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.