• Taylor Wimpey West Midlands - http://www.landatolivegrove.co.uk
• Belmontview House Ltd - http://www.belmontviewhouse.co.uk
• Pathe Communications - http://www.pathecommunications.com
• Cornerways Electrical - http://www.cornerwayselectrical.co.uk
• The Stafford Ale House - http://www.staffordalehouse.com
• Photo Booth Events Ltd - http://www.photobootheventsltd.co.uk
• Ecosys Advisory Services Ltd - http://ecosysadvisoryservices.co.uk
• Greenspace Leisure - http://www.portableminigolf.co.uk
• Your Call (Specialists) Ltd - http://www.ycs-ltd.com
• MJ Grab Hire - http://www.mjgrabhire.co.uk
• Void Property Consultants - http://vpc-rates.com
• Eat Well Live Life - http://eatwell-livelife.co.uk

• Purple Energy Ltd - http://www.purpleenergy.co.uk
• Enhanced Space Creation - http://www.enhancedspacecreation.co.uk
• Click4Trading Ltd - http://www.click4tradinguk.co.uk
• Absolute Floors & Walls - http://www.absolutefloorsandwalls.co.uk
• Whispering Grass Films Ltd - http://www.my-untold-story.com
• Elite Transport Training Ltd - http://www.elitetransporttraining.co.uk
• John Charles Auto - http://www.johncharlesauto.co.uk
• Elite Transport Training Ltd - http://www.elitetransporttraining.co.uk
• The Cambridgeshire Marketing Consultancy - http://www.cambsmarketing.co.uk
• PJW HR Consultancy Ltd - www.pjwhrconsultancy.com
• Trident Design & Fabrication Ltd - http://www.tridentfabrications.co.uk

• Restaurant 23 - http://www.restaurant23.co.uk
• Skate Hire – http://www.sk8hire.co.uk
• Taylor Wimpey, West Midlands – http://www.himleyview.co.uk
• POP Partners – http://www.poppartners.co.uk
• Home Response Team – http://www.homeresponseteam.co.uk
• London School of Dry Stone Walling - http://www.londonschoolofdsw.co.uk
• Bodevajon Cleaning - http://www.bodevajon.co.uk
• Edward Gildea - http://www.edwardgildea.co.uk
• PollyAnnA Recruitment Ltd - http://www.pollyannarecruitment.co.uk
• Raigins Ltd  - http://www.raigins.co.uk
• JC Flooring Ltd - http://www.jcflooringltd.co.uk
• Passion Caterers - http://www.passioncaterers.co.uk
• Linam – http://www.linam.co.uk

The new RBST website launched on the 8th February 2012

The new website launched last week to coincide with the release of RBST’s 2012 Rare Breeds Watchlist.

The project was a lot of fun to work on, and it was great to see the website get launched and get some great, positive feedback from visitors and staff. The driving force behind the website is a custom content management system which enables the RBST staff to keep the website up to date as easily, and more importantly quickly, as possible.

From a technical point of view, one challenge was faced was importing the hundreds of PDF articles from the RBST’s quarterly magazine, The Ark, and allowing users to use a keyword search to locate relevant results. We installed some fantastic, easy to use server side software called XPDF to allow the PDFs to be read as plaintext, which helped tremendously.

New RBST Website

Another potential banana skin was the existing news archive stretching back to 2006 – with a few articles posted every week, we were looking at hundreds of news articles which needed to be imported from their current CMS (which was Drupal, by the way) to their new system.

Despite initially struggling to get to grips with the unusual, but inventive, database table structure that Drupal utlises, we were able to import all of the news items and re-organise them to their new structure with relative ease, and even managed to keep the photographs associated with the articles.

In the future, we may also be looking to add in streaming webcams onto the website. All in all, it was a great project for us to get our teeth into, and we look forward to working with RBST in the future.

So what are you waiting for? Visit the new RBST website and take a look around.

• The Rare Breeds Survival Trust - https://www.rbst.org.uk
• Home Response Team - http://www.homeresponseteam.co.uk
• Young Muslims Support Services Limited - http://youngmuslimssupportservices.co.uk
• Liz Pascaud Translations - http://www.lizpascaudtranslations.com
• The Scarlet Life - http://thescarletlife.com
• The Rosconn Group - http://www.rosconngroup.com
• FLM Ltd - http://fashionlondon.co
• JPW Consulting Ltd - http://www.jpwconsulting.co.uk
• Corinthian Protection International - http://www.cpimaritime.com
• Jonah J Consulting Ltd - http://jonahjconsulting.com
• 2me 2you Removals - http://www.2me2youremovals.com

What makes these results so special?

Bendigo Mitchell was established in 1978 and has had a website presence for over 10 years. When Managing Director Duncan Nealon approached us in early 2011 to discuss a redesign, the site was already quite dominant for many of the popular key-phrases within it’s sector.

Our brief was to

• Build a site that would give the company more control over it’s content
• Give the site a more modern feel, whilst retaining it’s established brand identity
• Retain the existing search engine rankings held by the previous site and find new ways to bring more visitors to the site
• Increase the conversion rate of visitors to the website

Whilst we can’t share too much of the data for competitive reasons, we were pleasantly surprised to have received the following comments and data from Duncan just before Christmas:

Working with Thomas and the team at Edge of the Web was exceptional. They obviously have a deep and all-encompassing understanding of the digital and design worlds. What is similarly impressive however is their quite superb service and commitment to consistently exceed expectations. I really cannot recommend their services highly enough.

Much more importantly, Duncan sent us this graph showing an increase in traffic of around 100%.

There are a number of lessons that other websites owners can learn from Bendigo Mitchell’s story.

• A correct implementation means that a re-designed website can usually retain most of it’s existing rankings in search engines
• Just because your website appears to be visible in search engines does not automatically mean that you cannot achieve more visitors and sales. There are always new search terms to seek out and conversion rate is just as important as site visitor numbers
• Bendigo Mitchell have always taken their Search Engine Optimisation seriously and have worked with an independent specialist long before they spoke to us about a redesign. We found their SEO advisor to be straight-talking, knowledgeable and realistic which are all-too rare qualities in that sector

We would like to thank Bendigo Mitchell for allowing us to share their data, wish them a very prosperous 2012 and we look forward to exploring new ways to help them move their online objectives forwards.

Does your nose tell you it's time for a change?

This morning I was walking along the High St, and overheard somebody in front of me say ”everything is back to normal again now.”

I presume he meant that now all of the excitement and escapism of Christmas and New Year are over, we go back to the drudgery of our daily lives.

If I am brutally honest, his sentence did resonate with me a little. Only a little, but enough that I knew precisely what he was talking about.

Of course, it doesn’t help that today is wet and outrageously windy (so much so that I woke up to discover my fence had blown down, the felt has blown off my shed roof, and about 20% of the contents of the skip in my front garden were decorating my street…I’ll be popular when I get home tonight)

So what does back to normal mean, and why is there such a negative connotation attached to it?

I think it means that there are too many people out there that will spend tomorrow doing precisely what they do today and wishing they weren’t. I think it means that too many of us have the next year already mapped out before us, and whilst we don’t know what subtle variations will occur along the way, we do know fundamentally that unless a large helping of good or bad luck seeks us out, not a lot will change.

So how does that relate to a blog on a web design company’s website?

I suppose this post is just to say that I feel grateful that we get to work on creative projects, with ambitious, forward thinking clients. Our clients don’t just stand still and let life or business simply run it’s course. They are trying to ensure that tomorrow isn’t the same as today, it’s better.

It’s also to say that my business partner, Mark, and I spend every Tuesday night working solely on the development of Edge of the Web. We are just too busy to consider doing it during a working week, but we spend around 5 hours each Tuesday working out how to find new customers, improve our service levels, make our (excellent) staff happy, increase our margins, develop our image, understand where we want our business to be and so on. Every week, we are 10 hours of thinking and planning further ahead then we were last week.

Why not allocate a fixed time to try this for your own business weekly / monthly and see how you feel next year when it comes to “back to normal” time.

If it is normal for you to seek out new opportunities and ways to make your business (or your career/life better), then “back to normal” may be actually quite exciting.

With that said, I am not looking forward to the task of getting my garden back to normal tonight.

Question 1 – What is your website for?

• Ecommerce
  If you want your website visitors to buy stuff on your site, then you should know that ecommerce comes in many flavours. Here are some of the big issues to discuss with your developer:
• How many products will you sell?
• Will people buy more than one product at a time?
• How are your products categorised?
• Do your products come with customisation options?
• What payment solution do you need?
• How do your delivery charges work?
• How is stock managed?
• Service Provider
  This sort of website is for companies that perform a service rather than sell a product. The content you need depends on the type of service you provide, but here are some issues to discuss with your web designers
• What sort of information do you want to put on your site?
• Do you want to update the content yourself regularly?
• How much investment do you want to make in the design (look and feel) of the site?
• What information do you need to provide in order to get the process moving?

Question 2 – How will people find your website?

If you have high expectations yet no strategy for bringing visitors to your website, then you are probably going to be a bit disappointed when your site is launched. Buying a website does not automatically mean you have bought the right to appear in position 1 on Google for the most popular term in your industry.Your web designer will be happy to discuss ways to promote and popularize your website and help you achieve your objectives. It’s always best to discuss this before your site is built so that allowances can be made in the design for your marketing objectives.

Ask your designer about:

1. Search Engine Optimsation (SEO)
2. Link building
3. Content creation (blogs, news, articles)
4. Social media (twitter, facebook, google+, linkedin)
5. Offline advertising

Question 3 – How will you know what’s going on with your website?

Quick Quiz: Which do you think is the easier problem to fix…

• A website with no visitors
• A website with lots of visitors but no sales / enquiries

Answer: OK, so there isn’t an answer to this question. The point simply being if you don’t know what the problem is, there’s not much chance of you fixing it.

Make sure you discuss analytics strategies with your designer.

In Summary

Have a think about the above points before you have your first discussion with your preferred web design company, and you’ll find the whole experience is much more productive.