Web Design in Glossop

With the uncertain economic climate that doesn’t seem to be reaching its conclusion any time soon, more people are turning to online marketing and website creation in order to make money. Likewise, previously established business’ are learning that with the increased use of smart devices such as the iPad, phones etc that more and more people are becoming connected online. Due to this, it’s clear that with the large number of websites that are being created each month, only the best will be receiving the proper level of traffic and recurring traffic.

To achieve this, the web design of the site must be spot on. Normally, this is divided into two main areas which are the actual appearance of the website as well as how well the site is optimised, a term dubbed as search engine optimization.

With the former, it’s crucial that the website looks as good as it possibility can be. This is especially true if you’re aiming to sell things through it. A professional and stylish looking website will instil a sense of confidence in the shopper which will not only make them more likely to make an initial purchase, but also even more likely to come back as a repeat customer. Furthermore, having a clean layout to a website will make pages on it load faster which is actually a factor now in how well a website ranks on the internet for a list of keywords.

During the design stage, there are a lot of choices to be made. One of the biggest ones though apart from the URL is what content management system (CMS) should be used on the site. Whilst there are various option available, the most widely used platform is one you’ve most likely heard of before; WordPress. This is a really straightforward platform to use and once it’s installed on a server, making changes to the content on the website is as simply as writing out a document in Microsoft Word. Even better, WordPress has it’s own selection of apps, dubbed plugins which can make your site highly customisable. There’s even plugins available for search engine optimization. However, one of the biggest challenges involves setting up the site initially via the servers and then coding it so that the appearance is exactly how you like it to ensure that it doesn’t look like a generic site.

Search engine optimization does exactly what it says on the tin. It’s really just a way of making sure your site is perfectly optimised so that it shows up higher in the search engines. However, this stage isn’t something which everyone can do themselves. There are two forms of SEO, onsite and offsite. Onsite SEO involves making sure the header information on each page is correct, as well as optimizing your content so that you have a keyword density of around 1-2%, which has been found as the sweet spot to stay on the good side of Google. Having said that, it’s actually pretty challenging to get this target value of keyword density whilst at the same time making the content readable and natural sounding. Further challenges involve selecting the correct meta tags for each page, as well as creating alt tags as well for any images you may have.

Offsite SEO involves promoting your website via various methods. Over the years, the rules have been seen to be changed a lot in terms of what Google does and doesn’t allow. Previously a wide array of 20+ Web 2.0 posts for websites that had a backlink to your site used to be a great way to raise the ranking of a site however this is now considered to be blackhat.

There are of course other ways to do offsite optimization, however these are generally much more difficult and time consuming to do in order to get these backlinks. Due to this, and because of the time consuming commitments of doing the coding of the website, many people decide to outsource this. For the majority of people this is the most cost effective option since it takes all these issues out of their hands and allows the site to be built whilst you work on other aspects of the business.

When it comes to making your website, there are hundreds of vendors. However, it’s normally best to choose one which isn’t part of a nationwide chain and rather a smaller company. This is due to the fact that they’ll have much smaller overheads, as well as being able to fully be commit the time to your needs to make sure your vision for your site is what is actually published on the internet. Also, you'll be wanting one that can give your site a fully comprehensive audit and one that is on call to meet your needs as well as being able to answer any queries that you may have.

A great way to research smaller SEO companies would be to search for vendors in specific areas with a search term such as ‘web design in Glossop'. A key example of this would be Dark Peak Digital that are specialists in web design and SEO who are more than capabable to carry out the aforementioned tasks listed above.