It doesn’t matter if you’re a budding entrepreneur just getting started or perhaps you run a global brand; all businesses need a well-designed website.

Shoppers today almost immediately decide whether they want to continue shopping on your website or perhaps decide to leave. Therefore, a business needs to invest in a well-designed, perfectly designed website.

It matter if you’re a one-man-band or an international conglomerate, your website must do the following:
– Must be simple to use and offer an excellent U.X (User Experience)
– Must be super sonic fast
– Must have well-written content marketing, which is written with Google E-EAT in mind
– Must be optimised in a white hat way

How to choose the right web designer:

Choosing a web designer is a big decision. You need to deliberate over and think about it for a pretty long period. Don’t get rushed into choosing a web design agency.

Picking the right web designer is crucial because, sometimes, it can make or break a business. For example, let’s say a brand new company is established in the city centre of Cardiff, and it will operate in a highly competitive business sector.

So, that particular business might be competing with at least 100 other Welsh businesses. These companies might heavily invest in SEO, so your business will invest in search engine optimisation. Your business is going to need to get a good website designed to get the foundations right.

A well-built house needs rock-solid foundations, and so does your company website. It will need a well-designed website that offers a good UX—that’s user experience. That’s why you need to take the time to choose the right web design agency.

Why you need to understand some of the critical terminology

So, when you start to phone around various web design businesses, you might clearly state what you want on the phone. Yet when the e-mails start flying into your inbox with various web design quotes, you might find it a bit like comparing apples with pears.

One company might say we will provide an AMP website plus a responsive version of the website, and another company might say that the website doesn’t work on smartphones and that this option is extra.

So, our point is that you need to be clear with the web designers about your business needs. This article will help you understand some of the critical terminology so that you can tell the web design agency precisely what your business needs.

Domain name

Let’s start with something super simple yet something you need to consider carefully: What domain name will you use?
And you might be thinking, what on earth is a domain name?

A domain name is simply a unique web address, like Nike.com or Google.com; these are examples of domain names. When you use your web browser, you can use Google Chrome. You may type the domain name directly into the box, which is then converted into an Internet Protocol (IP) address, which tells the browser where the server is and a hosting company is hosting that website.

Why you need to check a domain name history

So, let’s say you’re about to start a new company and launch it in Cardiff Bay. You check that the domain name you want is available, and it is.

So, you may buy that domain name immediately- but should you do that?

Well, no. You should pause and chat with an SEO consultant to see if the domain name you’re about to buy has been purchased and owned by another company in the past.

Why is it important to check if a domain name has been purchased in the past?

Many companies have purchased low-quality and spam search engine optimisation. Google and other search engines, such as Bing, may have “de-indexed” that website, meaning it has been flagged as having lousy SEO and removed from the search engine.

So, just like buying a car with a dodgy engine, this is the same as buying a domain name whose search engine optimisation has been low-quality in the past.

It makes organic SEO work much harder and slower in the future. In a worst-case scenario, websites can receive a significant algorithmic penalty, for example, for building backlinks incorrectly. Then, the Google algorithm places a Google Penguin penalty on the website—and the website gets penalised and de-indexed.

The owner of that domain name may give up trying to rectify the SEO problems; then, the domain name becomes available again for someone else to purchase. But the problem is that you, the new owner of the domain name, register it and start using that domain name because it received, say, a Google penalty in the past; you, the new owner, then inherit the SEO problems.

HTTPS/HTTP

What does HTTPS/HTTP mean?

So, what exactly does HTTPS/HTTP mean? Well, it simply stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol. The extras added to the end indicate that the connection is secure, and the s stands for “secure.”

If you log into a website using a username and password that is not encrypted, the information can be exchanged in plain text format, which runs the security risk of being intercepted. This is especially true if you work in an area with an open Wi-Fi connection, such as a coffee shop, or you are sitting waiting to catch a plane.

So, if a website is secure or encrypted, the connection is somewhat protected as it travels between the different hosting companies. This adds an extra layer of security, making it harder for hackers to access the information. It’s still not impossible, but having the connection made secure is much better for your security.

HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

My website designers keep mentioning HTML, CSS and Javascript- what does this even mean?

Quite put, your web browser, let’s say your Google Chrome web browser, uses different programming languages, such as HTML, Javascript and also CSS, to present the website the

What does Cascading Style Sheet or CSS mean?

What is a blog?

So, we highly recommend that whichever type of business you run, you want to add a blog section within the main menu. It would be best if you also dedicated time to regularly add quality blog posts that are well written in a white hat way.

So, you might wonder why our company needs a blog.

Why should we be routinely adding blog posts?

Well, the answer is quite simple. Businesses of all sizes, from sole traders to large e-commerce businesses, use blog posts, also known as content marketing, to help their websites rank higher in Google’s search engine results pages.

Quite put, if you regularly post about, let’s say, car repair terms, then it’s likely that your business is a garage. Let’s say that you regularly add blog posts about a particular car brand; well, your website is getting optimised for that specific car and car repair terms so that the website can start to appear higher on Google for keywords related to your business sector.

Therefore, you can improve your business’s organic search engine optimisation by adding quality content marketing, such as evergreen content marketing. This can help your business get onto page one of Google for various keywords.

Bootstrap

What exactly does Bootstrap mean when it comes to designing a website?

Bootstrap is simply a CSS framework that aims to make a website responsive. Because more and more shoppers purchase items off their smartphones, it is more important than ever that when calling web design companies, they design and build a responsive version of your website. Sometimes, this is called mobile-first design, and many web developers use Bootstrap and CSS to design the front end of a mobile website.

What does CMS mean? What is a content management system?

Regular readers of our company’s blog posts will know we like designing WordPress websites. WordPress is simply a type of content management system or CMS for short. Many Welsh businesses have chosen WordPress because it is well-known as a brilliant, well-designed, and simple-to-use content management system. WordPress is now, by an absolute country mile, one of the most popular CMS worldwide.

Here’s why WordPress now is one of the most popular content management systems out there:

– It has WP Dashboard, which is an absolute piece of cake to use
– A lot of SEO companies like WordPress, as you can make a lot of changes to the CMS
– A well-designed website can be designed using WordPress

Why does my web designer keep talking about “mobile first design”?

For many businesses, organic visitors and visitors they get through Google Adwords and social media will be shoppers using their smartphones. This is why web developers now need to make a website responsive yet well-designed and straightforward. Therefore, mobile-first design is essential.

The website must be responsive, but more than that, the website must be:

– Simple to use
– Fast
– Must work on Apple I-phones and also Android devices
– Must also work on tablets

What exactly does front-end development mean?

A web designer can design the front end, where you often use various design languages, such as HTML, CSS and sometimes Javascript. This is to create everything shoppers see and can click on, such as the Contact Us forms or simply the main menu. It’s now more important than ever that you hire web developers who create websites that offer a good UX, that’s user experience.

Many digital marketing agencies think that Google uses RankBrain to see how shoppers approve or disapprove of your company website. For example, they use time on site, or dwell time, to determine how much time shoppers spend on your company website.

If the average shopper spends long browsing your products and services, this is an extended dwell time. Using your company’s Google

Analytics account, you can check your business’s dwell time, also called time on site. Log in and look at the dwell time for each page.

Yet many marketing companies know that if they offer an excellent UX user experience, shoppers will want to browse more items on the website and spend longer looking at the products. This tells search engines like Google and Microsoft Bing that the shopper is interested in this business and what it offers. This means that your company provides a good user experience so that the business can rank higher on Google.

In a nutshell, if your business wants to offer a good UX, then the front end of the website needs to be well-designed. So, you need to hire a local web design agency offering a good UX.

What exactly does full-stack development mean?

Full-Stack Development

So, full-stack development is simply a method used by web designers to design both the front and back ends of the website. Now, you might see web design businesses refer to the front of, say, a WordPress website as the client side and the back end as the server side. Many companies are looking for staff who have knowledge of building both because they can basically build the entire website, both the front and the back end.

It doesn’t matter if it’s a Drupal website, a Joomla website, or another type of content management system. Web developers, regardless of which language they use to build the website, build the front end, which is the screens the shoppers see on their browsers. The back end is the server side, and that’s the part where the web developer uses it to make changes to the coding, such as PHP.

Wireframe

Why do my web designers keep talking about wireframes? What are wireframes used for in the web design process?

When you initially sit down with your website designers, they may say that they will build and design wireframes at the start of the web design process. This sounds technical, but it’s not really. It’s simply a two-dimensional rough sketch of what the website will look like, not in terms of its finished design, but roughly where the picture, the text, and the footer will go, for example.

Your website designer may use a “low-fidelity” design, where they set out essential boxes, which is often the starting point of designing a brand-new website. Then there’s “high-fidelity” design, where the more final elements, the finer brush strokes, so to speak, are added, which gives us a much clearer idea of what the website will look like once finished.

You know, when an excellent oil painter is painting on canvas, they often make a rough sketch before they start adding the final detail. Well, this is the same when using wireframes; it’s a rough sketch of what the website will look like, and it allows the client to have a meeting with the web designers to make changes and amendments to the website. This is much simpler and quicker to do during the wireframe design stage.

That’s because amending or changing a finished design is very hard. A relatively simple change like changing and redesigning the footer might take well over one hundred hours on a large commerce website. Yet, if the change is made, say, to increase the footer width or add more buttons during the wireframe stage, well, this is much simpler to do.

So, it allows the client to make adjustments and edits during the wireframing stage, and making amendments at this stage is much simpler.

Hosting

Website Hosting

Huge international companies sometimes own their own servers. Yet purchasing web servers can be super expensive. So, many businesses put their websites on hosting companies’ servers.

However, whatever type of business you run, make sure your business purchases lightning-fast, speedy hosting. That’s for two main reasons. Number one, the website needs to be fast because shoppers like a fast website; it offers a good user experience. The second reason is that

Google gauges how fast your website is; does it all load quickly? If so, your business has an SEO advantage. If it is slow and clunky to load, it will hold your business search engine optimisation back.

So, when getting a website designed, make sure it’s super-fast. The web designers offer good-quality, fast, and reliable hosting. You most definitely don’t want your website going offline for too long because Googlebot won’t be able to crawl and index it, which basically means you start dropping down Google’s ranks.
So you need your company website up.

User Experience (UX)

How can my company improve our U.X user experience?

This is a really difficult one to answer because it boils down to this: Do your shoppers like using your company website?
So, you often have to do a lot of split testing, which some web developers also call a/b testing. It’s basically a process of constantly making rather small edits to the website and perfecting the design.

This doesn’t ever end because you can constantly find areas to approve, lower the bounce rate, and keep shoppers on the website for longer. So, it’s a process of continually improving the design so shoppers find it more straightforward. When Google’s algorithms see that shoppers are spending a long time, visiting many pages, and also buying from you, the algorithms will start to see that your website is well designed, shoppers like it, it offers a good user experience, so your business will begin to rank higher.

Yet, as any good SEO consultant will tell you, improving the U.X. by lowering the bounce rate, increasing the time on site, and improving organic SEO takes a lot of time simply because you have to show Google’s algorithms that your website offers good user experience.