Affordable and effective website designer

Those of you who know me will appreciate that my favorite pastimes are camping in the woods with my family or flying gliders, so the new website for Southdown Gliding Club has been a labour of love. I’m rather pleased with it and further development work will be carried out over the coming months.

Indeed – another blog! This site is for Tia Konieczna  of Soulbird Psychotherapy in Tunbridge Wells.  Quite a quick turnaround in just week for this site and Tia has already started blogging.

I seem to be releasing lots of blogs at the moment and have just done another for Greater London Carpet Cleaners. They will be producing lots of tips and hints to keep your carpets clean and so much more. They are obviously working predominantly in the Greater London area, but they are not just carpet cleaners. They can pretty much clean anything from stained decking, to drives, stone flooring and all kinds of carpets. So, if you live in the London area, give them a call!

Following on from the Panda update I mentioned in an earlier blog, Google has now released another update to it’s algorithm called Penguin. Penguin is designed to punish spammers of a particular kind, because Google doesn’t like websites to be over optimised for seach engine purposes. As to whether you get punished really depends on which camp you fall in – white, black, or gray. White stuff SEO is completely legitimate and follows the overarching aim of Google to reward sites with good content. Black hat stuff is bad – stuffing keywords, invisible text, doorway pages – the list is endless. The aim of Google is to punish sites that do this by blacklisting them from the search results. Black hat SEO is tempting, for the tricks can work temporarily. But once caught – don’t bother contacting Google to ask for your site to be re-listed  - they won’t listen.

With every algorithmic update, Google tries to reward the white hats and punish the black hats – so beware – the Penguin is on patrol!

I guess I’m not the only one that has noticed that as soon as a drought order is issued and hose pipe bans enforced, it starts to rain and rain and rain. Oh well – back to work…..

That was rather a result, the website for Siobhan Tinker was listed on page one of google for the phrase ‘psychotherapist sevenoaks’ the day it was released!

I’ve been very busy since the start of the year with a dozen or so sites now released and doing well. I’m working on a very diverse range of projects at the moment – City Flooring in Beckenham are having a complete makeover, Ancer Spa are having a new site designed to reflect the work they do in the South East, Sigma Time (a lifestyle management company) have commissioned a site and Sponge Kitchens is nearing completion.

I have just released the website for Siobhan Tinker who is a Psychotherapist in Sevenoaks, Counsellor, Supervisor and Trainer. I’m rather pleased with this website – crips and clean with lots of nice colours and a good selection of images.

I am frequently asked by clients whether the should be ‘on’ Facebook or Tweeting away on Twitter and there is no easy answer to that question. The answer will largely depend on the type of business your are running and what point you are with your Internet presence. So, if you are a local plumber with an existing website, should you be Tweeting every day to inform people of your movements? Probably not, because the time invested in Tweeting is unlikely to produce a return on your  investment (time). Facebook? Possibly – more and more people are searching for services on Facebook, but  remember, the search results are powered by Bing, so if you are listed on Bing already, then in some respects you already have a Facebook presence.

Blogging however is different. I have become a great fan of blogging, because there are many blogs out there providing useful helps and tips and most importantly, the content tends to be kept fresh and up to date. The search engines love well constructed and frequently updated blogs.

So lets go back to our local plumber. He runs a blog on helpful tips and tricks for DIY enthusiasts. It is updated a couple of times a week and the content is unique and of interest to anyone doing a makeover of their house or even more major work. The search engines love this type of content and it is well indexed. Will this generate leads for his business – most certainly. And how will it affect his website? That will depend on how the blog has been integrated to the site, but generally the search engines love content to be updated regularly and will rank the website higher.

I’m keeping an open mind on Twitter. Facebook – I’m pretty much converted as long as you can see a return on the time you are putting into it. Blogs – I am now  a fan – BUT – if you do start blogging – don’t stop! The search engines hate that.

So to blog or not to blog? I’d say a resounding yes – but if you do start and you are a client of mine – then expect to be nagged if you stop blogging for too long

For more than half a century they lived separate and vastly different lives. This is the story of two sisters with contrasting childhoods and opportunities, unaware of each other’s existence, caught in the ‘tangled web’ of their mother’s secrets and deceptions.  

You can read more about their story and forthcoming book at the blog I have just completed for Helen and Jenny and they will be updating this themselves as their story unfolds.