Entertain-ment supply all sorts of entertainment packages for events throughout the UK. They specialise in hen and stag parties, and so you can probably imagine the sort of thing they're usually asked to provide!

Still, it's not all about strippers and dwarfs; Entertain-ment also provide a huge variety of other activities, ranging from the chilled-out (perfume making classes, relaxing massage sessions) to the utterly intense (salsa dancing workshops, dominatrix lessons, and the extremely challenging stag night boot camp!)

With such a wide range of services on offer, Entertain-ment needed a website that would appeal to all users, giving bridesmaids, best men, and everyone in between an easy way to put together the perfect party. To start with, we came up with a great-looking responsive design that would function well on screens of all sizes; the company wanted their new website to be accessible from smartphones and tablets as well as from desktop computers, and the finished site allows users to research ideas and make enquiries on-the-go.

The enquiry form was a crucial part of this project. Aside from the usual fields (name, location, telephone number, etc.), we included a 'Service Required' field that allows customers to specify up to 6 Entertain-ment services along with their enquiry. This feature gives the company a good idea of what each customer is looking for before they've even picked up the phone.

If you'd like to see the work we've done for Entertain-ment, visit www.entertain-ment.co.uk today.

Gibran is a not-for-profit organisation based in Monmouthshire. They work with female (and, more recently, male) offenders throughout Wales, helping and supporting them while they rebuild their lives.

Gibran approached Designer Websites because they wanted their website to look more modern and give visitors a better experience. They wanted a good place to talk about their projects and events, but more importantly, they needed to give vulnerable people a quick, easy way to get in touch with the Gibran team.

The new Gibran website is now live, and we feel that it fulfils every aspect of the brief we were given. The responsive design is equally easy to navigate on all screen sizes, allowing those who need Gibran's help to access and use the organisation's site via smartphone, tablet, desktop computer, and any other device - whatever is easiest for them. Information about Gibran's work is laid out clearly on all pages, and every page has an enquiry form in the footer, allowing quick contact from any point in the website.

Gibran's cause is a very worth one indeed, and we hope that this new site serves their purposes well. Click here to see the website and learn more about Gibran UK.

Back in 2013, we created a website called PorcelainPaving.co.uk. Owned by outdoor specialists Greensquares, this site was specifically designed to show off the company's stylish range of porcelain tiles and paving slabs to potential customers.

PorcelainPaving.co.uk has proven extremely successful indeed, receiving a very healthy amount of traffic and allowing Greensquares to make these paving products a much larger element of their overall business. In fact, their porcelain range now has a brand name of its own: PrimaPorcelain.

Of course, a new brand calls for a new design, and we have recently been working hard to turn the old porcelain paving website into the new PrimaPorcelain website.

This doesn't just mean that we've been changing a few bits of text - the site has been given a complete overhaul, and PrimaPorcelain.co.uk now has an elegant responsive design and an intuitive new 'Product Selector' tool that allows customers to filter PrimaPorcelain's range (which has grown exponentially since 2013!) by colour, texture, and indoor/outdoor use.

The new PrimaPorcelain website is a big step up for the brand, and we hope that it will be even more successful now than it was in its old guise. Click here to visit PrimaPorcelain.co.uk.

As you're probably aware, it's very important to stay hydrated throughout the working day. Drinking lots of water keeps you active and alert; if you ever feel tired, headachy, or unable to concentrate at work, it could simply be because you aren't drinking enough water.

But what does this have to do with Designer Websites? Well, we've just completed work on www.go-hydrate.co.uk, a brochure website for a South Wales company called Go-hydrate. Go-hydrate specialise in mains-fed water dispensers (such as water coolers, drinking fountains, and hot water boilers), and as such, they know more than anybody about the dangers of dehydration. The new website even has an entire page dedicated to the benefits of staying hydrated!

Go-hydrate offer a wide range of products and services, all of which are geared towards keeping you and your workforce hydrated. They mainly provide plumbed-in dispensers that draw water directly from your building's main supply, but if this is not a viable option for you, they can also supply bottled water coolers to stave off your thirst. And their products aren't just for the office; if you want to install a water boiler or an undersink purification system in your own home, they can do that too!

The new Go-hydrate website is full of clear, concise information about the company and what they have to offer. If you want to stay better hydrated, we strongly recommend that you visit the Go-hydrate and use the enquiry system to get in touch!

We've seen a lot of articles in the last few months with titles like this:

"Yes, SEO Really is Dead!"

"Stop Doing SEO - It Doesn't Work Anymore"

"SEO is over. Here's the new way to get your site seen!"

Invariably, these pieces will talk about the supposed demise of search engine optimisation as a worthwhile practice. They use the following arguments to convince readers that SEO is, indeed, a thing of the past:

• Link-building doesn't work anymore. Seeking out links from external websites used to be a huge part of SEO, but inbound links are no longer an automatic guarantee of high rankings - these days, quality is far more important than quantity, and it can be very difficult to manufacture a really good link to your own site. Also, Google are getting much better at spotting unnatural and/or manipulative links and punishing the sites on the receiving end; this has put an end to linkbuilding as an effective means of boosting rankings, or so some bloggers would have you believe.
  
  
• Keywords are more complicated than ever before. Once upon a time, you could achieve high rankings for a search term like 'cheap sofas' by simply mentioning 'cheap sofas' a hundred times in your site copy. Nowadays, the system is a lot more complex - search engines are aware of things like synonyms, closely related topics, and a whole variety of other ranking factors that don't have anything to do with keyword density. Also, Google and their competitors have learned to spot keyword-stuffed content from a mile away, and the penalties for this can be just as severe as the slap you'll get for dodgy link-building.
  
  
• Sites should be optimised for users, not search engine bots. The problem with a lot of old SEO practices (particularly keyword stuffing) was their tendency to make things unpleasant for the user. You can write a 500 word essay that uses the phrase 'best mobile phones' in every other sentence if you so desire, but even if it ranks highly, it's not going to make especially riveting reading; in fact, all of that keyword stuffing might well make it harder for your customers to find the information they need. Nowadays, a good user experience is valued above high rankings, and since aggressive SEOing can quite easily get in the way of a strong UE, those practices no longer have a place on most websites.

Now, these are some good points - keyword stuffing and link farming do more harm than good, and we would certainly advise any webmaster to stay well away from these practices if they value their site traffic. But SEO isn't just the black hat stuff; those three letters may have picked up some negative connotations over the years, but search engine optimisation is still alive and well, and if you want your website to have any kind of presence on Google, Yahoo! and Bing, you absolutely must take it into consideration.

First of all, you need to stop viewing SEO as a shady effort to fraudulently boost a site's rankings. SEO is actually a very important part of website design, and it starts with the code itself - our developers have spent the last decade building sites in a way that's easy for Google and other search engines to digest. We also work hard to create lightning-fast pages, user-friendly functionality, and so much more; all of this is as much a part of SEO as strategic keyword placement.

But we won't bore you with an in-depth dissection of good quality code. Instead, allow us to address the points above, and demonstrate why SEO remains very much alive:

• Links are still important. Building a lot of low-quality links to your site is unlikely to do much for your rankings nowadays, but remember what we said about quality and quantity? That's an important thing to bear in mind - Google themselves have stated that inbound links are still a major part of their algorithm, it's just that they're now more interested in the value of your links than in how many you've amassed. Of course, since artificial links can land a site in very hot water, it's better to focus your SEO efforts on creating a site that encourages people to link unsolicited - make it easy to link, and make sure you provide something that's worth linking to. This is what really impresses search engines at the moment.
  
  
• Keywords still have their place. Modern SEO demands a rather less ham-fisted approach to keyword placement, but that doesn't mean you should forget about keywords altogether. When creating your website, think about the search terms you would like each page to show up for, and then tailor your copy and any other content to those keywords. Make sure you're providing potential users with the clear information and the useful resources that they are likely to be looking for, and this will make each page's purpose clear to search engines as well.
  
  
• User optimisation and SEO are, in many ways, the same thing. User optimisation makes your site more appealing to humans. Search engine optimisation makes your site more appealing to search engines. These two practices are very closely related, especially as search engines get smarter and more capable of thinking like humans. The articles we've read always tell you to forget about SEO and concentrate on the user experience, but this is misleading - they are two equally important undertakings that will yield sizeable rewards if done properly in tandem.

To answer that million dollar question, then: no, SEO isn't dead, it's just different to what it was a few years ago. Mind you, this shouldn't surprise anyone (least of all the type of people who are liable to write 'SEO is Dead!' aritcles) - SEO has been an ever-changing entity since day one, but none of its transformations have ever negated its usefulness as a practice. In fact, as web designers, optimising for search engines is one of our most important jobs!