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Web Design for Cumbria, UK and elsewhere

Advice for a More Successful Business Website

To help you create a successful business website and to then promote it successfully we have a few pieces of advice. Click on the topics below to go to the advice.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

The techniques known as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) aim to move your website or web page closer to the top of the list with search engines like Google and Yahoo. On this page we sketch the outlines of the SEO process and then list some simple steps you can take.

Although many website management companies sell SEO services, we recommend people take a DIY approach. The reason is that half of the work will already have been done (at no extra cost) in our design work, and the other half consists mainly of quite simple techniques that you can implement yourself for little or no financial outlay.

On-Site SEO

Basically there are two halves to search engine optimisation: on-site SEO and off-site SEO. On-site search engine optimisation concerns the design of the web pages themselves. The key word here is "key words".

Key words
To be given a good listing the page needs to highlight the relevant key words. If, for instance, you provide bed and breakfast in Keswick and you know that most people searching on the web will type these words in the relevant box in Google or Yahoo, then these will be your key words.

These need to appear in different parts of the page. For instance, each page has two titles: one visible on the browser screen and another in the invisible head section of the web page. The most important key words must appear in these titles. In the invisible head section there is also a description of the content of the page (a kind of summary that each page carries with it). This must also highlight the key words.

It is also a good idea to have a fair amount of text on the page that repeats the various key words and phrases. Here a balance needs to be struck between writing text that seems natural and pleasant for human readers while also achieving the density of key words that will score enough points with the search engines.

In the normal process of designing web pages we will make sure that they are constructed in the right way so that they can work well with the search engines. This we do as a matter of course; it is not something we charge for separately.

Off-Site SEO

Once the web pages have been constructed correctly the big issue is incoming links from other sites on the web. This is what Off-Site SEO is all about: building up a large network of incoming links.

It doesn't matter how well designed the page is, if there are no links to it from established pages on the web the search engines will never find it and it simply won't be listed.

Bear in mind that some incoming links are better than others. Links from very popular sites are more valuable, as are links from sites full of content that is directly relevant to what you are promoting.

Really high quality incoming links are hard to come by, but we have found that the following ways of increasing the number of incoming links can bear fruit.

Bookmarking sites
There are many bookmarking services now on the web. You need to register with them (for free) and then you can bookmark the most important pages on your site. This plays a dual function. Each bookmark functions as an incoming link and each is a means by which your website could be found by interested visitors who use the same bookmarking system. Here is a list of some of the bookmarking services.

When bookmarking your site make sure you write a title and a brief summary (where possible) that highlights your key words.

Encourage others to bookmark your site. We will gladly put a button on your home page providing immediate access to the bookmarking sites, like the one below.

Bookmark and Share

Social networking sites
Similar to the bookmarking sites there are others where the emphasis is more on social networking. These also enable you to post links back to your web pages. They also enable you to join virtual networks and thereby raise the visibility of your business, so that as well as increasing the number of incoming links you are also finding potential customers.

Three popular social networking sites are:

Again, try to squeeze your main key word into any usernames, link titles, tags, etc


Directory submissions
There are directories to which you can submit a link for free. Two universal directories are particularly important: dmoz.org and dir.yahoo.com. You may not have heard of DMOZ, but that is a directory that Google pays particular attention to. When submitting links to directories be careful about the way you word the title and any description, and make sure those key words are highlighted again.

Look for business directories on the web and list your business with them in the most relevant category. There are some paid listings worth considering (e.g. yell.co.uk) but before considering those, try these free ones:


Getting reviewed
If you provide a service, there will be a website where people can leave reviews about it. If happy customers are not spontaneously filling these sites with glowing reviews and including links to your site, you could perhaps encourage one or two people to make up for this oversight. You can use your favourite search engine to find the most relevant review sites. However, not all of them enable you to post a link. Here are a few sites for holiday reviews.


Blogging
Start a blog, or two or three. You can do this for free. Blogging will involve putting up short, newsy pieces on the web, and in these you can include links back to the relevant pages on your site. If you have a guest house, you can write briefly from time to time about things relevant to tourism in your area. This is a way to create a source of external links with a high degree of relevance, but it does take time.

Two free blogging sites are www.blogger.com and www.wordpress.com.


Commenting
There are other places around the web where it is possible to post comments and similarly small interjections, and sometimes it is possible to squeeze in a link. Other people's blogs, forums, and question and answer sites can provide opportunities to add links. Use your favourite search engine to fish them out. One that we use is uk.answers.yahoo.com.


Link baiting
Ideally, what happens is that not only your business but also your website is so interesting that people just link to it because they find it an important point of reference. One way of encouraging people to do this is by putting up particularly interesting or important material. If you have a guest house, for instance, in a significant location and you write one of the best histories of the place on the web, you will inevitably attract links once word gets around.


The Web Design Cottage and You

As a matter of course we will ensure that the web pages we design are constructed in such a way that they will work well with search engines (the on-site SEO). We will also submit links to the DMOZ and the Yahoo directories and create other links if necessary to ensure that the site is visible to search engines.

As for building up an enviable collection of incoming links, this is a task that we suggest you undertake yourselves. It is something to be done gradually over a period of time. It is not the sort of thing that can be done overnight. Technically, it is very easy, but it does take time. It is best to see it as a long-term project to come back to regularly and with patience.

Isn't there a quicker fix?

You may come across ads promising an amazing boost to your Google ranking overnight. These need to be treated with caution. The systems at Google and elsewhere are continually being developed to weed out sites that use techniques to create an artificial impression of either extreme relevance or extreme popularity (sometimes referred to as "black hat techniques").

Because of this, our advice is to ignore the ads and be patient. With your own hand-made reviews, comments, blog posts, genuine directory listings, etc you can slowly raise the visibility of your site, increase the traffic, and build up a network of links from other relevant sites. This takes time, but it is safer, doubtless more effective in the long run and certainly cheaper than paying for a dubious "quick fix".

How can I beat the competition?

Before you try to beat your competitor it might do to learn from him/her. How? One step is to see what sort of incoming links they have gathered. To do this just type their web address in Google and look down the list to see the sites that mention them or link to them. Look at the sites and see how to get your link included or and your business mentioned. For a more focused list of incoming links to sites, use the free Yahoo site explorer service.

!Spam warning!

When arranging listings and links you will often be asked for a valid email address. We advise against using the address you rely on for either personal or business emails. The risk is that you end up with unmanageable amounts of spam. To deal with this eventuality, create a new email address with one of the free providers (try Yahoo/Ymail). Then, if you do get overwhelmed with spam, you can just cancel the email account.

How can I gauge the success of my efforts?

Type the most important key words for your product/service into Google or Yahoo (or some other search engine) and take a close look at the list. If you can't see your page, try this Google position tool (it can give a useful indication although the results are not necessarily 100% accurate).

In addition to checking your position in the list you will probably also want to keep track of how many visitors you are getting. Most hosting accounts (including ours) give you a control panel from which you can access statistics about your website. For more detailed stats and for information about your incoming links you can sign up for the free Google Analytics service. This requires adding a few lines of code to your home page. The Web Design Cottage can do this for you. We will also answer any queries you might have about the SEO advice on this page.

When will I be able to relax?

This depends on your competitors. If others a few rungs below you are busy building up their links and furiously optimising their pages for search engines, you might find yourself slipping back again. You will need to keep an eye on your position in the list and make sure that your rivals are not getting the edge. There will be brief periods of relaxation, but you won't be able to get to page two and then never have to lift a finger again.


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Text

The text is important. Firstly, people will pay attention to how well you describe your products or services. Secondly, the text is far more important than the photos if you need to move up the search engine rankings. Search engines only really pay attention to the text on a page. We will help to improve the text that you send us, not only to make sure it makes the best possible impression on human readers, but also to make sure it ticks the right boxes with the search engines. The latter are looking out for certain key words and phrases repeated in the text. We will make sure that the most important key words and phrases are repeated without this sounding artificial to human readers.

One tip regarding the text is: Don't just write only about what you are selling (the beds and breakfast in your guest house, for instance). Instead, describe other details that will interest and attract potential customers. If you have a guest house in a beautiful resort, include information about the resort and find a few links to sites with further details that visitors might appreciate. Note that it is an advantage to have a few links like this on your page, even though you are giving free promotion to the sites you link to. Do some research and find the best links.

Although we rely on you to provide the initial textual input, we will carefully edit and possibly extend the material you send us. Of course, any changes we make are subject to your approval.


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Taking your own photos for your website

Your site will need photos. Occasionally you will need one or two commercial photos. We can source those for you, usually at little cost. As for the photos of the products or services you are selling, why not take the photos yourself (at least initially)? Here we have some practical advice to help you do it well.

Equipment
UseIf you are going to photograph interiors, use a digital camera that has a wide angle lens. A lens that will be wide enough for most purposes is 28mm. The camera with a 28mm lens that we use is the the relatively inexpensive Canon IXUS 86015. (Note that cameras like this advertise their lenses as 28mm, but the actual figure written on the rim of the camera lens will be 4.6. This is a bit confusing, but the figure of 28mm is borrowed from the larger format non-digital cameras which many people are still more familiar with.)

Set the size of the photo. If you are taking photos specifically for use on the web, the smallest size setting on your camera (640 pixels by 480) is usually large enough (unless you are taking a photo that is intended to fill the screen, then it needs to be about 1,500 pixels wide). Setting the size first saves time editing later and makes it easier to attach the photos to an email when sending them to us.

Use a tripod. To get pin-sharp photos you need to hold the camera perfectly still. Either you do a course in transcendental meditation to gain perfect control of your body's involuntary movements, or you use a tripod. The tripod also makes it easier to leave the camera in one place while you think more about how you compose the objects in the field of view.

When choosing a camera it is worth looking for one that gives you some degree of manual control over the settings. The most important settings to be able to control are the following (in this order): the white balance, the focus, the aperture, and the ISO rating. For more details see the appendix at the bottom of this page.

Composition and Lighting
There are two things that make good photos: composition and lighting. However good the subject of the photo is, you need to think a little about how to position it in the frame relative to the other objects that can be seen. One tip regarding composition is to have something interesting in both the foreground and the background of the photo.

Lighting is the other factor to pay particular attention to. Your subject needs to be lit well. Our big tip for people photographing interiors is: Don't bother with the flash. Photos illuminated by a flash built into the camera almost always look bad, so you certainly want a camera which lets you deactivate the flash in low light. Instead, for indoor shots choose to photograph on a moderately sunny day when the room is nicely lit by sunshine coming through the windows. Then switch all the lights on. Take a series of photos from the same position with different settings (altering, in particular, the white balance to compensate for the artificial light). Note that if you have a tripod, you can take good, sharp photos indoors in relatively low light, relying more on the room's lights instead of resorting to that nasty flash.


Let's compare these two photos:

samplephotworse samplephotobetter

The photo on the left is not so good. Firstly, it is too dark. To avoid this, it is a good idea to take two or three photos from each angle using a slightly different shutter speed for each one. Most digital cameras will let you know what the shutter speed is if you adjust the details shown on the screen. Secondly, the white balance setting is not quite right - the camera is still set for sunlight and the picture has turned out too orange. These complaints apart, the really big problem is the composition. It is flat, and we have a large white area with electrical sockets, which is not very flattering. Having the corner of the table in the frame also doesn't do us any favours. By comparison, the photo on the right has a better composition, with something interesting in the foreground. The photo is brighter, as it should be. It's much better.


The size of photos
Many visitors to your site will have slow connection speeds and will not be impressed if they have to sit waiting a long time for your photos to download. With this in mind we will limit the number of photos on the page. We will also resize and compress the photos without sacrificing the quality of the images as they appear on the screen. If you have some very good photos and want larger versions to appear in a new window if people click the photos on your page, we can do this.

Because the web pages will only accommodate relatively small photographs, we would recommend you set your camera to take photos of only 640 by 480 pixels (this will usually be the smallest of the picture size settings on your camera). To make the smaller versions to go onto your main web page we will then resize them.

Image software
One of the big advantages of digital photos is that you can retouch and tweak them yourself quite easily using photo editing software. If you want to get the best out of your photos, you will want to use this software. A good and relatively affordable programme is Paint Shop Pro Photo (by Corel). If the expense seems too much, and you'd like to try something for free, you could download the Faststone Image Viewer from faststone.org (although particular care needs to be taken with free software downloads).

Unless you insist that we use your photos exactly as you send them to us, we may retouch them or crop them or make other slight alterations to improve the way the photographs appear on the web page. You will be free to disagree with our editing and can instruct us to revert to the original photographs if you are not completely happy with the result.

Commercial photos
If you have a guest house beside a lake, you might want to include a photo of that beautiful expanse of water on your web site. If you haven't yet managed to take a really good photo yourself, you might consider using a commercial photo that can be bought over the web. As part of our design service we will source the commercial photos you need. Usually there will be no extra charge for this.




Photography Appendix

Here are the slightly technical details about the white balance, the focus, the aperture, and the ISO rating.

White balance
If you have to take photos indoors, it is vital you can alter the settings on the camera to take into account that the scene is lit (if only partially) by artificial light. If you don't regulate the setting appropriately, the photos will either come out far too blue or far too orange. (To a great extent, this can be changed on the computer afterwards, but why not avoid having to correct the mistake?)

Focus
Most cameras let you point at an object, half depress the shutter button to focus on the object, and then recompose the shot with your finger still half depressing the shutter button to keep the focus where it was. We would say this is essential.

Aperture
The aperture is the hole behind the lens that lets the light through. The diameter is expressed as an F number - the smaller the number, the wider the aperture. Here is why having some control over the aperture matters: Sometimes you will want to take a photo where there is something close to the camera and something in the distance, and you want them both to be in focus. This is only possible if you can set the aperture so that it is smaller (i.e. with an F number of 5.6 or greater). A narrow aperture gives you what is called greater depth of field (i.e. a wider range from the foreground to the background that will be in focus).

ISO Rating
In the old days of film, we bought film with a particular speed, and the speed was expressed as an ISO number ranging perhaps from 50 to 1,600. Films with a speed of 50 were great for really sunny days when we wanted the crispest possible photos, while films of 1,600 were great for taking photos indoors with poor lighting (although the photos with fast films were never as sharp). Digital cameras have the same system and it is good to be able to manually set the ISO number. Here are two situations. If you have the camera on a tripod indoors with low light, you will want your photo to be as sharp as possible (the point of having a tripod is to take better quality photos). To get a photo of the best possible quality, you need a low ISO rating (50 or 100); but on automatic in low light your camera will push the number up much higher. Ideally you want to keep the ISO number as low as possible. Alternatively, if you want to take a photo standing on a chair, for instance, (and interior shots sometimes look better from higher up, even though we generally prefer to use our tripod), the shot will be hand-held and it will be an advantage to make sure that the ISO number is quite high (say 400 or 800) so that camera shake will not cause the photo to come out too blurred.



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Content Management

Broadly speaking, there are two types of website. One is the so-called "static" site put together and maintained by someone who knows about web page construction. The other is a site put together and maintained using what is called a content management system (CMS), which makes it possible for a user to change the content on pages and add or delete pages without knowing anything about the code used to build web pages. CMS puts the owner of the site in direct control of the content, whereas changes to a static site usually involve material being sent to the web designer, who then manually changes the code for the relevant web pages.

Both approaches have their pros and cons. The static site will load faster when visitors access it, and usually the search engine optimisation of the site is better. With a hand-built static site it is also possible to position and present text, photos and graphics on the page with precision. The downside is that the owner of the site has to rely on the web designer to update and alter the pages. Conversely, a site with a content managment system will probably work more slowly, be less well optimised, and have a more standardised look (due to a loss of precision in the positioning and presentation of material) but it allows you to make your own changes to the content immediately. Bear in mind, though, that although a good content managment system puts you in charge and requires no knowledge of the code used to build web pages, there is a certain level of complexity. It will take a little while to become familiar with it.

So which is better for you? Our advice is that if you need to make significant changes to material on more than one page of your site more often that once every couple of months, then a site with CMS is probably the better option. However, if you need to make frequent announcements (post news of special offers and/or news of upcoming events) on only one page of your site, there is an alternative to constructing the entire site with a CMS. Announcements could be made on a blog which we install on your site and customise so that it has the same colour scheme. You would then have a mainly static site maintained by us, but with a section where you can add and delete content at will.

If you have less need to update the site, it would be better to let us build and alter the pages manually. Why make your life more complicated with a CMS that has its own learning curve? We don't charge separately for minor updates. The cost is covered by our annual hosting fee.


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