Affordable and effective website designer

The website for the Lodge Practice is now live. They offer counselling in Crowborough, Tunbridge Wells and surrounding towns.

Quite a lot under way at the moment. Working on a new website for magician Bertie Pearce based in Crowborough, Link Consultancy based in Brighton, and a major overhall for Martins World Travel based in Sheffield. It is going to be a busy run up to Christmas.

The new website for Beech Court Gardens, Challock in Kent has just been released. If you haven’t visited yet – please do – it has delightful gardens and tea rooms. It opens again mid-March and has several events planned for the Summer months. The owners and staff are most welcoming as are the various varities of chicken that roam the gardens!

The site has a content management system installed and they will be adding additional content throughout the year.

I’m rather pleased with this website. Simple, but a classy feel to it. It has it’s own CMS installed so the client can update text and add images herself - www.beautytherapistskent.co.uk

When designing your first website, it is important to avoid some fundamental errors common on all levels of web design:

• Treating the Web as an Argos brochure to be passively viewed instead of a fundamental shift that will change the way we conduct business online
• Managing a web project as if it were a traditional corporate project. This leads to an internally focused design
• Structuring the site to mirror the way the company is structured. Instead, the site should be structured to mirror the users’ tasks
• Creating pages that look gorgeous and that evoke positive feelings when demo’d inside the company. Internal demos do not suffer the response-time delays that are the main determinant of web usability; similarly, a demo does not expose the difficulties a novice user will have in finding and understanding the various page elements. Instead, design for realistic circumstances
• Writing in the same linear style as you’ve always written. Instead, force yourself to write in the new style that is optimized for online readers who frequently scan text and who need very short pages with secondary information relegated to supporting pages
• Treating your own site as the only one that matters, without proper links to other sites and without well designed entry points for others to link to. Many companies don’t even use proper links when they mention their own site in their own advertising.

In every one of these cases, the natural way people go about doing web projects based on their non-web experience turns out to be wrong. Compared to traditional means of publishing, the Web is a new medium and requires a new approach.

I have quite an eclectic selection of sites under development at the moment. Beechwood Gardens in Challock, Kent are having a new site designed and also Edge Building Company based in Sevenoaks are having their first website developed.

Chevron Publishing have had a makeover of their website. They have been clients of mine for many years and publish an exciting range of books ranging from motor racing to wildlife to military history. New site is well worth a look at www.chevronpublishing.co.uk.

I was delighted to be approached by Media Safety to do a makeover of their existing site. They are based at Leavesden Studios (just next to where the new Harry Potter experience is being created).

They have been supporting the entertainment and broadcast industries since 2003 and have worked on productions large and small ranging from the Harry Potter Films to The Harry and Paul Show.

www.mediasafety.co.uk

A much needed makeover has been completed for Langley Park Golf Club in Beckenham in Kent. I am delighted that the new site is finally up and running and is a considerable improvement in both how the site looks and how theClub will manage the content.

Google finally rolled out the latest updates to its algorithms ‘Panda’ and this hit the USA in Feb of this year. The UK has now seen Panda prowlling through websites based in the UK and losers seem to be voucher sites, ‘content’ and links farms with little or no original content. At the end of the day, that was what Google intended, to demote the sites that don’t add value to the Internet, so it is the same old story – ‘content is king’. Sites that produce their own original content and update regularly seem to have done well out of the update, but it is unlikely that the smaller sites will have been drastically affected – yet!

My advice on getting listed in Google pretty much remains the same – write good quality original content, don’t stuff it full of irrelevant keywords and as far as possible, update frequently. Good content means that visitors will keep reading and if they remain on your site for longer, Google will reward you by higher rankings.

Just as a footnote, the update does risk  upsetting Microsoft and also the EU Commission because it has demoted the shopping comparison site owned by Microsoft (Ciao). The ranking on that site has been cut by 94%, which means it will only rarely feature in the top 10 search results. So is Google using its virtual monopoly on search unfairly or just trying to give users a better user experience. I don’t think Google cares much at the moment, but maybe the EU will?