Website Design & SEO Tips

We are delighted to say that the new website for Albies Taxis  Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, designed by S3 Web Design, is launched.  You can order taxis etc online, book minibuses, coaches and get your car serviced.

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.

Being only 9 months into the web design business we have pretty much used all our savings up investing in the business so have an unusual life for the next few months travelling around Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex in an antique Bedford Campervan.  I just love the way so many people wave at us as we trundle along and best of all the way the lorry drivers do that blinky thing with their lights when overtaking.  We are now part of a group of slow drivers, I just don’t look back to see the blokes in big cars fuming!

I never imagined we would be as happy as we are, Mike and I in a small tin box, but wierdly despite only having the basics with us we have everything we need and lack nothing.  Tidying up, doing the dishes and cleaning take about 2 minutes and on the mild days we can sit in the fresh air and code websites.  I think one of the most surreal days was when we were parked up at the country park in Braintree (Essex), Mike was writing websites, I went for a cycle ride and then when I got back I started to cook a sausage casserole with fried onions. It smelt amazing and then I realised we were surrounded by people walking dogs, parking their cars up all being wafted with wonderful fried onions.  I’ve never cooked dinner in a car park before…

S3 Web Design are proud to announce the release of their first Content Management System (CMS) with Search Engine Optimistation (SEO) management.

Many free CMS systems are very complicated and have been created from the “design” end so search engine optimisation is an afterthought only available with special add-ons.  This means that the simplest changes to your website can take far too long. Our CMS system (S3 Web Design CMS(I)) is quick and easy to use with every page on the website including the body text and meta tags editable.  For only £650 you can have a 9 page website which is HTML and CSS compliant which you can SEO yourself.  The S3 Web Design CMS(I) website can be ready for you within a week. 

As well as being able to easily edit the page content using the text editor or XHTML, our CMS also allows you to set up the META and SEO settings for each page. This allows you to frequently edit and optimise the website to keep on top of your on-site SEO.

For more information see  Desire Solutions CMS.

Always make sure that you obtain as many backlinks as possible. The backlinks should be at least PR3. You should never pay for links, this is seen as very bad practice.  Social networking is becoming more and more important when it comes to creating backlinks and many commentators feel that the real-time search and indexing of things like Twitter is going to become the norm rather than the methods currently used by search engines.