Website Design & SEO Tips

2010 is Our NEW YEAR when Desire Solutions CMS our SEO friendly content management system is properly released and our resolution is that it will be fantastically successful.  I have already set up several websites using it and have been amazed at the speed of setting those websites up.  And of course they have been indexed very quickly by Google as we knew!

See our SEO Friendly CMS at Desire Solutions CMS, where you can SEO in a few seconds with no bloated code or more importantly rewritten code – how annoying is that even with WP! – No FTP so upload is fast and effective.

You will know that for a few days we have been pretty much snowed in in Norfolk.  The water in the stand-pipes and under our motorhome froze solid and so for a few days we have had no running water.  The only water we had was what we had sensibly collected in the water containers.  So we have not had a shower for quite a while… well finally today the pipes thawed a little just before the -5 predicted for tonight!  So we dived in the shower, ok yes it was cold, there was no way our little water heater could cope with the low base temperature of the water, but I do not think I have ever enjoyed a shower as much!!

Anyway despite the weather, or maybe because of it, we have been working hard.  After all there’s not been much else to do.  So I have set up 4 websites over the last few days and have played with my design tools doing artwork.  Best of all though has been really playing around with CSS style sheets which I only started to learn a couple of weeks ago.  Mike of course is expert at all the coding etc but I want to learn too.  I am particularly pleased with my latest effort which is a portfolio for S3 Web Design.  Here is a picture of it.  I used CSS to create a gallery effect.

S3 Web Design Portfolio

Check your Google Pagerank here.

Yes I love living in our motorhome but today I am just very glad that we do not live in close proximity to other people as beautiful as the snow is our pipes have frozen so no shower today… 

It is so incredibly beautiful but living without running water is strange however we are resourceful and have thawed out the well water tap, we just have to hope that the pipes under the motorhome thaw soon.  Despite the weather however it was still warm enough to sleep last night and today I have put a chicken in the oven so its wonderful and toasty warm in here and of course the sun is streaming in warming us up.

We put our Christmas decorations up and I love the grotto effect!

Christmas Decorations

The decorations are wonderfully tacky but have really made me feel Christmassy at last.

Matt  Cutts has indicated that the speed with which your website loads is going to be increasingly important and if you use webmaster tools you will see in the labs section an option on website performance.  The fact that Google have added this section to their webmaster tools does seem to support the idea that website load speed is going to be increasingly important in search position.

Google Labs

If you look at this section you will see a graph showing where your website comes in terms of loading speed compared to other websites.  The graph shows the 20th percentile ie the region within which the fastest 20% of websites fall.  Ideally you want your website’s performance to be as close as possible to that section of the graph.

Website Performance

Under the graph you will see a list of your slowest urls with the average speed of download, bear in mind this will be over a range of servers and internet connections.  Additionally there is a list of pages with suggestions as to how you could speed the pages up, most often by using gzip compression.

Average Load Speed

On the face of it this seems like a good move as nothing is more irritating than clicking through from a search onto a website that takes an age to load and locks your browser up, however there are much wider implications which may not be good.  Many people have websites on servers over which they have no control and depending on their configuration these servers may run very slowly.  The result is then that either your website suffers in searches or you have to move to faster more efficient servers which doubtlessly will be more costly and I can hear them hiking the prices up as I write!  One possible consequence of this is that search engine results will over time be predominantly populated by only large businesses pushing the SME businesses out the bottom of the search results.

Another implication is for media based websites who use video clips etc as these always take a while to load and even I here in the UK find pages with videos a nightmare as I work with an internet connection via a mobile dongle.  Your market may not involve countries outside the UK however your average website load speed will be calculated from everyone who tries to access your website whether they are in China, Russia, USA wherever and some of these countries have considerably less efficient broadband connections than the UK.  So your website speed will be judged by download speeds in countries who are not relevant to your market.

There are many implications of deciding search position on website download speed and it will be interesting to see how this pans out over time.

Our first snow in the campervan.  We are still parked up in the lovely field in Belton, Norfolk with the donkey!   We ahve now been living for 2 months on the road in our antique Bedford CF340 aged 31.  This morning we woke up to about an inch of snow.  Everyone assumes we will be cold but nothing could be farther from the truth.  We are very cosy and particularly so at night despite having no heating on.  There is something about our bed above the cabin that just keeps us wonderfully warm. 

I think part of it is that we have become acclimatised.  I realised that yesterday when eating a bourbon biscuit – I was perfectly warm but realised that the cream inside the bourbon was rock solid!

Workwise we continue to work long long hours but I have spent the last week or so mastering CSS to try in some way to catch up with Mike – some hope!  But I have managed to right the style sheet for 2 websites, one of them particularly complex with equal sized columns regardless of the amount of text in each, so I am pretty happy with myself.

Obviously business can slow up quite a bit just before Christmas and this did concern me but we have had calls from 4 businesses in Norfolk to set up meetings the first week back after Christmas to discuss some pretty large websites so I’m happy.  Very few people walk away after meeting us regarding websites so we are hopeful of a reasonable amount of business from those meetings.

Recently I provided SEO advice to a larger corporation and am waiting so see if I get a long term contract from them.  It’s all very exciting.

I am looking forward to our first Christmas on the road, Christmas dinner in a motorhome, wonderful.  We have decorated the motorhome with tinsel and lights and it is like living in a grotto – it makes me chuckle each time I walk back in.  I have taken some photos and will put a pic in when I have taken the photos off the camera, now I must get back to work!