Web design is obviously very important to making sure that your new potential customers see your business in the way that you want it to be seen. In the same way that a shop would make sure that it is clean and tidy from the outside to attract customers to the inside, your website must be the same. Here are a few fundamentals that everyone should consider and be thinking about when launching or building a new website.


I started work as a web designer many years ago, as I have written in previous blogs information about just how long ago it was, but web design back then (and we are talking 10 years, not 50!) was nothing more than a couple of pictures and a page (or two at most) of text, and that was about it. Very little thought had been given at that time about SEO, or just how pages “felt” to consumers, the paths that customers would take through a site, where they would end up or return on investment by tracking usage of the site. It was just about having a website, back then it was considered cool to have a domain that was either a .com, .co.uk or a .net etc.
The rules have changed a lot, and for your money when starting a site and hosting packages etc, you get a lot of bandwidth for you £ or buck!

And as you will see from any of the sites you and I probably go to everyday, like sky sports.com bbc, msn, yahoo etc they have rich multimedia content flashing away on their homepages, sometimes full video, sometimes games to make you roll your mouse over the advertising. How can small businesses compete with all that going on, I hear you ask? Well, we have developed better and better websites over the years, and our customers have given better and better feedback on how we make effective use of their designs.


Sole traders and small businesses have enough to manage in their everyday life and web design or bringing some kind of impact to their website needn’t be one of them. Do away with the unnecessary extras! Do you need the full flash website? The flashy gimmicks the stuff that won’t really help you. Take a look across the top performing sites in the world. They have spent £1,000,000’s on site research, customer surveys etc - copy from the best! The top performing sites, are the most straightforward. Users really appreciate the simplicity of a well laid out, performing site - just take a look at Google! it’s a classic example.


Give the user what they want, not what you want! - they are often not the same thing, and sometimes quite hard to distinguish, but all the same very important on a crisp clean site. Also remember that less is more. Obviously, information and content is KING for your site, but spread it out, do not put all your products on one page for example, spread them across sub categories, people will expect to drill down categories to find things they want, allow them to do so. By spreading content out, it gives you more content, more space for more content, more pages and more importantly less clutter for your users to experience and see in their use.
So, this is when we come to the next part, navigation.

Often I have come across, fantastic home pages, that once you navigate away from, you then come across a whole different format, with different fonts, different layout of text, everything’s different! - this is a mistake, keep everything uniformed as much as possible. This will help your brand and your business gain credibility. There are some SHOCKING examples I would love to share with you, but I don’t think its fair to mock people who have a site, often it’s down to the web designers.


Ok, so what’s next? Ok, well this one really depends on your type of business, and it is not a tip for every business sector to take out. But good quality, striking images that appear on your homepage can really capture peoples attention and get them looking further through the site. It’s a proven fact.


So, now after you’ve taken into account all of these proven facts on making sites “sticky” - that means people going back to them, staying on them, repeat business etc etc - Once you’ve taken into account all of this information, go and have a look at your website (and if you don’t have one www.behigher.co.uk). If it covers all the bases, then well done! Fantastic! If not, it might be worth having a chat with your web designer and mentioning what made them do it the way they did, on what success basis and why?


Well, I hope that is good information from my “bonus” blogg posting this week, I am really enjoying writing here, but wish a few more of you would come forward with your comments! If you do suffer from shyness, mail me at info@behigher.co.uk we’re always happy to help where we can.

Tom,

Local SEO - The advice you need

Well, I posted my first blog a couple of days ago, about getting your business seen on search engines, and my business partner and writer for a few websites including www.allinlondon.co.uk David Thompson, just posted a Brilliant blogg on localised SEO and getting your business seen in the local area - I thought it would be great for some businesses on here to see, so David Thompson from BeHigher gets all the credit for this blogg and his short interview at the end.

"Something I wanted to talk about on my blog this week is SEO, but more specifically localised SEO.I have been involved in Behigher.co.uk long before we had a name for the company, but my knowledge was just used for friends and family websites - as with most things that work well, this grew and myself and my business partner decided to go full time with BeHigher.

So something we get asked a lot about is localised SEO, so I thought I would write a few tips and advice for maximising the most from DIY local SEO. I’ve broken this down into 5 steps (and a 6th bonus tip!), there is obviously a lot more, but with this it’s a good starting point, and if all of the points are applied results will not be far away.

1) Make your target keywords local - so if your service is “wedding planner” and you operate in London, try and include all the local authorities and boroughs that you want to be noticed in, such as “wedding planner southwark” “wedding planner west London” and variations based on local search. Keep your national more generic keywords too, but the localised ones will also benefit you too.

2) Submit your site to local search - if you don’t already know one, find one, there are plenty of local sites that cater for small businesses in the local area - businesses are on there for a reason. Even if the sites look poor and don’t have a page rank, that’s not as important as people think, when you are targeting local traffic.

3) This one is very simple, but effective - display your postal address, and your business address (if they are different, or just one if the same) but once this information is indexed these words in your address are included in the information of your site. Simple eh?

4) Submit to local sections of larger search engines, don’t forget sites like Craig list, gumtree etc etc.

5) Get on the local maps section of google, this is free and is basic seo techniques, but many people don’t bother, don’t see the benefit, but for local traffic its important.

6) *BONUS* exchange links (and banners too if you prefer) with local businesses. Now this you have to be careful with, but if you keep the numbers to maybe 5-10 links it will be fine - try and keep the businesses relevant, so for a wedding planner for instance, include links to “chauffeur car hire”, “flower shops” etc, in the local area, can be very powerful. Just linking to some random local businesses can be good too - but SEO benefits more from relevant links, so if you are going to do it, might as well do it properly.

Well that’s all from me this week, just thought I’d leave you with my site of the week, this is www.anthialott.com - a new site which is tailored to creative people, in need of inspiration. Anthia is based in London, and New York, she lives in North London and jets over to New York as and when work arrives.

As I was talking to her over a coffee recently she told me “More and more work is coming from London, I’ve had to set up a website recently just to automate the enquiry process which was taking a lot of time”, she continued “local search is incredibly powerful and needed for my business to grow in London, plus it gives me the opportunity to target other major cities as and when my business grows in the future”.

David Thompson

http://www.behigher.co.uk
- Complete solution for small business SEO / PPC / WEB DESIGN

So, thanks to David for all that fantastic information, its incredibly useful and if you are looking to target local customers, get those aspects applied today!

I will be posting my next blog after the weekend and plan to give some more advice on your seo campaigns.

All the best!

Tom

http://www.behigher.co.uk
- Complete solution for small business SEO / PPC / WEB DESIGN

Whats the point of a website if nobody can see it?

The amount of people I speak to in business, and ask the question - do they have a website?

Many reply with yes, and then go into detail about how much it cost and how it is'nt generating any cash for them. Not all companies say this, of course, but you'd be suprised how many do!

In a website there has to be a reason for creating it - many think that it's like having a business card online, well thats great, but who's going to see it? and often if a potential customer does happen to stumble across it, its normally shocking!

Websites are created for two reasons -one, to generate more awareness (to a blog, a notice board, a chairty etc) - or - to generate more business. Whatever the type of site it has no use unless the right kind of people are looking at it - "the target market".

It suprises me just how many websites have been set up as one page, cost about £500 to create, let alone the domain and hosting being wasted on a site sitting there doing nothing.

What good would play.com be if it did'nt have customers? What if the latest movie came out without a website? What if the community site you joined only had you in it!?

The internet is the most powerful opportunity in business - capture and lure 100,000's of customers around the world to your page, showing your products and services, and how unique your website is compared to everyone elses!

Make the most of what you have! - Every opportunity counts, and the internet is the biggest your business will ever see!


Tom

http://www.behigher.co.uk
SEO / WEB Build for small businesses from £89 per month!!