His website is a tool for him to showcase examples of his past works, categorise them into types of work and enable potential customers to get in contact with him.

This is a fully responsive, custom template built for the WordPress CMS (Content Management System). Some key features include an integrated contact form, customer testimonials which are linked to previous works and a photo gallery attached to each portfolio item.

Design

I really enjoyed creating this design which was heavily influenced by three main factors:

1. The content
2. The existing logo
3. A photo taken from his portfolio

Each item in the list above had an impact on the design in a different way.

The Content

This is where I believe design starts. There’s no point in something looking great if it doesn’t get the message across in a clear and concise way. Once Leigh had provided me with the bulk of the content and what he wanted to communicate to his customers it was all put on the page and organised.

One of the driving factors of the content was an easy and accessible way for customers to get in contact with Leigh to request a quote.

The Existing Logo

Leigh’s existing logo design, created by the talented Anna Badger, inspired a large part of the website design.

The font used for all headings on the website is the same font as the logo to ensure the website conforms to Leigh’s established brand.

Also inspired by the logo is the black, block border around elements and the uniform, brick-like look and feel of the content blocks.

Portfolio Photo

The colour palette was inspired by a photo from Leigh’s portfolio of completed work.

I used this photo on the landing page to show a completed project with vibrant colours. Those colours are then echoed throughout the design to tie the whole website together.

Development

For this project I created a custom built template for the WordPress CMS so that we had complete control over all aspects of the design to get Leigh exactly what he wanted. I chose to implement this website using WordPress so that Leigh could easily update any information and add new pages and portfolio items quickly.

One of the key features that Leigh requested was a ‘contact details’ section which ‘followed’ visitors around the website to make it as easy as possible for the customer to get in contact with him for a quote.

Services Used

1. Design
2. Development
3. Hosting
4. Email setup and management
5. Content management
6. Search engine optimisation

Interested?

If you would like to learn more or are looking for a quote then please contact me.

Things to understand

The first, and possibly most important thing to understand is that there is no magic fix for SEO – it takes time and effort to reach the top.

The second thing is that all search engines will have their own, unique and highly top secret algorithm and filters (maths and computer stuff for getting the user the best and most relevant result for them). As these are secret to the search engine company nobody outside of those companies know exactly how they work. That being said, there is a lot of speculation, guesswork and trial and error and most SEO experts agree that the details matter and will help you increase your ranking.

Content

Your site’s content is king. Search engines love websites that are full of valuable content. It needs to be informative and authoritative on the subject you are writing about. No longer are websites something you create for your business and leave it to work its magic for a few years, and then update the website again. Your website should be a living, breathing source of information and products, updated regularly with valuable, informative information.

Keywords

When writing this content, try and select three to five keywords to focus on throughout the article or post. You can select as many as you need, though be aware that the more you select, the lower your keyword density becomes which can do more damage than good.

Title

Make sure that your content title is keyword rich and descriptive of your content. Not only do search engines still think titles are important, ultimately the reader needs to find your title informative and helpful to their needs.

Ideas

Your content and articles should revolve around ideas and not keywords. While keywords are important, your content should be valuable and informative and you’ll tend to find that when you’re finished, your content will naturally include keywords about the subject.

Page structure

To get the most out of this content it should be structured correctly. I’m not necessarily talking about how it reads to users, but more the HTML structure of the webpage.

WordPress is a great place to start for SEO. It utilises <article>, <section> and <header> tags which helps break the content up for search engines and makes sure that they are categorising the content correctly. A good theme or template for your WordPress site is essential because those tags are included as part of your content and in the correct place without you having to worry about them which lets you focus on writing great content.

Heading tags

Heading tags are different to both <head> tags and <header> tags. Without getting into it too much, heading tags range though <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, <h4>, <h5>, <h6> and they format text to be a heading or content title. The numbers represent the importance of each heading for search engines and helps the reader break the content into logical sections.

The most important heading on your page should be a h1. Everything else on the page should then be a h2 or lower. There should only be one h1 tag on each page. This will help search engines rank your content appropriately and allows you to control the importance of your keywords and content.

Loading time

Search engines love websites that load quickly so a really easy win is to improve your website speed. Most of the time the largest improvement can be made by correctly optimising images as they are huge files when compared to text content.

Pictures & images

As well as correctly optimising image size to make them load faster, another great tip for SEO is to make sure that you use the alt attribute for images. In a nutshell, the alt attribute stands for alternative and is a descriptive sentence which is used in place when images fail to load or are replaced or removed for any reason.

Mobile friendly

Search engines love mobile friendly websites and will rank them higher in search results. As over 50% of page views are on a mobile device, it makes sense that search engines put so much importance on this.

Any good web designer or developer will make sure that your website is mobile friendly, mostly from a user experience point of view, although be aware that it will also impact your search engine ranking not having a mobile friendly website.

Link content

Try and link as much of your relevant internal content as possible. This will help search engines establish a structure to your website and your content, and also allows users to find more useful content.

If you’re able to link to other reputable sources of information and other small businesses with some good content, then do so. If they can do the same in return then that can quickly help increase your search engine ranking.

Stick with it

As mentioned at the start of this article: there is no magic fix for SEO – it takes time and effort to reach the top. If you follow these quick wins and top tips for SEO and keep posting regular, valuable content then hopefully you will start to see an increase in the amount of traffic to your website.

Need help?

Alongside all of the above quick wins and top tips, there is still plenty more than can be done for SEO. A good web developer or SEO specialist can help even further. As part of my design and development service I also ensure that all of your content is optimised for search engines.

If you want to find out more, then contact me for a chat or a quote.

The stats

Back in the olden days (September 2015), the IAB (Internet Advice Bureau) and UKOM (UK Online Measurement company) published some research saying that users in the UK spend an average of 2 hours and 51 minutes every day on the internet. Oh, and that’s being active online too, not time connected or with just one webpage open in the background. It’s the time of users actually doing stuff online.

“It equates to about 1 in every 6 waking minutes.”

– IAB & UKOM
Read more

One interesting thing to note is that IAB & UKCOM’s research has shown that over 50% of users in 2015 were online with a mobile device. This puts the UK well ahead of the curve of global webpage views on a mobile device.

Maintain your brand image

A well designed website will help maintain your great reputation, online. Your brand is your company’s identity and customers looking for more information about you should be able to find you online. If they can’t…

Competition

… the worst may happen and they find your competitor online instead. A great website also helps small businesses level the playing field and go head to head with larger companies to secure those customers.

Low cost advertising

You can spend as much, or as little, on advertising as you would like. Your website is the showroom to your business that never closes. Let customers browse your products or services, get to know you and your brand a little bit and make their own decision on whether to buy and what to buy.

Huge reach

Your website and online advertising has so much more potential to reach more pairs of eyes than a flyer in the local shop ever will. When you pair your website and search results with active social media posting and advertising then that is a massively powerful force.

In fact, my business cards arrived around 4 hours ago and after a little post on Facebook I know that already I have got those business cards in front of around 500 people, and at least 40 of them have had a look at the photo. Not bad for 4 hours work…

Easily target advertising

With the above ‘insights’ and Google Analytics the power of advertising can be targeted to certain demographics. Are your products or services suitable for a certain type of person? Then with targeted advertising you are able to target those potential customers directly.

For instance, I know that most of the users who like my page on Facebook are the most active at 17:00. To use this data practically, I would target my advertising or posts to be published at 16:45 so that it’s waiting in their newsfeeds for when most people (I’m guessing) finish work and check Facebook.

Potentially untapped markets

By using targeted advertising, coupled with the huge reach and a strong brand image it will help your business tap into markets and demographics you may not have realised even existed.

Shows you what marketing works and what doesn’t

Google Analytics and Facebook’s insights will help you see which marketing and posting campaigns are working for your business and which aren’t, meaning that you will have more time to focus on what matters.

Useful?

If you found this article useful or I’ve missed anything then please get involved below.

If you’re looking to learn more or would like a quote, then feel free to contact me for a chat.

The stats

Did you know that over 50% of all website views are from a mobile device and it just keeps on growing.

This has increased massively since only 5 years ago and the trend does not seem to be slowing down. The only sure thing is that in the coming years there will be a huge amount of different screen sizes. To maintain your brand image or, more fundamentally, just for your website not to hurt potential customer’s eyes as they read it.

Okay, it’ll look nice… why bother?

There’s actually quite a few reasons to make your website responsive (mobile friendly), aside from the huge potential market of customers you’re missing out on.

Search Engines

Google and other search engines like mobile friendly websites and rank websites with a responsive design higher on the list.

Social Media

A huge amount of people using Social Media now do it primarily on their, you guessed it, mobile devices. This means that as you post a link to Social Media, the majority of people who will click on the link through to your website will be on a mobile device.

Easy Maintenance

If you have had experience with old-school mobile websites then I can see why the idea of making a website mobile friendly makes you shudder. Fear not though, with a responsive website, it is just one source of information to keep up to date which makes maintaining your website easy and the changes happen for all devices.

Future Proof

Responsive websites adapt to the device screen size. That means that a responsive website will work and look good on any new devices that are released in the future. When there are new devices released every few months, it’s a no-brainer for me that websites should have a responsive design.

Desktop

Download and install the desktop client on your PC or laptop and Dropbox will automatically create a Dropbox folder so you can easily add, edit and delete files from your Dropbox account.

Your files will automatically sync to your account and one awesome feature is if you right click a file you can see the version history (every save you made) of that file.

Mobile

Installing the mobile app on your tablet or phone and logging into your account will let you see your files stored in your Dropbox folder.

A nice feature of the mobile app is the automatic backup of your photos to your Dropbox photo folder. However, be warned that you will more than likely burn through your free 2GB of storage space pretty quickly with this enabled. Fear not, however, there is a much nicer solution if you’re looking to automatically back up your photos to the cloud.

Get more free space!

There are loads of handy guides online which walk you through getting more space for free on your Dropbox account. In fact, Dropbox itself will walk you through the steps to increase your storage for free.

Some simple steps are connecting services like Facebook and Twitter, following Dropbox on Twitter and giving Dropbox some feedback. Doing all of that will earn you an extra 250MB of space. You can complete the getting started tour for another easy 250MB.

Referring others

This is the big one. You can earn up to a whopping 16GB of free space just by getting others to signup to Dropbox. Each new user you get will give you another 500MB of space.

But… I only have 2 friends…

Don’t worry! A little known trick is that you can do this all from your own email address.

Some email providers allow extra characters in their email addresses such as “+” and a lot of services will recognise this as a unique email address. The best part is that the emails will still go to your email address. Anything after the extra character is ignored by the email provider.

Simply put, it means that you can do something like this:

Normal email: BillyNoMates@gmail.com

Alternate email 1: BillyNoMates+Dropbox1@gmail.com

Alternate email 2: BillyNoMates+Dropbox2@gmail.com

Alternate email 3: BillyNoMates+Dropbox3@gmail.com

Alternate email 4: BillyNoMates+Dropbox4@gmail.com

Alternate email 5: BillyNoMates+Dropbox5@gmail.com

And so on…

I hope this helps and if you have any questions or suggestions, please comment below.

Step 1

Download and install the app.

Step 2

Log in to your Google account.

Step 3

Go to settings and make sure that you have selected the “High quality (free unlimited storage)” option*.

Step 4

On your app settings go to “Backup & Sync” and turn it on.

Step 4 and a bit

Have a little look at the “When to back up” settings too and set them to your preferences.

Step 5

Watch in amazement as your photos are automatically backed up as you take them.

Hopefully this article helps you out. Let me know in the comments if there’s anything I’ve missed or if you know of a better solution.

_{* This option does compress your images a bit (not noticeable) but if you’re planning on backing up RAW images or huge resolution images then this option probably isn’t for you. Then again, you probably have your own backup systems in place.}

I tried googling it and that didn’t help. I didn’t get much further with different search strings; they were all coming back with the same, fantastic resources. Websites like Udemy, Codecademy, Freecodecamp and Wix are great for teaching you and providing you with the tools and the knowledge to create websites but my question remained unanswered.

You hear and read a lot about people who are naturally talented artists/poets/musicians/writers etc. and it must be so easy for them because they are naturally talented. Design, like writing/signing/playing an instrument, is a skill. Skills should be practiced, and practiced and practiced. Either way, I’m not ‘naturally talented’ and I’m very under-practiced! So where to start?

I kept searching and eventually I stumbled across this gem. It taught me more in the 4 minutes of going through the website than the 4 days of head scratching and reading different articles on ‘proportion’, ‘composition’, ‘colour meanings’ and ‘assessing the mood of a typeface’.

Their website is a tool to provide up to date information to the members while showing parents and the community what the youngsters get up to on a week to week basis.

This is a custom template built for the WordPress CMS. Some key features include a custom photo gallery and randomly selected header photos.

Photos

The Scout Group uses Flickr to store and organise their photos in their private ‘photostream’ and then any they want to publish are put into a ‘photoset’ and made public. One of the challenges with this template was the integration of the current workflow and only displaying the published photos on the website.

There are loads of plugins out there for photo galleries and Flickr photo galleries, but they usually pull in every photo from the ‘photostream’ (not suitable for the current workflow) or they only look at one ‘photoset’ and display that (does not display all published photos) or they only display x amount of photos in each set (free version of the plugin).

My solution was to create a photo gallery from scratch using jQuery and the Flickr API. This kept the current workflow intact and allowed any new ‘photosets’ and the photos inside them to be included automatically.

Currently the gallery is included in the custom theme files, but I am planning on making the gallery into a WordPress Plugin so that it can be installed on different websites with ease.

Branding Update

Recently, The Scout Association updated their branding guidelines for the UK. The new branding included a new logo, new font, new layout and spacing and new colours.

In order to conform to the new branding guidelines, the website needed to be updated and modified. Here’s a side-by-side comparison of the two different themes.

This is a customisation of a readily available template for a low budget installation. The blog rates products and provides guides for the readers.