Website Design & SEO Tips

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

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.

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!

In the Sun on 30th November they reported on a woman who was fined when a tissue flew out of her bag and then at the end of the report they wrote

Earlier this month the council fined Vanessa Kelly of nearby Oldbury for feeding ducks with her one year old son.

I think she got off lightly for such a level of child cruelty!!!!!!

Well it’s certainly not as nice today – lots of rain and wind.  We haven’t been out on the bikes for ages.  The last week or so has been frantic, both of us working flat out, the new website for Albies is virtually finished and the shop for Scotts Gallery Cafe is up and running.  We are promised a free meal and must go and take James up on that.  We do have some of the friendliest clients, on Saturday we are going to a dinner party at Barry and Ben’s at their hotel Willow Tree Lodge and will stay over.  I am so going to enjoy that, the excitement of being able to have a proper hot shower with room to move without a shower curtain fixing itself to your back so you can’t move!  Our campervan shower is cute but so so small and water temperature does rather depend on so many things including the battery power.

Ironic to be writing that as we have just had our first power failure!  Not too bad in the short term for me as I work on a diddy laptop with an excellent battery but Mike’s swallows power.

Hilarious – apparently the person who runs the farm has forgotten to put the coins in the meter!!  Well not coins strictly, some key thing but she’s going off now to top it up – fantastic…

Well, other than these domestic dramas, I have been on the forum a lot exchanging views which I love, and we have redesigned the look of our main website S3 Web Design and finally it makes me smile when I look at it.

I have done lots of picture drawing this week and am putting some of it in time on here for people to download for free.  We have many many domains just sitting there so I am going to sort them out, use some maybe for freebies like art etc, one I will use for an online tool we have for writing CSS which Mike designed but as it is too simplistic we don’t use anymore but it will be great for beginners.  I am thinking that some of the other domains which have been indexed by Google would be good to put our content management system on and sell as is.  If so I will of course put news on here.

Desire Solutions CMS

Well this must be the best way to work, in the middle of a beautiful field in Belton, Norfolk, the sun is blazing in the windows, the birds are singing away and of course the donkey, it sounds like it needs oiling! 

I have spent some time on the forum this morning hopefully helping a few people out with SEO and general website design and structure.  So many of them are graphic designers and do not always understand that although the look is important for the visitor and for brand recognition, it is only a very small part of building a website. The stuff in the background, the coding, structure and SEO are the things that stop it being just a pretty picture and turn it into a useful marketing tool!  I am on a one woman mission to change the world!!

 One down-side of this life style is not having the day to day contact with other business people but we still do the networking stuff but the forum and this blog help me keep in touch.  I certainly don’t miss the distractions of people thinking that because we had an office in town they could drop in for a chat, I loved that but not when an hour and a half later they were still there.  I sound cruel don’t I but when it’s the same people all the time it isn’t condusive to business, we both get so much more done now.

We both are very similar when we work, we both put our heads down, work like fury then realise it’s gone dark and the day has disappeared, the whole day.  That’s why I was still answering questions on the forum at 1.30 last night, but what a sleep I had.  Amazing considering the winds last night – it was like being on a boat, which is our next dream.  Next year maybe.

Now, back to work.  Designs are needed for our new product Desire Solutions CMS, I need to set the website up, I’ll need Mike for a bit of that.  We’re optimising a client’s website and handing over a large website for a prominent business in Norfolk, our largest website so far.  We have a shop to add to one of our client’s website.  Plus must do some washing and try and get out on the bikes again.  The cycling is brilliant round here.