote to design a website, our quote always includes

designing the mobile version.

Some web design businesses charge extra for designing a mobile version of the company website. However, we like to offer excellent value for money, so we offer to create the mobile version of the website. We often provide free hosting for the first year.

Would you like a web design quote?

Whether you run a plumbing or beauty business, we can design an amazing website for your company.

Come to us, give us a call today:

AI and web design

Marketing / Web Design

It can be difficult to estimate the time it takes to design a website. Let’s give you an example: The client wants a picture of someone wearing running trainers running through a park.

Sounds simple, right?

Well, you could spend 30 minutes or more looking for the right stock photo on Adobe Stock Photos, or you could spend more than that editing and perfecting an image so you get it the way you want it to look.

Times that by a hundred, and web design takes a lot of time.

So now you can see why so many web design agencies have put their espressos down and started to wonder how artificial intelligence is changing web design and how it can revolutionise future website design.

Let’s dive in, A. I and web design

Are you stuck for an idea of what to write about for the latest blog post?

Well, why not chat with ChatGPT if you are struggling to develop some good ideas about what to write about for your latest blog posts?
Don’t get us wrong; here at our web design agency, we will have copywriters writing the text.

However, picture this: It’s a rather cold winter morning, and your copywriters have just arrived at the office.

Two espressos later, they struggled to develop a coherent plan on what to write for a solicitor website’s latest article.

Well, this, my friend, is where Chat GPT comes into its own.

It acts like a de-icer to the car window, instantly making things clear.

You can chat with ChatGPT; suddenly, your creative juices are free-flowing, and you know what to write about.

Thanks, ChatGPT. We think you’re great.

Huemint

Have you tried changing ties or shirts before a meeting to get the look just right?

Now, you might think, don’t want blue shirt today, don’t want red, don’t want white.

So, it can take a relatively long time to choose the fitting shirt and tie—this is the same when designing a website. Getting the colour scheme right is essential. Do you want to convey a sense that you’re selling a luxury product, for example?

Do you want to convey that you’re a funky, modern company with bright in your-face colours used?

This is where you might want to use Huemint to determine which colour scheme you want to use on your new website.

Fontjoy

Which font you use can significantly impact the website’s appearance. A good font can make the website look stylish as if you are reading flowing text as you land on each page.

However, some fonts make the website look dated, old-fashioned, and behind the times.

This is why businesses and web designers use handy tools such as FontJoy, which can help us narrow down which font to use.

Teleport HQ

A bricklayer today wouldn’t carry bricks up a ladder; it’s not safe and is hard work. Neither would they pull bricks up using a pulley.
No. They just wouldn’t.

This is why web design agencies worldwide sometimes don’t design a website from scratch. To bring the cost of the web design down for the customer, there’s often some “heavy lifting” that can be removed by using tools such as Teleport HQ. Here, you can get a rough outline of a site created, offering a good starting point for those who want to create a website for their business.

3D compositions

Blender is an advanced AI tool that can create 3D elements.

Dalle2 and Midjourney

It used to be the case that if you wanted to add a picture of someone sitting enjoying craft beer with a large glass beer, well, eating wood-fired pizza, with a wood-fired oven burning in the background, outside an old-fashioned pub, then you often had to hire a photographer for the day or morning at least.

Yet, as the picture above shows, you can create AI photos with a few clicks of the mouse in seconds. These are great to add to, say, a blog post to enhance it and make the text more interesting; after all, which shopper wants to read 3,000 words without any pictures added to make it more enjoyable?

It helps the customer understand how the website could look

So, for example, instead of hiring a photographer for the day, some web designers use ChatGPT to place some A. I took photos on the website as a temporary way of designing it.

It gives the web developers and the client a good idea of what the website could look like when finished.

Then, once the client says, “I like the text and the pictures you’ve added with A.I.,” the real photos can be taken and added.

So, for example, if a brand new restaurant is opening up, let’s say a steak restaurant, then you could add A. I took a photo to show how we raise our herd very well. This one is the team, this one is someone eating a steak, and this one is a cow in the field. Then that allows the web designers to set out the pictures to design the website, and then the client can say, swap this part, replace that, etc.

The photographer obviously knows what photos they must take and what the client wants, so the A. It allows you to visualise the website before it’s even been completed.

A.I can help to write code

CSS styling, PHP, HTML structure or JavaScript functionalities

We web designers often encounter glitches and errors developed with a company’s website.
Many web designers use A. I have tools to fix problems with a website’s code.

Chatbots

Hiring a customer service team is expensive, yet they are often needed because customers usually have complicated queries that need to be answered, such as “My parcel says it’s been delivered to my bin, and it’s not there; it’s not in the bin.”

A chatbot cannot help locate where the parcels have gone, so a customer service team is essential.
However, more and more businesses now want their web developers to design a WordPress website which has built a chatbot into the website.

There are various chatbots you can use. Some only offer basic functionality: a customer selects a button, which generates a pre-written

answer.

On the other hand, some web designers are adding highly sophisticated chatbots, so sometimes, shoppers might not even realise they are conversing with a chatbot.

How you use various A. I have tools to improve the design of your company website

So, how do some U.K. web designers use A? I have tools right now to design websites for their clients:

Logo design

A lot of businesses use Stable Diffusion, using what’s called the LORA model, to design their logos. Another option is to use Hatchful.

Does your web design agency believe that A? I will replace web designers one day.

So, we are a web design company based in the city centre of Cardiff, South Wales.

Some of our highly skilled PHP web designers have been designing superb websites for well over ten years.

And there’s no two ways about it: web design will change over the following ten years. There is no question about it: we might see drones delivering our parcels, robots bringing out our lunch in restaurants, and we might have A. I am doing a lot of the web design process, even by us just speaking and during the A. I as the website gets built in front of us.

However, hold your horses just for a second.

There’s no substitute for human creativity; there just isn’t.

If we listen to music while enjoying a nice, refreshing pint, sometimes we don’t know why the beat of the drums lifts our mood; it just does.

The same goes for web design. We can make websites that are mass-produced, like nuts and bolts in a factory.

Yet there needs to be that flair or creativity, a sense that the person designing the website understands the business, its main selling points, its company history, and the main benefits of owning that product.

Will A. I pick up on that?

If guided and told to do something, there always needs to be human input, perhaps the web designer.

So we think that web design agencies will always be needed. In the same way, painters and decorators are always required; you could, for example, pop along to a local DIY store, buy some excellent paint and splash it around the living room yourself if you wanted to spend some money on DIY costs.

Yet a lot of people still hire a painter and a decorator?

Why? Because the finish is better, and you save time. And when you come in from your work, you often have the, well, that looks a lot better impression on your face when you see the living room redecorated in lovely colour orange.

Now, this is the same for website design
Sure, you could design a website yourself- but do you want to?

Do you have the time?

When finished, how will it look? A bit basic might do unless you can dedicate a lot of time to writing text and improving the design.

This is why our phones are always busy ringing, with businesses based all over Cardiff wanting a quality website designed at a fair price.

Now, don’t get us wrong, there could come a day when artificial intelligence takes over web design.
But until that day, web design agencies like us are using A. I have tools to help design better websites, create better U.X for shoppers, and design websites faster, which brings down the cost of web design.

Installing WordPress

Subject: WordPress

Date: 17/10/2024

Do you want to install WordPress? First of all, we think that WordPress is amazing, and this guide will help you install it so that you can start designing your brand-new company website.

What’s included in this guide:

• Why our web design agency believes that WordPress is a very good choice for a lot of businesses
• We will explain how to install WordPress
• What you will need to install WordPress
• Where you need it, all programs can be obtained free and securely.
• Where you can obtain all of the programmes you need to do this

Why install WordPress?

First things first, why install WordPress?

WordPress, a free content management system (CMS), is the most popular and widely used worldwide. Roughly 33% of all websites are run on WordPress.

Used by well-known brands

Some of the world’s leading companies use WordPress, which is another reason our web design agency often recommends it to our clients. WordPress is trusted by well-known businesses.

So, what tools will be needed to install WordPress?

We recommend using an FTP client and Webspace.

We will need website hosting. We recommend using a company that offers hosting for WordPress websites. Will your hosting require a PHP database, MySQL, or MariaDB?

Pick a website hosting company that offers a high level of support.

FTP client

You will need to install an FTP client. This allows you to transfer files from your Apple Laptop to hosting online. It’s super simple and often works on a drag-and-drop basis.

Here are some of the programs that you might want to use:

• Cyberduck
• FreeFTP
• Transmit
• FileZilla

Which program do most web designers use?

So we use FileZilla, which many businesses have widely used for a long time. It also works on different operating systems, and many other web design agencies use it globally. Here’s the link if you want to read about FileZilla: https://filezilla-project.org/.

Install WordPress and Filezilaa

Then, it is time to download WordPress itself

WordPress Download

The great news is that WordPress is offered free of charge. Incredibly, it’s provided for free when you consider some other Content Management Systems, which can sometimes charge a monthly or one-off fee. WordPress being offered for free is fantastic.
So, visit WordPress.org to learn more about the benefits of owning a WordPress website for your business.

Hosting and WordPress

WordPress will then be in a zip folder, including all the necessary files. You need to upload these to your hosting. So, when choosing a hosting company, choose one that offers WordPress hosting.

WordPress Install Tutorial
WordPress upload

Now we are ready. Connect FileZilla to your web space. For this, you need the FTP access data from your hosting provider.

How to upload WordPress

This is then when you connect your FileZilla to your hosting; for this, you will need FTP access; you will also need the following information:

• Host
• Username
• Password
• And Port

WordPress Filezilla Data Transfer

WordPress installation

Set the language and connect the database.

When installing WordPress, you will be asked which language you want to use for your backend. Confirm this choice and press continue.

Installing WordPress onto your website hosting
When installing WordPress, there is often an option in the C-panel to do this. You will need information regarding your database name, the server, and password. Often, it’s just a matter of one click, and that is done.

Install WP

WordPress Setup Installation
WordPress setup and installation
So, when installing WordPress, you want to complete the installation. Your web designers will take care of this for you.

Setting up WordPress

WordPress first login

Set up WordPress login details: Choose a password and username, and keep this login information safe. Any SEO companies or, let’s say, web designers working on your website in the future will need this information.

Website hosting and WordPress

You should then receive a notification in your C-Panel that you have successfully installed WordPress.
You can then add a WordPress theme.

Do you require help creating the website?

We have built many WordPress websites for construction businesses, electricians, and carpenters.

We have built WordPress websites for solicitors’ practices.

Would you like to obtain a well-designed website for your business?

We design and build very high-quality websites; our digital marketing agency can offer you the following services:

– Web design
– WordPress web design
– Website Hosting
– Search Engine Optimisation
– Managing your business’s social media

Why do we recommend opting for WordPress?

There are a massive number of content management systems to choose from. Now, if we put ourselves in the shoes of a customer, they often don’t know what CMS to choose.

Drupal or WordPress?

Wix or Squarespace?

We fully appreciate that most businesses don’t know which CMS to choose. However, as we have been building quality and unique websites for businesses all over the U.K. for over ten years, we can say, hand in heart, that we think WordPress is a brilliant option.
Now, the other content management systems out there are also excellent. Some might suit your business better. For example, you might find the dashboard, which is the website’s back-end, more straightforward.

As the old saying goes, there are horses for courses, meaning you must find the option that best suits your business’s requirements.
Now, let us put it this way: choosing a website or a website designer can sometimes mean the difference between your business’s success or failure.
Some businesses are solely and 100% reliant on getting more customers via digital marketing.
Without digital marketing, some businesses may go bust in a very short period.

So, a word to the wise: Choose your website design company carefully, choose a good website designer, and take your time to find the right company and CMS that works for you.

These are, therefore, the considerations that you should make when choosing a web design company and CMS:

– Do you find the admin/ dashboard a piece of cake to use?
– What content management systems are your competitors using? Do you want to use the same?
– Is the CMS simple to update?
– How much is the CMS? Is it within your marketing budget?
– Talk to your SEO consultant/ SEO agency. Do they have experience using that CMS, or do they recommend using it?
– Talk to your friends in business about which content management system they use. Have they encountered any problems or issues with the CMS?

Can WordPress be used as an e-commerce website?

It most certainly can. Millions of businesses worldwide use Woocommerce and WordPress together, and it’s a good partnership.
WordPress and Woocommerce are brilliant, and we highly recommend WordPress to all our clients.

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

The price fluctuates often depending on the area, whether you’re hiring a freelancer or agency or perhaps you’ll have a go at building it yourself.

Building it yourself is sometimes not the cheapest option. On paper, it does appear to be the most affordable option, but if you’re going to spend days on end working out how the dashboard works, how to move a block of text, or, let’s say, how to add a company logo, well, this can be counterproductive.

It can take you well over two weeks to design the website, whereas a highly experienced web designer might have been able to do this work in a fraction of the time.

It’s a bit like tiling your kitchen or painting the living room. You can do this work and save money, but do you want to? What’s the result going to look like? Are you going to have to tear the tiles off the wall because they look wonky?

This is the same with web design. Some businesses think, “How hard can it be to design a website?”

Well, it isn’t accessible if you’ve never done it—there’s much to consider.

So why not hire our highly experienced web design team?

For just £950.00 flat fee, we can design a 7-page website and offer super fast hosting for the first year for free. This offers unbelievable value for money. So why not give us a ring today?

Why you should take your time to find the right website hosting

So, your websites must be speedy if you want to improve your businesses later on, such as organic or local search engine optimisation. It needs to be supersonic because today if you hold up the shopper for even a few seconds, they won’t wait for the website to load. Therefore, the bounce rate can get high.

When you have a cup of tea and sit down with your local SEO company, they will tell you that a high bounce rate is not good news.

It tells search engines, such as Google, that many visitors are not interested in visiting another page on your website; they’re turning around and going elsewhere.

So, you don’t want this.

You want engaged shoppers who view many products and pages and ultimately part with their hard-earned money. So you want engaged shoppers who read various guides, look at many products, and read your company’s information about us, for example.

In summary, you want the bounce rate to be low, and you want engaged shoppers. Therefore, one way to minimise that bounce rate is to purchase fast website hosting.

Do many businesses within Cardiff use WordPress?

Yes, whether you run a dog-walking business or a local bean counter, i.e., an account, ask your website designers to run a search for your type of business within Cardiff.

Such as “family lawyers + city name”

Then, have a look at the website’s source code.

Your web designers will then be able to examine the source code and tell you how many of the businesses ranked in the first ten results on Google.co.uk are using a WordPress website.

You often find that many of the businesses on the first page use WordPress. Don’t get us wrong; you still need to apply a lot of SEO and hard work to get any business onto page one of Google.co.uk.

The point we are trying to make here is how popular WordPress is with many businesses. You will often find that some of your direct competitors within Cardiff frequently use WordPress as it is simply such a brilliant CMS.

So, you’ve just got off the phone with your SEO agency. It’s the first month that they have been working for you. They’ve logged in to an SEO tool such as Google Analytics, and in a matter of just a few seconds, they can see that the bounce rate is through the roof.

There can be many different reasons for this, but often, it boils down to two main factors: the website being too slow or the design being just, well, a bit rubbish, putting off potential shoppers.

So, first things first:

What is a bounce rate, and how is it calculated?

So, the bounce rate is calculated when a shopper visits a single page or blog post on your website and then doesn’t take any action, such as clicking on another page. The shopper, therefore, leaves the website without browsing any of the products you have for sale.
Now, this is bad news on two fronts:

Costing the business sales

So, if many shoppers leave more or less straight away, they may not like the design or find the website a bit difficult to use.
Either way, they are not purchasing items, which means that the business is not making sales. Now, it could just be that the website is too basic, looks a bit rubbish, or that the customer can’t find the answer that they are looking for.

The really good web designers, the web design agencies that design good websites, often keep things simple. They put themselves in the customers’ shoes. What products/services do they want? How can you make it a piece of cake for them to get to that page from, say, the homepage?

Then, there’s often a lot of effort that goes into producing the content marketing, so it’s helpful, useful, and useful so that it helps the shopper.

If a customer can’t find an answer to a question, such as how energy efficient a washing machine is, they will just leave the business, increasing the bounce rate.

Bad for SEO

So, if thousands, if not millions, of shoppers are leaving your website faster than you can shout “bounce rate,” then it is not good for the company’s search engine optimisation. Google, as well as other search engines like Bing, see that shoppers are not spending too long on the website, which shows low engagement. This means that the business, over time, starts to go down the ranks and not up.

You need to create a better user experience that doesn’t need to cost a fortune.

Many web design agencies always talk about improving a business’s UX, but what does this even mean?
When you walk into a car showroom, the car retailers want to make it a pleasant experience.
Perhaps a friendly, smiling face at the front of the house, a free coffee, and light, bright, and airy spaces where the cars are illuminated and shining like stars.

This puts the product, the car, in its best light.

If you had to see the car in the middle of a muddy field on a winter’s day, you would not purchase it.
So, it’s all about generating a positive experience, and you must think about this when designing your company website. How can you improve the U.X.

Well, let us give you just a few ideas and suggestions on how you can improve your website U.X.

– make your website super sonic fast
– design the website so it is simple to use; don’t make it complicated and complex. The bounce rate will go through the roof
– use a font type that works on all mobiles and desktops

Work with highly experienced UX designers to design the mobile version of a website.

Let’s say you’re purchasing a rather expensive pair of running trainers on your Apple iPhone; the bounce rate will often increase sharply if the website is not simple to use.

So, for example, in a burger menu where the icon is just too small, some shoppers might not be able to click the icon. Therefore, they may be unable to work out how to use the main menu and, thus, leave the company website.

Use Google PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix to improve page speed

In an age of bullet trains, 5G mobiles, and fast electric cars, we all like things to go fast.

So, if your company website is loading slowly, work with a local web design company. They can use Google PageSpeed and GT Metrix to find ways to make your website faster.

For improve to improve the U.X the website designers could make the website faster by:

– improving load times
– switching the hosting company to a hosting company that offers faster website hosting
– get an AMP website designed.

Is the website navigation super simple to use?

So, many businesses have opted for burger menus or an expanding menu that goes across the whole screen, and you can pick a page you want.

Regardless of which type of main menu you go for, just make sure that it’s designed to be super simple to use. If the main menu is not a piece of cake to use, and shoppers find it a headache to locate the products they want, they often leave, and yes, that means, yet again, the bounce rate is increasing.

Come to us; we can design a fantastic website for your business

We design amazing websites that offer a good U.X. Our websites are fast, well-designed and offered at great prices. So why not call us today?

In this in-depth article, we explain how much it costs to get a website designed for your business and why sometimes the lowest-cost option is not always the best for web design.

Web design

Table of contents

• Why it’s essential to get an excellent website designed and not just go for the cheapest option
• Why we recommend WordPress
• Why do you also need to work out what is not included in the web design cost

So, how much does a website cost? Well, often, the cheapest options may not be that cheap once you factor in everything you need. For example, you will need super fast hosting, a responsive website, and often at least seven pages designed, plus the text written.

So, often, that super cheap price, at the end of the day, once you’ve added in everything you need, is not so cheap.
Weight up, therefore, by getting everything you need from a company that you know will design a website that will serve your business well over many consecutive years.

Investing in a quality website

So, there are websites, and then there are websites- what do we mean by that?

Well, some websites cut the mustard and are just good; some are just online business cards, which tell the business name, address, phone number, and a brief introduction of the services.

In 2023, 72% of businesses will have a professional website, meaning your business faces enormous competition. So, just having a “run of the mill” website is not enough. It would be best to have something that stands out, is well-designed, and makes an excellent first impression.

Website Design Services

Website design services

First impressions matter

When you first meet somebody, you consciously or unconsciously decide whether you like that person, right?

Well, this is the same for a company website. It’s said that it only takes 0.5 seconds for a shopper to make a decision about a business. So, you could be spending hundreds of hours improving search engine optimisation and paying a small fortune to an SEO agency to get the business ranked higher on Google.

But you could be flogging a dead horse if the design is good. As we just mentioned, it only takes a blink of an eye, 0.5 seconds, for a shopper to decide if they like that business, if they will stay on the website, or if they will leave.

Make sure everything works as it should

We think that one of the best TV commercials was made by Honda. It was simply brilliant; the message they were putting across was clear: “isn’t it just nice when things work?”.

This is a clear statement to promote the reality of their cars and their sound quality.

You should think about this when designing a website: it’s all good to have an ultra-complex, impressive design, yet if the complex design means it doesn’t work simply, then the bounce rate will go through the roof.

Poor functionality causes 42% of people to leave a site; basically, if something doesn’t work that well, or it’s just tricky to sort products by, say, price, whether they’re in stock, by customer ratings, well, customers will leave, increasing the bounce rate.

So, let’s get down to the nitty gritty—how much does a website cost to build in the U.K.?

Free

Free? Really?

Well, yes, there are websites that a business can build for free.

Yet, the quality of these websites depends on how much time you want to invest in designing them.

It’s a bit like hiring a painter and decorator. Sure, you could paint the living room yourself—but do you want to?

Do you have the time?

Will it look good in the end? Or will your furniture be covered in paint splashes, and will the “cutting in” look like a dog’s leg?

Well, this is the same for web design. You might design a website that puts customers off, and they swiftly leave the website, causing the bounce rate to increase. So rather than making a sale, you could have a website that just has a very high bounce rate across every single page.

Freelancer

So, let’s say we are talking about getting a relatively simple website built, a brochure website. Well, in the U.K., if you hire a freelancer, this would cost anywhere from £700 to £2500.00, depending on how intricate the design is.

Web design agency

Web design agencies typically employ many staff, often around 20 on average, so the overheads are higher.

This means that it’s often the most costly to get a website designed by a web design agency. At the same time, there are benefits to choosing an agency, in that they have a staff, and the website can often be built much faster. Also, you usually have a group of staff with a diverse range of marketing skills, so whether you need help with SEO, graphic design or help to promote your business on social media, often there’s a wide range of different staff that you can hire to help promote your business.

Would you like to hire our super-talented web designers?

Whether you’re about to open a funky coffee shop in Cardiff or a brand-new car insurance company, we are on hand to help. We are a well-known web design agency that can help you with every aspect of your digital marketing.

We are the WordPress web design experts in Cardiff, so if you would like a quote to build a quality WordPress website, why not call us?

Table of contents:

• What exactly is a website’s wireframe?
• Why should your web designers create a website wireframe?
• Are wireframes needed for every single website designed by web designers?
• How to create a simple wireframe
• Wireframe examples

Introduction

You might be about to launch a brand-new business?

Therefore, you may have contacted various web designers to explain how you want your website to be designed.
The various web design companies might all say that creating a wireframe for your new website is crucial.
Yet now you might be wondering, well, what is a wireframe?

What is its purpose?

How can it help me obtain a brilliant and well-designed website for my business?
Strap yourself in and get comfortable, because this comprehensive article will tell you everything you need to know about wireframes and why they are needed during the web design process.
Create a picture: someone designing wireframes on a tablet.

Think of wireframes like a set of architects’ plans

When you’re getting a relatively simple extension added to your house, a builder doesn’t just rock up with his van and start laying bricks willy-nilly.

There will be a set of architectural plans in place that the construction firm should follow. This is the same when designing a website; however instead of architectural drawings, you have wireframes that web designers construct to later design say a Drupal, Joomla or WordPress website. This allows an outline to be sketched based on the website’s appearance.

Wireframes therefore allow:

– Rough sketch of a website to be created
– Directors and stakeholders to have input on changes / improvements they want made before finished design goes live
– Using high fidelity wireframes gives you a good idea of what the website looks like, before it goes live

User experience (U.X) and putting the customer first

Just as when you’re designing the interior layout of the new shop, you will have a lot of people giving their input into how the design should look. For example, how the lightening should work, what flooring to use, which colour you should be painting the walls.
This is the same as with a new company website; there will often be many stakeholders, company directors, marketing managers, and senior employees which will all have input into how the website should look. For example:

– Which hex codes / colour schemes should you use?
– Which CMS should you use
– What should the footer look like?
– How the home page look?
– Which website hosting company are you going to use?
– How should the layout of the main pages look?

 
These are all questions that businesses often have, and these are the conversations that web design agencies, have with their clients often on a daily basis.

For example conversations are often had to discuss the website’s typography, colour scheme that’s going be used, and page layout for example, as these are all important considerations that will need to be thought about when designing a brand new company website.

Now, if you’re going to hire a web developer, they may decide to dive in headfirst and start designing the website without using wireframes.
What often happens is that many, if not even hundreds, of changes need to be made if the client is not happy with the finished design.

Therefore, it is a good idea to get a rough sketch and create a wireframe, whether “high-fidelity” or a “low-fidelity” wireframe created.

Don’t worry if you don’t know what high-fidelity and low-fidelity wireframes mean; we will explain more about this later on in the article.

High-fidelity wireframes are detailed and closely resemble the final website, while low-fidelity wireframes are more straightforward and focus on the basic structure and layout.

So, what exactly is a website wireframe?

The website wireframe is simply like a rough sketch of your website.

It allows you to plan what functionality your website needs, such as where the contact us boxes, buttons and CTA’S should go.
It also allows web designers / web developers to place where the pictures on your company website should go, and where the text should go where the buttons should go.

As we shall explain later in this article, when creating wireframes you don’t need expensive computer software to design them. It’s not uncommon for a business, for example when designing a simple brochure website, for the client to rock up at the web designers offices with a piece of graph paper laying out how they want the website designed.

Create a picture: Someone designing wireframe for a website on pen and paper.

Can you skip designing wireframes to say money and time?

You can skip the wireframe stage, which can bring down the cost of designing that website.
However, to do this, the web designer and the client must be on the same page. You might be scratching your head, thinking, “Well, what does that mean?”

This means that the web design team and the client need a very clear idea of how the website will look.

Therefore, they need to agree on, for example, the page layout, the typography, the logo, and the colour scheme they used.
And what we would encourage, at a minimum, is a very basic mockup. A low-fidelity mockup is created at a minimum using wireframes.

The reason for this is that on the day of the website’s grand unveiling, let’s say you’re asked to visit the web design agency’s offices to see the finished design.

You might be anxious about the website’s appearance because it’s been months in the construction stage.

The risk of not having wireframes created is that during the website’s grand unveiling, you might look disappointed.

That’s because the web designer thought you wanted the website designed that way, but it might be different from what you had envisaged.

Therefore, the website might look overly basic and a bit naff.

So what wireframes actually do is allow a very concrete idea of how the website is going to look.

Because a high-fidelity wireframe actually sets out everything from web buttons to the main menu, the picture layout, the text layout, you can gain a very good understanding of how the website is going to look before it even gets finished.

So, in more instances, can you skip designing a wireframe?

You might find some web design companies that absolutely insist that a wireframe is needed no matter what type of website is designed.
However, in some instances, we think this is overkill, and it actually costs the client an unnecessary amount of money.

As we know by now, a wireframe is simply a blueprint, a rough sketch of how the website will look.
This is all well and good- but let’s say that your web design company charges a minimum of £2000 to design wireframes for the website’s desktop and mobile versions of the website, which sounds reasonable if its say a 25-page website.

Let’s say that you need a basic one-page website to set up an event.
Its lets say a rock festival event is about to take place. You need a one-page website that links you to a ticket management company that handles ticket sales for you.

This sounds like a relatively simple website, so do you need a wireframe constructed?

In this instance, we would say that if the client and the web developers are same page regarding what is needed from the design, and sometimes, then sometimes you can actually skip the wireframe stage. For instance, a wireframe may be unnecessary if you’re creating a simple one-page website for an event or if the design requirements are straightforward and well-understood.

This can save about weeks’ worth of work in some instances or even more if it’s a large e-commerce site. These potential time and cost savings can be a relief, especially for businesses with tight schedules and budgets.
So how do you begin designing wireframes?

First, you have to think of the goal you want to obtain.

Let’s say it’s garden fencing business, just as an example.

How can you design the best website to bring as many visitors from Google as possible so you can sell more fencing?
So this adds another element to the web design process because what can happen with web designers is that they have a tunnel vision of just making the website look good and impressive, which is, of course, important.

When you think about your customers, you start to think about their questions they often have and how you can bring as more through shoppers to your website as possible.

Then, you stop thinking about things like an FAQ page and add content marketing and detailed product descriptions, which changes the web design because your website becomes much more helpful to your customers, which often means more text, more infographics, more helpful

YouTube videos, explaining the benefits of owning that product or service.

How many pages need to be designed?

Different wireframes need to be designed for each page. In some instances, this might be the case; the main service pages share the same wireframe construction because you want the same layout duplicated across say 7 main service pages. This can save time and often reduce the cost of getting a website designed.

Mobile phones

Don’t forget that it is crucial to get wireframes designed for both the mobile and desktop versions of your company website.
A different wireframe construction must be created for the mobile version because it’s an entirely different and separate design from desktop wireframes.

Your mobile version of your website, needs to be designed to be responsive, you will want it to work brilliantly on a mobile device, and arguably, we would say that you need to pay particular attention to the mobile design.

The reason for this is that the number of people buying goods and services on their mobile phones is on an upward trajectory. Therefore, web designers need to spend a lot of time designing both sets of wireframes, the desktop and mobile.

The other reason we say to pay particular attention to the mobile version when designing the wireframes for the mobile version of your website is that you need to make mobile version very simple to use.

We’ve all been there: when looking to buy goods or services, we encounter a mobile website that is just tricky and difficult to use.

The mobile menu might not function smoothly, and if it’s a burger menu and the icons are designed to be too small, you might even struggle to locate them by squinting at the screen, trying to find where the main menu expands to.

So, your web designers must design a “good user experience”.

You’re likely to hear your web designers bang on about until they are blue in the face: improving the UX of the website.

That is the user experience of a website.

You might want to go low-tech and use good old-fashioned pen and paper
So when we think of web design offices, we think of multiple staff, cutting edge computers and many people sitting around drinking fancy coffee’s.

However, if the customer has a rough sketch of how they want their website designed, say just designed on a piece of paper this can massively help the web design process.

From pen and paper, low fidelity and then a high-fidelity wireframes can be created later.

So some businesses, often small businesses, might think, well, I can’t take in scraps of paper with a rough sketch of how you want your website to be designed, to the web designers, but you can.

Many web design agencies like this because it can quickly convey how was let’s a brochure website designed.
So why not create a rough sketch at a web design company’s office, even on pen and paper or perhaps on a whiteboard?

Low fidelity wireframes

Asking your web designers to create low-fidelity wireframes can be extremely useful. It allows stakeholders, such as employees, directors, the marketing team, and even friends, to have a lot of input on how they want the website designed.

And what often happens is someone comes up with a really good point, such as, “What about this service, can we add that page?”
Therefore, this can be a precious experience in gaining feedback from your employees or friends on how to improve the design.

Content marketing
Content marketing is what petrol is to a car. If your website has no well-written, helpful text, the SEO will not go that far, if anywhere.
So, content marketing, which is just a rather fancy way of saying text needs to be applied to your website, but that text needs to be well written.

However, wireframes allow you to visualise how the text should be laid out. You need quite a bit of text added to each page, but you don’t want so much text added that it overwhelms the shopper. They don’t want to read that much text, and they leave your website causing the bounce rate to soar.

Why do we need to keep bounce rates low?

If you get the design wrong, then this means bounce rate can be very high, meaning shoppers are leaving more or less straightaway.
It is a bit like a lot of people stepping inside your restaurant, asking to see the menu, and walking straight out the door. The chef or the company director may wonder what is wrong. Why are so many people doing this?

Well this be the same for your website, if of the bounce rate through the roof, is there a reason for this because of the design or because it offering a bad user experience?

So, for example, if you apply too much text to a page, the shopper might think they are not reading all of that, its simply too much text, and they leave the website. They turn on their heels and leave straight away.

Buttons and links

You need to use calls to action throughout the website, which web designers call “CTAs”.

You want to offer valuable information the customer finds useful when deciding whether to buy a product or service.
Then follow that up with a CTA, which might be a button that simply says contact us

The CTA is, therefore, simply a prompt: Do you require further help?
Yet without this, we might lose the customer; they might have gone off the website and onto a competitor’s website.
But a well-designed website, with a clear call to action, guides the shopper and helps them when they’re about to make a purchase decision.

For example, you might be selling a high-value product, let’s say, just for example purposes, a garden room.

But if you add a CTA that says, why not sign up for our monthly newsletter?

How can we design a low-fidelity wireframe?

You might hear your web designer’s say are building a low-fidelity wireframe using content blocks.

So this could simply be setting out a block which shows where the text is and another block that shows where the picture is.
Sometimes, these need to be high fidelity design designed, to give you an excellent understanding of how the website could look when finished, or low fidelity is just like a rough sketch, as if somebody made it with a pen and paper.

So, how these wireframes are created depends on the software the web designers are using.

They might have content management systems (CMS), allowing wireframes to be created in the CMS.

Alternatively they might use a wireframe designing programme to design wireframes.

Why we think you should ask for an interactive wireframe to be created

As we discussed earlier, there are low-fidelity and high-fidelity wireframes. You can take this a step further and create “interactive wireframes”, which are basically wireframes that you can click on and use the different elements, such as the buttons.
So basically, you’re getting your website, but if it’s not finished, it’s just a rough outline of what the website will look like and the buttons you can use to press.

How does using wireframes improve the web design process?

So we would highly recommend that your web design business use wireframes for you get an idea of how the website could look before it’s finished. It also allows input from, say, the company director for the marketing teams, so you can make changes to the website before is actually been fully designed.

Do you require a brand-new website to be designed in Cardiff?

Cardiff is a capital city, and that like most capital cities throughout United Kingdom there are a massive amount of web design companies to choose from.

However, many companies choose us, because our designers have over 10 years’ experience designing websites.

We can also offer the following services:

• Organic SEO
• Website design
• WordPress web design
• Drupal web design
• Joomla! website design

We can actually offer also offer to design a brochure website, complete with 7-pages for just £1000.
If this has you interested in any of the marketing services that we can offer, when why not get on the dog and bone, that’s phone and have a chat with us today.

What Are Pillar Pages?

Date: 11/10/2024

Long-form content marketing

So, think of the wheel of a bicycle just for a second, you have a lot of spokes, all leading to a central hub to support the wheel on the bike.
Well, this is a bit the same for “pillar content marketing” in that it’s the central hub, the part to which everything connects.

Now, suppose you hire the right web developer and SEO team- in that case, you will use on-page SEO methods, including internal links, to ensure your website is optimised for the keywords your business wants to improve its organic search engine optimisation for.

Reaching the top of Google.co.uk

It used to be, let’s say, seven or eight years ago, that a website designer could sometimes design a website for a business that’s operating in a low-competitive business sector and, with no ongoing SEO work, reach the top of Google.co.uk within a few months.
So, why did that happen?

Well, often, it’s because the business operates in a low-competition sector, meaning that not many businesses have invested in SEO services for that industry.

This means that, let’s say, a well-designed WordPress website, with well-written content marketing and good on-page SEO, could sometimes cut through straight to the first page of Google.co.uk.

Fast forward to 2024

Now, things are much different; across the U.K., countless web design businesses and digital marketing agencies work for their clients to help get them onto page one of Google.

Years and years of SEO graft have therefore, gone to improving the on-page and off-page SEO for many businesses.
This means that the bar, which is the standard of SEO to beat, is now much harder and to get any business on page one, whether a solicitor or a hotel is now hard work.

This is where many businesses have developed marketing strategies that now involve using “pillar content”.

This is to clearly demonstrate to Google’s algorithm that business are the experts when it comes to talking about that product or service.
Businesses all over the U.K., therefore, if they want to get on page one of Google.co.uk, must now produce work that clearly shows they know about “Google E-EAT” and how to write white hat content marketing.

Google E-EAT
Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness

It’s essential that when a business produces a piece of evergreen content marketing or produces a piece of pillar content, their work is top quality; that an expert has written it. The work must, therefore, demonstrate Google E-EAT.

To do this, leading web design agencies must work hand in glove with the experts within the client’s business. Suppose it is a solicitor practice, just as an example- in that case, the web developers and the copywriters must now work with many of the most experienced solicitors within that business to produce good quality content marketing.

If you want your business to rank higher than a direct competitor, then Google’s algorithm must deem your business’s content marketing to be better.

So, work with the company’s experts to add high-quality and useful text to your website.

Google and the first index of a new company website.

Walk into a new shop or restaurant; it only takes a few seconds to get a first impression of the business, are we right?

Well, this is how the search engines work. Google will crawl and index your company website, and the first indexation of your website by Googlebot is very important.

The reason is that this is where Google will then decide where to rank the business. Is the website excellent and should, therefore, rank on page one of Google.co.uk straightaway after indexation?

Should the business be ranked on page 7?

Or is the website entirely made up of duplicated text and poor on-page SEO, so it shouldn’t be indexed on Google at all?
These are the questions that Google’s algorithm will ask.

This is why it’s important to hold off on launching your website until you know you have put in your best effort in terms of writing the text for your new company website. So do make sure that your web designers write white hat, high quality content marketing.
One way of doing this and improving your business’s on-page SEO from the get-go is to add quality pillar content.

Pillar pages and cluster pages

So, it’s important to create evergreen content marketing, or “pillar pages,” and then link related blog posts to that page.
For example, your main piece of pillar content might be 7,000 words and take a very long time to create.

You should aim for you Google Analytics account to show a low bounce rate, high on-site time by shoppers.
Then, you might write a blog post about a similar topic, say once every month, and then internally link back to the pillar content marketing. Just make sure that all of this work is done in a white-hat way.

Covers a topic in-depth, very different from a main product page or landing page

So, a company website’s main page advertises a product or service you sell. It doesn’t need a high word count; it just needs to describe the product or service accurately.

However, a piece of pillar content marketing is different; it’s your business’s opportunity to show that you are the experts at what you’re talking about and that you know your stuff. Google’s Knowledge Graph will be used to see how well-written the article is.

Google RankBrain

Then, Google will use “Google RankBrain” and its AI to see how engaged the shoppers are with the work.

• Are they spending a long time reading it?
• Are they clicking to read more pages?
• Is the shopper engaged?

You can monitor these statistics using Google Analytics, which will tell you how high the bounce rate is and what the time on site for each page is —these are really useful metrics that your web designers and SEO company should monitor.

Introduction

When we think of greenhouse emissions, we normally instantly think of cars, trains, and planes contributing to our warming planet.

Yet, fewer people know that websites, or more specifically, data centres, also consume a huge amount of electricity. The heat generated from these servers is considerable, and therefore, because all of this heat and electricity is being used, it can cause a lot of environmental damage.
So, we think that in the near future, you will see more and more web design companies pop up that specialise in building environmentally friendly websites.

In this blog post, we will discuss how to build a more environmentally friendly website for your business.

Quick introduction on us…

So, W&P is a highly experienced web design company based in the beating heart of Cardiff’s busy city centre. We offer the full spectrum of digital marketing services, ranging from improving your business’s SEO to graphic design. We have some of the very best SEO consultants in the whole of Wales working for us.

So we are, therefore, well placed to advise you on how to design and build a more environmentally friendly website for your business.

What is a sustainable website?

So, a sustainable website is simply a website where the website designers have carefully considered its impact on the environment. For example, they might have used lazy loading techniques, made the pictures small so that, let’s say, the product pictures load faster, or purchased website hosting that is mostly or completely powered by green electricity.

Data centres

We are all used to buying items from our phones, tablets, or desktops with just a few clicks. It’s simple, straightforward, and a piece of cake to buy anything we need.

Now, we all carefully consider what mobile phone, laptop, or tablet we want to buy. Yet often, we don’t consider whether the websites we are buying items from have a green policy to minimise the impact on the environment.

So, we think that more and more companies will promote their green websites at this web design company. Often, this means using hosting companies that use renewable energy.

Data centres are simply what are used to host a website. So, for example, it doesn’t matter if you run a solicitors website or, let’s say, you run a demolition company; you’ll need website hosting.

Now, a good web designer will tell you that website hosting quality varies massively. Companies offer super cheap prices, yet the hosting might be super slow.

Then there’s fast hosting, which is commonly more expensive. However, many hosting companies are setting up to offer “green website hosting.” This typically means that part of the energy or all the electricity consumed is from renewable sources.

Offsetting

So, we think that at this Cardiff web design agency, we will hear the term “offsetting” much more soon. When we say this, it’s not just something to do with web design or hosting; we think we will hear this term being used by many more companies.

So, off-setting means, perhaps planting trees, to off-set the company’s emissions through website hosting.

Why not ask your website designers to implement lazy loading?

What’s lazy loading? We hear you cry!

Well, it’s a method of designing a website which reduces the amount of content requested by the shopper at any given moment.

The whole page doesn’t load straight away; it only loads parts of the page as the shoppers scroll down the page.
So, this has a twofold benefit: it can substantially reduce the load time, which means there are some SEO that organic search engine optimisation benefits.

Yet, there are also benefits from an energy consumption point of view; it’s a bit like someone only placing what they know they will eat on their plate rather than wasting food. This is the same concept with lazy loading; basically, only part of the page will load, such as a row of products will load. Then, as the customer scrolls down the page, more of the page will load.

Font, colour schemes and web design

So, believe it or not, which fonts you use and the colour scheme you have chosen for your company website can directly affect how much energy is consumed when loading the page.

So, talk to your website designers today about how they can design an eco-friendly website for your business.

Web designers

We have highly experienced web designers working for us at W&P.

We can offer your business the following services:

• Eco-friendly web design
• WordPress websites
• Organic SEO
• Local SEO
• We are a Welsh web design agency
• Mobile website design

Why not call one of our team for a quote today?

Date: 08/10/2024

You might currently be reviewing various web design quotes and deciding which one is right for your business.

Sure, freelance web designers will cost a lot less, yet often, they specialise in one aspect of marketing and perhaps even building one type of CMS, like designing websites in Drupal.

So, your business might be considering pushing the boat out, going the whole hog, so to speak, and hiring a web design agency.
But before you hire a web design agency, you might want to understand what they do and how their work can help your business grow.
So, without further ado, we pull back the curtains, invite you backstage, and explain what a web design agency can offer your business.

You might have a preconception that marketing agencies and web design companies are all about boozy Friday afternoon celebrations and holding so many meetings that the coffee machine gets worn out from producing so many frothy coffee flat whites.

Well, this is partly true, yet a good web design agency can take care of a whole business’s online marketing needs, from creating a stunning, well-designed website that offers a fantastic U.X to taking care of your business’s SEO so that your company starts to climb Google. That phone starts ringing a lot more often.

So, let me walk you through some of the job roles you are likely to find at a local digital marketing agency:

Web designers

We work with a talented bunch of web designers. We build the vast majority of our websites using the WordPress CMS. We design websites that look amazing but are also super simple for shoppers to use, therefore offering a brilliant UX.

Planning stage

A good SEO consultant or web designer will have a lot of tasks to complete on any working day.

In fact, it can feel as though there are a million and one things to do, from liaising with a client over how they want the footer designed to building backlinks.

So, anybody working for a digital marketing agency must plan out the day-to-day work they plan on completing. Plus, for example, a website will need a plan on how it will be built so that all the various team members can work on the site and complete their work so that another team member is not waiting for them to finish a piece of work.

Therefore, web design needs to be carefully planned. One of the first stages is creating wireframes and working with a copywriter to ensure the text fits neatly onto the page.

Then, it’s over to web developers to design and finish the rest of the website.

Administration tasks do need to be completed.

A web designer can become so busy writing code and designing the website that the client may not know what work they are completing.
So, it is always essential, and web design agencies often use time management tools to set aside time for a phone call or an e-mail to update the client on what is happening with the website build.

Designing

Of course, most web designers spend most of their day designing websites, yet many hours per day are also spent working with copywriters, UX designers, and web developers.

That’s the client as well.

Therefore, a web designer could use Adobe Photoshop in the morning to edit photos and then work with copywriters in the afternoon to add text to the main pages.

Brainstorming

SEO consultants have SEO tools, which are brilliant for helping you know which keywords you should optimise the website for. Then, there are backlink-checking tools, making it a piece of cake to look at your competitor’s backlinks and get an idea of the websites you might want to build backlinks.

However, web design is more subjective.

It’s about what the client and business’s customers wish to do.

Therefore, what the website should look like is open to interpretation. So, a lot of time at web design agencies will be spent brainstorming,

which also involves copious amounts of tea drinking and some good old-fashioned boiled sweets.
Yet brainstorming can save a significant amount of time because you can start to whittle down what the website should look like. Rather than going full steam ahead and fully designing a website, the client doesn’t like the colour scheme, fonts, or page layout.

Brainstorming allows creative suggestions on how the website should look to flow, but it also ensures that the client and the web design agency are on the same page.

Copywriting

Most digital marketing agencies spend a lot of time using Microsoft Word to simply write the text for main pages. Yet this text is so important because it has to answer the questions a shopper needs.

If a page doesn’t answer a pressing question that the shopper has, you could lose that visitor, and if this happens often, the bounce rate can start to increase.

Editing the text and website

Even if you spend, let’s say, forever and a day planning how you will design a brand new website, let’s say for an e-commerce business, you could plan, have meetings, and scribble ideas on a whiteboard until the marker pen runs out!

Yet sometimes, it’s only when all the code, such as the PHP web development and web design work, is finished that you can take a step back from the masterpiece and consider whether it’s a job well done or whether more refinement is needed.

The copywriting team could spend hundreds of hours on the project, but sometimes, it becomes apparent that there’s too much text on a page, such as the homepage.

So, web designers often spend a lot of time refining and improving a website, such as slimming down the amount of text, perhaps adding titles to make it clearer what the page is about, or simply making changes to speed up the page so that it loads faster.

A leading web design, copywriting and digital marketing agency in Cardiff.

Choosing a digital marketing agency for your business is like shopping for boots.

Some just won’t fit, yet when you find the right pair, you will want to keep them for an extended period.

On-going business relationship

Often today, businesses want an ongoing relationship with their digital marketing agency.

Gone are the days of asking for a timescale for how long a web designer would take to design a website and then for the business to never use the marketing agency again. Often, things are different now; enterprises have worked with digital marketing agencies like ours for a very long period and hopefully have built a long and mutually beneficial relationship.

Cardiff-based businesses often need ongoing support, whether that helps them improve their organic search engine optimisation or website hosting provided by web designers.

For example, W&P can offer a massive range of services, such as:

– Graphic design
– WordPress design
– Drupal design
– Joomla design
– Local SEO
– Organic SEO
– And much, much more.

Call us today to find out why so many businesses in Cardiff hire us to build a website and partner over the long term.

What are some of the most common web design mistakes to avoid?

Date: 07/10/2024

Many start-up businesses and entrepreneurs may have had a website designed before. So, it’s too simple to hand all the work over to the web designers. Yet, when your website is back up and running and it’s been live for three months, you might start noticing functionality you wish you had incorporated into the design.

Choosing the right CMS for your business is crucial. For instance, a high bounce rate on Google Analytics could indicate that you’ve picked the wrong one, affecting your business’s performance.

The web design team at W&P has many years of experience designing brilliant websites. We, therefore, know what works and what doesn’t regarding web design. So, we thought we would write a quick article explaining some shared web design problems many businesses encounter.

Just as you wouldn’t attempt to build a wall and extension on your house, you should entrust your website design to a professional. This is why web designers are in high demand for their services. When a business needs a professional, high-quality website, it needs a highly skilled web designer. At W&P, we offer web design and SEO services to meet your needs.

So what are some of the more common web design mistakes?

We would say that the most common mistake a business makes is purchasing an overly simplistic website. One that is too basic doesn’t fully detail all of the business’s services. Therefore, improving the business’s organic search engine optimisation is tricky when each leading service is set out on its page.

So, the website often lacks clarity regarding the services the business offers. And shoppers today don’t wait around to look for a service. They leave that company’s website if they can’t find the exemplary service they want to purchase quickly. This causes a higher bounce rate, damaging the business’s search engine optimisation.

Main menu design

Therefore, the main menu must be designed to get the shopper to the right page quickly. Plus, you also need every service on its page. Let’s say you have a one-page website. You are a family solicitor, for example. However, if customers cannot quickly read that you offer collaborative law, they may leave the website.

However, you can design the website well so that collaborative law has its page. The main navigation should also be well-designed so shoppers can quickly spot the page they want.

What are your main competitors doing?

So, if your main competitors are at the top of Google and those businesses are thriving, what are they doing right regarding their website design?

For example, if you sell products, they make a presenter dedicated to explaining each product’s benefits. Do they have well-written, bullet-point product descriptions?

Do they have a chatbot that’s good at answering customer questions?

You should consider incorporating similar functionality; for example, if your main competitor has a chatbot, your business may require this.
For example, if your main competitor has many YouTube videos with staff explaining how to use a product, you may sell kitchen tiles. Many videos describing how to tile a wall will be helpful to the customer.

From a web design perspective, adding this to a website will cost more. Yet, the most successful businesses in your business sector might have achieved this because they have gone the extra mile to offer helpful advice to customers.

Ever since the Google E-EAT update and Google Helpful content update, it’s more important than ever to write and publish work that your customers will find very helpful. This increases time on site and reduces bounce rate, which is good for your business in terms of your sales being more likely to improve.

Most definitely purchase a designer to design brand guidelines.

So, many businesses, let’s say a brand new start-up company, might be moving to headquarters, let’s say, in Cardiff Bay. They may call a local web designer and start designing a website.

Now, for some businesses, this is all good, yet it’s best to spend some time creating a set of brand guidelines for some other companies. This is to create a company logo, choose a font, and, for example, choose a colour scheme for the business. This ensures that the company branding is consistent, from the company’s business cards to the branding on the company vehicles to how the website looks.

Poor mobile design

Many web design agencies sometimes design websites that look good on desktops. For example, the website looks fantastic on your MacBook Pro, and you’re pleased with the design.

However, the mobile design of the same website might be super basic and not say much about what your business offers.

Now, most web design agencies agree that for most businesses, whether they specialise in catering for weddings or construction business, roughly speaking, over 50% of the visitors, that’s organic visitors via Google.co.uk, often come from a mobile device, primarily smartphones.

So, if your business doesn’t have a well-designed responsive website, then this could mean that many shoppers may find your mobile website hard to use. They may find that it doesn’t answer a question they may have had, so they leave the website.

Therefore, the bounce rate is high, and the dwell time is low, which is terrible for your business’s search engine optimisation. That’s because Google’s algorithms will deem your company website offers a poor UX or user experience.

So, what are some common mistakes that web designers and businesses make when designing the mobile version of their website?

Text

Sometimes, the text is too difficult to read, and some fonts don’t work on some browsers. So, you must pick a font that works across different browsers.

It doesn’t scale to match the screen size.

Some websites do not scale to the size of a smartphone or tablet, meaning shoppers often go to another website, increasing the bounce rate.

Websites navigation

Avoid burger menus

So, let’s say your website has a well-designed homepage. Let’s say you sell hypercars, and the homepage instantly communicates that this is what your business sells, using Lamborghinis, for example.

But let’s say your web design agency designs a budget menu for your car dealership. It’s a menu with three small lines in the top right-hand corner of the screen. Yet, seeing the burger menu might be challenging when the website loads on a smartphone.

Many shoppers might not even get past the homepage because the main menu is so difficult to use.

Sure, a burger menu makes the home page look minimalistic, yet if this comes at the cost of the website’s simplicity, then you might end up with a lot of frustrated shoppers who can’t get onto the page they want.

This will, therefore, increase the bounce rate.

Is your company website a bit sluggish?

If your company website is a bit slow, especially on mobile, this can hamper your company’s SEO efforts and mean that you may also miss out on customers. Many incredibly cheap websites often have super-slow hosting, which will damage your business’s organic SEO.

A balanced approach

So, often, businesses want the full-hog, with autoloading videos at the top of the homepage, high-resolution images of the company staff, premises, and products, and chatbots instantly loading. All of this drains the speed of the company website.

If you have high-speed, lightning-quick hosting that instantly loads your company website, then that’s no problem. Why not ask your web designers to design the website how you want it?

Yet, ultra-fast hosting doesn’t often come cheap. Servers are expensive, so you usually have to hire a hosting company. Moreover, different website hosting companies offer various hosting speeds.

Some hosting companies offer high-speed hosting, yet you often must pay more. So, a common mistake is businesses choosing a hosting company that offers sluggish, slow hosting. This means you have many frustrated shoppers who are impatient and won’t wait long, resulting in a high bounce rate.

Pop-ups can be annoying.

So, just as when you walk into a car dealership , and you have a pushy salesperson, this can put you off buying from that car dealership,

right?

So, you will likely turn on your heels and go elsewhere, right?

Well, this is the same with a website, where the web developer has designed it so that on every page that loads, a pop-up loads to perhaps ask the customer to sign up for a newsletter.

This can get annoying for the customer, who may not want to hand over their e-mail address, for their e-mail inbox to be rammed with spam.

Some businesses insist that web designers add pop-up messages and screens, yet often, this can annoy the customer, causing a bad user experience. This can mean that you lose that customer, and yes, again, the bounce rate may increase sharply.

Do you want a DIY website?

So sure, DIY websites are often offered as cheap as chips.

Yet here’s the thing: When starting a business, we understand that you will likely be cash-strapped.

So, the temptation is to buy things on the cheap.

Cheap stationery—well, why not, a pen—but a cheap website—well, that’s a false economy.

The reason we say that is that when you sit down, make a cup of tea, and think about how customers are going to find your business, most of the time, a business is either heavily reliant on or solely reliant on its company website to drum up business.

Now, if you spend, let’s say, thousands of Google Adwords to help you gain more sales, but you send customers to a poorly designed website, you’re unlikely to get many sales.

Sure, Google Adwords is brilliant at gaining more customers for businesses; with the flip of a switch, your Google PPC campaign can be live.
Yet, if your website is rubbish, people will not stay around for long. It’s a bit like opening a restaurant, spending a fortune on advertising for the build-up to the opening night, only to purchase cheap and nasty ingredients, which means your customers don’t return.

And this is the same for website design; you might be forking out dough on the following:

• Google Adwords
• SEO Consultant
• Social media advertising

But what’s the blooming point if the website is rubbish and poorly designed?

Hire a web designer or a large web design agency that can design a website that cuts the mustard.

Why is your web design company always so busy?

So, it’s true that our web designers are like busy bees. One hour, they’re writing PHP to design a main menu, and the next, they could create a brochure website for a top solicitor’s practice.

We are always busy because we design top-quality websites at some of the best prices you will find.

So, here’s why so many companies choose W&P:

• We design the mobile version of the website for free
• We offer one year of free hosting
• We specialise in designing and building WordPress websites.

Are you spending money advertising your company on Google, Instagram, or Facebook?

Well, this is an excellent way of getting more shoppers on your website—yet if you’re spending money on digital marketing, you need an impressive, well-built website.

This is where we can come in. Our hardworking and diligent web developers can often design most of our brochure websites in less than three weeks from start to finish. (That’s as long as the web developers are given copious amounts of coffee!).

We can offer you the complete package.

So many businesses, from start-ups to well-known established brands, come to W&P because we offer the full range of digital marketing services.

We have SEO consultants who know everything about optimising your business’s on-page and off-page search engine optimisation.
Then, we can also design a brilliant, well-designed, impressive WordPress website for your business.

So, why not give us a ring so we can start building a brand new website for your company?

Date: 05/10/2024

A web agency should have a mix of highly talented people who help bring businesses’ visions of how they want their websites to look to life. Now, there are some roles that are more creative than others. A technical SEO expert cannot really get that creative, other than designing their Excel spreadsheets.

Yet, UX designers, web developers, and web designers can get creative, whether initially when designing the wireframes or right at the end when deciding where the social media icons should be placed.

Here at W&P, we are a full-stack web agency based in the wonderful city of Cardiff. We have web designers, developers, and highly skilled SEO experts working for us. Many businesses know, for example, what a social media manager does on a daily basis, but not many know about the work that a web developer does on a daily basis.

So, we thought we would write a question-and-answer blog post to help people understand the type of work a web developer completes on a daily basis.

What would your web design agency say the biggest challenge that web developers face?

So often the hardest projects to complete, in terms of web design, as you might expect would be the ultra large e-commerce websites. Simply because there’s so many product pages, and a lot of web designers just copy product descriptions from somewhere else, but this shouldn’t happen.
Because of the Google Panda update, any copy-and-paste text will mean that the website could incur an algorithmic or manual penalty from Google. So, it’s better to manually write the work and design the page so that all the content marketing is high-quality but unique to that website.
So, often, the most challenging part of a web developer’s job is simply designing e-commerce websites, with, say, over one hundred pages, which will need the help of front-end web designers, copywriters, U.X web designers, and graphic designers to start forming the company’s brand guidelines.

So, please walk us through a typical day as a web developer working for a web design agency.
So, often, it involves the web developer working directly with the client. Overnight, there might be emails where the client has had a change of mind, doesn’t want the footer to be so large, or, let’s say, wants a new page added to the website.

A web developer might then move on:

Writing basic blocks of code to add to the CMS
Most of the content management systems we design for businesses in Cardiff use WordPress CMS. Sometimes, custom blocks of code are needed to ensure that the website has the customer’s desired functionality.

Ongoing maintenance to keep things running smoothly

Just as a car needs maintenance or the engine may seize, so will a website. Well, a website won’t seize, but it might go down. The shopper may then be greeted with a message such as “critical website error” or “404- page not found”- these problems must be fixed.

Problem-solving

A website can run flawlessly for years and work like a Swiss watch, doing everything that you want the website to do. But then, suddenly, the CMS can run updates, making the website incur a glitch. Only one line of code might go wrong, but this could be enough to cause the website to incur a significant glitch, which means it goes offline.

So, a lot of the work that a web developer does is often figuring out where the glitch is and how to fix it.

How does a web developer’s job integrate with the other staff working at a web agency?

So, often, at a web agency, the client will meet with the company director or sales staff. Often, the first designer who works on the site is either the staff creating the brand guidelines or the designer creating the wireframes.

Often, a UX designer needs to state what hex codes to use, how the main navigation should look, and how the footer is going to be designed, for example. Then, it’s up to the web developer to start writing the code and designing the website.

Ongoing work

Often, a web developer will work directly with the client. For example, there are often a lot of e-mail exchanges and phone calls during the design stage. But the work is also often ongoing. For example, the client will often pay extra for their website to be backed up on a monthly basis.

Sometimes, for example, in an e-commerce website, the client will work with the web design agency to improve the business’s search engine optimisation on an ongoing basis. This often involves improving the website’s design and UX. To improve the user experience, a web developer is usually needed for split testing, for example, to see if a new main menu helps lower the company’s bounce rate.

What types of websites does W&P build?

So our web developers are constantly engaged with various websites that need building for our clients in Cardiff.

On Monday morning, after a nice fresh cup of coffee, designers and developers could be working on a relatively straightforward website design for a construction company. At our web design agency, we design many websites for construction-related businesses, like demolition firms, builders, plasterers, electricians, and plumbers.

Yet we have worked on websites for dental practices and huge national e-commerce websites. So, our work is very varied, and our web developers could work on a range of different business websites in one single day.

Plus, the work that the web developers complete is often massively varied. They could be carrying out routine maintenance for a client in the morning, say, backing up a WordPress website.

In the afternoon, they could be designing and writing code to create a custom main menu for a client. Therefore, no two days are ever the same, and our web developers will have a lot of varied work to complete to design unique websites for our clients.

How much does your web design team cost to design a new website for my business?

So, most of our clients are located in the city of Cardiff.

We also now work with businesses based all over the United Kingdom.

The cost of designing a simple brochure website starts from just £950.00 per website, which is for a website with just seven pages.

Yet our web developers also work on designing much more complex websites, for example, a brand new e-commerce website. This could cost upwards of 10k to design. Therefore, our PHP designers are busy designing many different types of websites for our clients.

What type of websites do your web developers specialise in designing?

We can use any website for any business.

Yet, over the years, we have accumulated much experience working with lawyers and solicitors all over Wales. We have also designed and built many websites for businesses in the construction sector.

We often design websites for the following businesses:
– Law practices
– Construction businesses
– Dental practices

Do you need to hire a web developer?

We are often chosen as the first port of call when a Cardiff business needs to get a brand-new website designed.

We are notorious for designing amazing, well-designed websites that look great but are offered at a competitive price point. This allows everyone from start-up companies in Wales to larger businesses to come to W&P to get a new website designed.

We can also help your business by offering the following services:

– Organic search engine optimisation
– Local search engine optimisation
– WordPress web design and web development
– Web design services

Call us for a free no-obligation quote:

If you need a website designed in Cardiff, do not hesitate to contact our web design team today. If you want a brochure website designed, we can often offer you a quote there and then over the phone.

If it’s a more complex design, for example, a new e-commerce website, we can often offer you a quote within 48 hours. We have web developers, designers, U.X designers, and white hat SEO consultants working for us, so why not call our web design agency?

Date: 04/October/2024
Subject: Digital Marketing Agencies

Introduction

They say you must “adapt to survive, ” which applies to most business. Of course, some rare products of exceptionally high quality don’t change as time passes.

Working in digital marketing is not just a profession that you can let the grass grow under your feet, it’s a dynamic field that demands constant change and evolution (you need to be very much on your toes). It’s not just about keeping up with the latest trends but also about being astute and adaptable. This adaptability is not just a skill; it’s a necessity that keeps us ahead of the curve in our field.

For example:

– Google’s algorithms are constantly changing so SEO consultants must adapt
– Websites are getting more and more complex, so highly skilled web developers are needed to code ever more complex websites
– Social media posts are needed in abundance, so social media managers must work their cotton socks off!
Understanding the best ways to market a business, identifying the target market, and maximising the marketing budget are all part of the game. As digital marketing professionals, we’re always ready to adapt and evolve, ensuring we deliver winning solutions for our clients.

Forward-thinking

As digital marketing agencies, we must be forward-thinking and innovative. Whether it’s creating excellent social media posts, writing evergreen content, or designing a brilliant website, we must demonstrate our ability to create something fantastic within our marketing budget.

Demonstrated expertise & Google E-EAT

There are a million and one web design agencies to pick from; however, ever since the emergence of the Google E-EAT updates, you must pick a web design agency that can demonstrate your business’s expertise in terms of whatever you are writing about.

This could be the text applied to the main pages, publishing a YouTube video integrated onto each page, or infographics that your business produces. You need to demonstrate your business’s strong expertise in your business sector.

This will do several beneficial things to your business’s SEO, namely it will help to reduce the bounce rate. It will also demonstrate to Google’s algorithm that your company knows what your talking about. This will, therefore, improve your business’s organic search engine optimisation.

Therefore, the point you’re trying to make is that in the future, we can see more and more digital marketing agencies being chosen where they can design a fantastic website. Yet, they also have in-house copywriters who are experts in that particular business sector. Whether it be the automotive business sector, construction or perhaps the pharmaceutical industry, we can see digital marketing agencies which are highly

specialised working in business niche.

Growth in specialised marketing agencies / web designers

We think there will be growth in these marketing agencies that operate in just one business sector, such as construction for example. We say this because there are two major Google algorithm updates: “The Google Helpful Content Update” and the “Google E-EAT” update.
Therefore, Google’s algorithm is most definitely looking at placing content marketing on the first page of the SERP’s, that can demonstrate that the author has real expertise and knows what they are talking about.

Faster pace

It used to be the case that, say, a business located in Cardiff would work on improving its SEO once a week.
As we all know, the Google Business results have significantly reduced, often down to 3 packs of business results And also, the organic listings, it’s now fiercely competitive to get your business listed in the organic SERP’s.

Therefore, businesses will need to partner with digital marketing agencies which know the stuff in terms of SEO, but can also have the capability to implement the work at a faster pace.

WordPress will get even more popular

As a very highly experienced web design company, we have seen various content management systems come and go over the years. Some companies have had huge marketing budgets to promote the new launch of a new CMS, yet they may not be around for that long. Sometimes the up-take is just not there, and these CMS systems, then fail.

We think on the other hand businesses will choose more well-known content management systems, such as WordPress, in the future and go with a CMS that’s proven, popular and just simply high quality.

What we mean by that is that WordPress is proven and trusted; therefore, we think many businesses realise that they don’t want to put their faith in a CMS that is just starting out. It might struggle to get regular updates and might be full of glitches- so people instead are turning to more well known CMS like WordPress.

This is why more and more company directors insist on our designers using WordPress, which has become a reliable and well-known content management system.

Original thinking

Artificial intelligence is great, but many web designers are saying how freethinking is it in reality?

So, for example, if its writing about the same topic, you could argue that its stating the same thing or similar text to different users, just using slightly different wording.

Original thinking is not just a valuable asset in digital marketing; it’s a game-changer. Businesses with an excellent organic SEO can leverage highly experienced copywriters to write work that shows orginal perspective.

A.I

As we all know, artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionising website design and content marketing, including social media posts. This technology is a handy marketing tool and a game-changer in the digital marketing landscape.

Some businesses might heavily rely on artificial intelligence, but many marketing agencies like ours are taking a more hybrid approach.
We are learning how to use these language models but not wholly integrating them into our marketing strategies.

For example, our content is written by a copywriter (yes, we still produce blog posts the old-fashioned way!). However, artificial intelligence (AI) profoundly impacts how marketing agencies implement their work.

In the next ten years, we can expect to see A. I evolving to a point where it has become an indispensable tool in digital marketing. The potential of AI to generate ideas, provide suggestions, and assist in everyday tasks is truly exciting.
It’s like having a creative partner who never runs out of ideas, and we can’t wait to see how this will revolutionise the digital marketing landscape and how we design websites.

The human touch

Whether writing content marketing or designing a new PHP website, the human touch will still be required. Mortal humans will still be needed to truly understand the business and its customers and direct the A.I., so we don’t think web designers are out of a job anytime soon.

Rise in wearables

We can see the introduction of wearable glasses, which allow people to ask questions directly to the glasses, which will have artificial intelligence built into them.

So, for example, you might say how to make a chicken korma from scratch, then start getting the instructions through audio built into the glasses or step-by-step instructions through the glass’s lenses.

We think that web design will involve much more videography, and businesses also have to offer more helpful information, via YouTube, which could be replicated and displayed through, say, glasses or

Basic websites will not cut it.

We think your boring, bland websites are going straight out of the window; you can see many more websites to be more engaging.
We think that people’s attention spans are getting shorter. In the future, people will not want to read blog posts like this as much, so you have to combine videography to explain what you are talking about; we also have websites offering more audio.

What do you see as the future of copywriting?

When you look at digital marketing agencies today, many have reduced the headcount of their copywriting teams sometimes substantially. You might have gone on an SEO agency’s offices, or a website design office five years ago, and they have over 20 staff as full-time copywriters.

Fast-forward to today, the copywriting teams of these same web design or digital marketing agencies will be reduced to one or two staff members- but why?

Why is this?

This is because generative AI language models using artificial intelligence are used to create content marketing.

However, our best advice is this: Hold your horses. We think the copywriting, which takes much longer to write, written manually by copywriters is still much better content marketing, as it can show original thinking.

Engagement metrics

So, if we were to say the most crucial point of this whole article, it would be this: In the past, SEO agencies concentrated on improving a website’s ranking factors, such as building backlinks, which is still essential.

Yet one of the most crucial seo signals out there to improve is engagement metrics, such as:

• Reducing bounce rates
• This boils down to factors such as the bounce rate, time on site, and user engagement.
• So, the algorithm asks questions such as:
• How long does the shopper spend on the website?
• How many pages have they visited?
• Have they purchased an item?

Now, for those who know a thing or two about organic SEO and read blog posts about this subject daily, they will know that Google’s algorithms are already calculating engagement and therefore this is incorporating it into their algorithms (Google RankBrain).
However, the point you’re trying to make here is that we believe these engagement signals become increasingly important.

Helpful content marketing

If you were to sit down with some SEO agency owners who implemented SEO 10 years ago, they would say that content marketing is all about sprinkling keywords within the page.

Writing keywords into sentences to try and get the page to rank for that particular keyword is now considered basic, low-quality SEO that no longer cuts the mustard. The whole concept of writing content marketing has been turned entirely on its head.

It’s now about being as super helpful as possible. Copywriters must be diligent and write copy that their audiences can find valuable and helpful.

As we alluded to earlier in this article, it’s all about engagement—keeping that shopper on your website longer. To keep the shopper’s interest, you must offer helpful advice.

That advice must be helpful and often presented in various ways, such as video, text, and audio.

It’s a funny crossroads, so to speak when it comes to content marketing.

We would argue that attention spans are becoming shorter and shorter. Yet, there’s more and more content marketing that shoppers can read, watch, and listen to that is published by so many more online companies.

So, your content marketing is in constant fierce competition with other businesses to compete for attention from shoppers.

How do you stand out in this crowded marketplace?

The answer that you need to emerge and show yourself as the absolute expert in what you do.

USP

We think that the future of digital marketing is for marketing agencies to work heavily with companies to promote a unique selling point.

E-commerce businesses operate in fiercely competitive business sectors. Therefore, marketing agencies must consider a business’s USP and how to differentiate themselves from other brands in that sector.

For example, if you sell mountain bikes and your competitors offer a delivery time between 3 and 5 days, can your business offer delivery the next day?

If so, this needs to be heavily promoted on the website and in the meta titles to improve the click-through rate.

Therefore, marketing agencies need to consider how to get your business to stand out in this crowded and competitive marketplace.

superfast

Bullet trains, 5G mobile, and next-day delivery of items, the world is speeding up, and people want things done and completed faster than ever.

This is the same as your company website, its not as good enough to have a fast website, you now need an ultrafast website. This mean the business needs to be constantly looking at ways to make the page load faster, make the code lean, and instantly snap the website onto a smartphone in the blink of an eye.

• SEO
• Social media
• Design
• Development
• Hosting
• Copywriting

Wearables

We think the wearables definitely are going to become more popular, without a doubt. At the moment wearables are often used to track exercise, and offer satellite navigation on say a watch. We haven’t seen much of an uptake in wearable glasses that supply information to the person.

We think we will begin to see a massive up take in terms of wearables. We now have a 5G signal, which offers a robust Internet connection. We think we will see an uptake in wearables over the next three years.

Contact us for high-quality web design;

We design amazing websites at affordable prices. Most of our websites are created using the content management system WordPress, which allows us to create fast, sleek, and impressive websites.

If you want to partner with our leading digital marketing agency, contact us today for a no-obligation quotation.

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

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

Understanding exactly what your business needs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For example, think about the following

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Web Development

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

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

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

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

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

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

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

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

In conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to Create a Responsive Website Using PHP in 2024?

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

Web designers must design a fast website.

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

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

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

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

Responsive design

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

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

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

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

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

For example, a web developer should consider the following

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

In conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The future of web development and new emerging technologies

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

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

The rise of artificial intelligence development tools

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

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

Helping to reduce debugging time

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

You run the code and might find some significant errors.

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

Augmented Reality (AR)

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

Augmented Reality (AR) helping to make better purchasing decisions

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

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

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

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

The rise of blockchain technology and Web 3.0

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

Voice User Interface (VUI)

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

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

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

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

Customer support and the evolution of chatbots

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Partner with a forward-thinking web design business

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

How much does a website cost to build?

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

Why should we pick your web design agency?

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

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

Have you built many websites for Welsh businesses before?

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

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

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

Do you just design brochure websites?

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

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

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

Why do you recommend choosing WordPress?

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

How much does your website hosting costs?

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to choose the right web designer:

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

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

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

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

Why you need to understand some of the critical terminology

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

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

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

Domain name

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

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

Why you need to check a domain name history

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HTTPS/HTTP

What does HTTPS/HTTP mean?

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

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

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

HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

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

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

What does Cascading Style Sheet or CSS mean?

What is a blog?

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

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

Why should we be routinely adding blog posts?

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

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

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

Bootstrap

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What exactly does front-end development mean?

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

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

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

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

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

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

What exactly does full-stack development mean?

Full-Stack Development

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

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

Wireframe

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hosting

Website Hosting

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

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

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

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

User Experience (UX)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First things first, what on earth is a wireframe?

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

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

So, without further ado, what is a wireframe?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Functionality

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

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

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

Do you need a brochure website?

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

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

This will dictate how the wireframes are designed.

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

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

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

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

Navigation

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

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

How do you even begin creating wireframes?

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

An initial meeting

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

Competitor research: who are your direct competitors?

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

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

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

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

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

Create a basic layout

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

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

Refining make it better and better

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Speed and Efficiency

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, your website is responsive.

It works on all Google Android devices

It works on Apple iPhone devices

Yet, is it designed with speed in mind?

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

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

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

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

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

Are you looking for a web design agency in Cardiff?

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

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

YouTube

Author: W&P

Date: 23/09/2024

Bounce rates

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

How to reduce bounce rates

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

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

Bounce rates, dwell time and Google Analytics

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

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

– Improve sales
– Reduce bounce rate
– Improve dwell time

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

User experience and conversion rates

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

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

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

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

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

Get a well-designed responsive version of your company website

Use split testing to make gradual improvements

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Able to convey complex ideas and services

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

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

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

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

Help to generate more sales.

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

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

Help improve sales

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

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

So, it’s your opportunity to:

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

Dwell time and Google Rank Brain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An explainer video

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

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

Why we recommend adding an explainer video to your website

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In summary

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

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

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

You might embed a YouTube video onto the following pages:

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

How we can help:

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

WordPress web designers

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

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

Author: Ryan Walsh
Date: 20/09/2024

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

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

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

WordPress can be used for most types of businesses

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

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

Simple text changes

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

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

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

Simple to use

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

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

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

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

Very versatile

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

Plugins

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

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

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

A lot of SEO agencies, like WordPress

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

Are you planning on managing your WordPress CMS yourself?

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

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

The mobile version of your company website

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

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

WordPress is affordable

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

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

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

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

What exactly is a bounce rate?

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

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

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

Use Google Analytics

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

Working with your web designers

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

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

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

How to reduce your website bounce rate:

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

Google Optimise and split testing

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

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

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

Install Google Search Console

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

Work on improving your mobile design.

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

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

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

How we can help

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

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

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

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

Widely used:

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

You can update:

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

Choose a CMS where you can make back-ups.

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

Choose a CMS where you

Things to consider when choosing a CMS for your business:

You find it super simple to use

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

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

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

Popular CMS Options

WordPress

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

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

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

Drupal

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

Magento CMS

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

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

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

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

We can help your business.

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

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.