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.