Posts Tagged ‘website’

5 Website Redesign Essentials

Monday, November 28th, 2011

Thinking of giving your website a revamp? Great stuff! It’s probably the best thing you can do in terms of your online presence. After all, almost everyone will look up your website when considering your services.

A fresh well thought out website can provide a much better experience for your users and there are several important factors to remember when doing a website re-design.

Content and Blog

Your actual content is obviously an important part of your website but amazingly this is still overlooked by so many businesses.

So ask yourself whether your existing copy needs a refresh as well? If so you’ll certainly want to optimise your copy for the search engines and make sure it is unique and demonstrates your expertise. You should also provide a strong call to action for users to get in touch, purchase your products or do whatever the goal of your website is.

Regular fresh content is essential in today’s online world and integrating a blog into your website is the best way to add regular news, articles, videos or podcasts that the search engines can index.

Search Engine Friendly

Your website should be built with the following in mind. Well coded websites mean faster loading websites, which is just one factor in how your website ranks in Google.

Meta data such as keywords and descriptions, although not as important as they once were should still be a part of your website.

  • Ensure keyword phrase is in the tags of a post if your site is blog based.
  • Keywords should appear in the first paragraph of content, be in bold, italicised or underlined.
  • Keyword phrase is used as the anchor text of a link within the page or post
  • Phrase is the alt text and title tag as well as the image

Browser Tested

Your website should work on modern browsers as well as older ones. There are fantastic new evolutions in CSS and HTML which can help your website load faster in modern browsers and bring functionalities to give your site that special touch. A future-proof site should be optimised for modern browsers with backwards compatibility with older browsers.

Mobile Friendly

How does your website look on smart phones and mobile devices? It may well be worth considering having an optimised mobile version alongside your main website that helps mobile users navigate around your website more easily. Almost half of UK internet users are going online via mobile phone data connections, according to the Office for National Statistics.

Social Media

If you want to tap into the viral power of social media then you may want to consider linking to or integrating your social media platforms on your website.

Think about whether social media will enhance your online marketing efforts as it may not be for everyone. What you want to achieve? Increase communication and get feedback from customers? Establish your expertise in a given area or just drive traffic?

Redesigning your site is an excellent move  – just don’t forget these basic ingredients

If you’re thinking of a website revamp don’t hesitate to contact us for a no obligation chat

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Posted in Design, Digital |

Godfrey Wilson Website Revamp

Tuesday, August 2nd, 2011
Code 9 recently revamped the website for the Bristol based Accountancy company Godfrey Wilson. They wanted to highlight their creative clients as well as their work with charities. Godfrey Wilson also wanted to avoid the corporate stuffy image sometimes associated with accountancy and auditing and have a website more in tune with their clients and field of expertise. Alison Godfrey commented, “I have been impressed by the service we have received. Throughout the whole process you have dealt with my queries and feedback really promptly and as if nothing is too much trouble.”

The website has been built with HTML5 and CSS3 technologies to make it fast, efficient and optimised for the future.    

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Posted in Code 9 News |

Website Launched for St Swithins Church

Tuesday, May 31st, 2011
Code 9 are delighted to have recently launched another bespoke website for one of our clients, St Swithins church in Bath.  St Swithins wanted a fresh new website that reflected the community spirit of the church, one that told the story of its’ members, its’ heritage with Bath as well as its’ openness to new members and visitors. We worked with and advised the client, until they were perfectly happy with the finished design and then constructed the website using Symphony CMS , an open source content management system. Symphony combines a flexible, open architecture with the power of XSLT to give users complete control over every aspect of their project, from its data structures to its templating layer Click here to view the website on our portfolio.

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Posted in Code 9 News |

How does your Website Convert?

Wednesday, October 14th, 2009
Is your website actually doing its’ job? And what is its’ job? These are questions that business owners with websites could focus on more when it comes to getting more leads, enquiries and sales. Firstly, it may sound obvious but asking yourself what the main function of your website is can clarify how it is designed. In the past some clients have specified that they just want enquiries by phone or email to follow up on, some are selling an actual product and some just want a online presence, a brochure site. Whether it is lead generation or actual sales, converting your visitors is a key part of the process, after all your website is a marketing tool. Taking the example of 100 visitors a day, with 1 sale/lead gives a 1% conversion rate. You want to increase conversions to 2%, so based on this which is easier: Increasing traffic/visitors to 200 a day? … or increasing conversion to 2%? (We’d vote for the latter) A great tool for increasing your conversions is available from Google (who else?). Google website optimiser enables you to do split tests on your webpage. So something as simple as your welcoming headline can be run through a  A/B switch test where half your visitors are shown headline A and the other half headline B :-) For example, if we were testing our marketing page we might also change some of the elements below as well as buttons, offers, text or anything else. web conversion This will tell you what page elements brought in new customers! Sometimes just changing a few words can bring unexpected results. If you can double your website conversion, your cost-per-acquisition (the cost of getting  every new customer) would halve! Google Analytics is another powerful tool giving you full tracking of your site visitors and can be used in conjunction with the website optimiser.

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Posted in Marketing |