Web Design Blog

Last night saw our latest web design project go live. Feel free to check it out should you wish, and as always all comments are greatly received and appreciated!

Ian Haring Wedding Photography

What Ian had to say about our services:

"Although I was pleased with the look of my initial website, it was under-performing, and I needed somebody who knew exactly what they were doing to take the project on and make it work.

It was great to actually sit down over a coffee and speak to real people about this. James and Neil at JB and G explained where my current site was going wrong, and what could be done to improve it. They accommodated our ideas, and incorporated these into a fresh clean design which, most importantly, was search engine friendly.

I also opted for their Advanced Search Engine Optimisation package, and after just a few weeks since go-live I am already noticing extremely promising results, and I know this will only continue to improve in time.

The monthly reports provided are extremely beneficial in monitoring the increasing progress of my sites performance, and with JB and G managing my website, and occasional meetings since the site has gone live, I know it will always be kept up to date at my request and continue to grow.

Cannot recommend highly enough to other local businesses."

Labels: web design

I was today reading a most fascinating blog post highlighting the differences in design of ten highly popular websites on the net today, over the course of a number of years.

There were some sites that have stayed true to their brand - and other than tidying up round the edges a bit, have remained fairly similar.

CNN is one such example. This is how the CNN website looks now:

And how it looked 8 years ago:

However, other websites highlighted in the blog post are dramatically different! The MTV website was my favourite transformation..

MTV website today:

MTV website 11 years ago:

I was also horrified to see that they even sported a "Best viewed in IE" button. Fail!

Labels: web design

Following on from my recent post regarding a free flash video player for websites, I have decided to briefly continue the media sharing theme after finding another free offering, this time a fully customisable MP3 player for your website.

There are a number of different varieties of the player available, for a simple one-track player, to a mini jukebox listing all the tracklists in the playlist.

This could be extremely useful for hosting soundclips on your website without having to rely on the user to have the necessary software on their PC to play the file.

For full details, and to download, click here.

Labels: web design

I think I have stumbled across a gem here - and the beauty of this code is its completely free!!

Those of you that use iTunes (shame on you if you don't!) will be more than aware of the pretty funky album artwork showreel at the top of the application.

Slowly and surely the introduction of this in websites began, almost always as an embedded flash video.

As we all know, flash isn't 100% ideal for Search Engine Optimisation, as mainly it doesn't allow for the inclusion of good keywords in your markup.

Now though, I have found a completely different method to get a very, very similar result, and it uses regular HTML markup and some rather clever javascript.

For a full demo and the files to download, you can find out more here.

Labels: web design

I recently found a rather useful resource on the net - a downloadable Flash Web Video Player - which for personal use is completely free!

It looks pretty stylish, and is also highly customisable using javascript.

If I find a suitable use, I might even try it out on the JB and G site.

You can find out all about it here..

Flow Player

Labels: web design

It's fair to say that there are two types of search engine optimisation, on-site SEO and off-site SEO. On site SEO refers to all of the code, titles, links, keywords and more used to create your website. Off-site SEO is, in a nutshell, the amount of good quality inbound links to your website.

You have control to an extent of both of these aspects, although off-site SEO can be aided greatly by having content worth linking to, rather than you yourself putting in all the hard graft.

But on-site SEO, well, that's all down to you.

You need to ensure that you have a good keyword ratio and density in your pages, and make sure that these keywords, where possible, also feature highly in your page titles, meta description, meta keywords, H1, H2 structure etc..

Lets take my business website, and another website I have recently built as examples. My business website offers Web Design and Search Engine optimisation, and I am based in Warwick. Logic tells me then, maybe my keywords should be focused on perhaps Web Design Warwick or Search Engine Optimisation Warwick.

Similarly, I am in the process of building a new website for Ian Haring, a wedding photographer also based in Warwick. And yes, once again, the logical thought process may be to dive in with the keywords Wedding Photographer Warwick.

However, there are some pretty cool tools available to help you decide if these keywords would be the most productive. One such "cool tool" comes from our good friends at Google.

A good friend of mine, Tony (he offers Free Internet Marketing Advice) once pointed me in the direction of the Google Traffic Estimator. Primarily a tool used for Google Adwords, this can also be used for this purpose too.

You can enter in all the keywords you think your website should be targeting, and after processing the information, it tells you how much you should expect to bid with Adwords targeting those keyphrases. This in turn then tells you how many people search for the key words and phrases you have listed, with the most expensive options obviously being the most popular.

More popular search terms = more potential visitors to your site, so target your key words and phrases carefully!

In light of this tool, I changed the keyphrase for my business site to Warwickshire Web Design, and for my client I opted for Warwickshire Wedding Photographer.

I still think this is a fantastically useful tool that I shall use for a long time to come, and I hope you will benefit from it too.

As ever, any comments are always welcomed and appreciated.

Labels: Search Engine Optimisation