IDS are a security company based in Cardiff who specialise in providing professional security and fire protection systems throughout the UK. With decades of experience in the field, the team are able to oversee the design, installation and maintenance of a variety of security systems, ranging from CCTV and access control to fire alarms. In addition to these services, they also offer 24/7 call-out and monitoring to their customers every day of the year. 

Despite being an established company with a thorough knowledge of their trade, IDS recognised that their website was not performing well enough in search engine results, which is what led them to contact Designer Websites. After careful consideration, our team set about improving the website in order to ensure that it was a great reflection of the company's products and services, which could easily be reached by potential customers. 

The new IDS website has a more professional look, with content that makes efficient use of meta tags and copy to ensure that the company will rank well in search results. The site also has an improved focus on local search terms, allowing them to effectively target and increase their business prospects within Cardiff and the surrounding area. In addition to these improvements, we also added a blog to allow IDS to share their latest news and insights, providing them with an enriched means of communicating with both new and existing customers.

You can view the new website we created for IDS here. 

For more information about the range of website optimization services we offer, click here, or follow this link to send us your questions and ask for a quote.

Have you ever seen a photo of something microscopic (such as a dust mite or a red blood cell) and wondered how that photo was taken? Well, there's a high probability that it was captured using a scanning electron microscope, or SEM; there's also a reasonably good chance that it was taken by the team at PSmicrographs, who specialise in SEM photography and provide a huge variety of detailed stock images to the people and the organisations who need them.

We quoted PSmicrographs for a responsive website design, and work was soon under way to make their extensive image library easier to browse on mobile devices. That work has now been completed, and www.psmicrographs.co.uk is now a fully responsive website, functioning just as well on smartphones and tablets as on desktop computers.

If you need scientific stock photos of anything from chromosomes to wolf spiders, we heartily recommend that you visit the PSmicrographs website and browse their comprehensive collection of SEM images. Whether you're browsing the website on a PC, an iPad, or your mobile phone, we are confident that you'll find it easy to navigate and a joy to use in general.

Based in the Rhiwbina district of Cardiff, Cross Accounting offer a wide range of accounting services for businesses of all sizes. The firm's specialities include bookkeeping, managing payrolls, and assisting with self-assessment tax returns; with years of experience and a flawless track record, Cross are among the leading accountancy firms in South Wales, and they're taking on new clients all the time.

As the owner of a growing business with a great reputation to uphold, Cross Accounting founder Nicola Cross was keen to ensure that her firm's website was providing potential clients with the best possible online experience. She recently asked our website design team to take a look at her site with a view to making it a little more mobile-friendly, and we're pleased to announce that the new, responsive version of the Cross Accounting website was released yesterday.

This version of the site has been designed to look good and operate smoothly on screens of all sizes, from desktop computers and laptops right down to tablets and smartphones. Mobile users see all the same information about the firm, but the site's navigation automatically changes to fit the smaller view, making it easier for clients to find what they're looking for on their phones.

We're very pleased to have worked with Cross Accounting, and we wish Nicola and her team all the best for the future. If you're based in South Wales and you need an expert accountant for your business, be sure to get in touch!

 

Ecommerce websites are typically a lot more complex than brochure websites. For one thing, ecommerce websites require some kind of online payment system, but there's also the issue of sheer size - by dedicating an entire page to each and every product you sell, you're potentially saddling yourself with a website that's hundreds or even thousands of pages deep.

 

And, as you can imagine, organising and optimising that many pages can be a mammoth headache. Fortunately, our website optimisation experts are here to share a few tips and suggestions that will help you to both climb the Google rankings and do a better job of satisfying your customers. If you're serious about optimising your ecommerce website, here are some things to bear in mind:

 

Let's say, for example, that your company sells decorative lampshades. Your lampshades come in dozens of different colours and designs, so it doesn't make sense to use a generic title tag like Buy Cheap Lampshades for Your Home on every single product page. A better approach is to craft title tags that give a more detailed description of each individual product; for example:

• Dark Blue Lampshade | Buy from Spiffing Shades
• Bright Red Pendant Lampshade from Spiffing Shades
• Black & White Lampshade for Floor Lamps
• Gingham Lampshade | Order Online with Spiffing Shades

Avoid duplicate content.

 

This task can be particularly tedious if a lot of your products are very similar to one another, but it still has to be done. If Spiffing Shades sell a hexagonal lampshade in five different colours (red, blue, white, yellow and black), the company's copywriter will need to write five different descriptions to give each product page the best chance of ranking. Of course, Spiffing Shades could simply choose to list the hexagonal lampshade as a single product, with customers selecting their preferred colour via a drop-down list; this would mean less work for their copywriter, but that single product page would struggle to rank for colour-specific terms like 'hexagonal red lampshade' or 'black lampshade hexagon shape'.

 

So why can't the Spiffing Shades team just create five different pages and re-use the same product description on all of them? Because search engines don't handle duplicate content well. Each of those hexagonal lampshade pages will look practically identical to Google's bots if the same text is used on each one (and no, changing 'red' to 'blue' won't make a difference!)

 

If Google finds multiple pages that all look alike, it will usually only index one, which means that all the other similar pages cannot possibly appear in search engine results. Too many identical pages may even result in an outright Google penalty that affects your entire website - is it really worth taking that risk just to save a little time on writing product descriptions?

Put your most important products on the homepage.

 

Put some effort into your images!

Images are an absolutely crucial factor for any ecommerce website - whether you're selling cookers, toys, laptops, or combine harvesters, nobody will be interested unless they can see what they're buying. 

 

But that's not the only reason to make sure you've got high-quality images for each of your product lines. There's also the small matter of Google Images; we've seen websites pull in thousands of visitors every month from image searches alone, so it's well worth getting your pictures done properly. Attractive, eye-catching product images will help you to stand out from all the other image listings (they're also essential for a successful Google Shopping campaign), and adding clear, concise alt tags to each of your images will help them to get closer to the top of the results page.

 

A lot of new top-level domains have been created over the past year or two, and more are on the way. For example, .lol, .dog and .movie are all launching this month - creators of funny dog videos will soon spoiled for choice!

The popularity of newly-established domains such as .brand, .london and .wales may have you wondering if you ought to get with the times and snap up one of these snazzy new TLDs while the iron is hot. In particular, a lot of our clients have asked if using a more unique TLD will help their website's rankings on Google and other search engines.

Or, to put it another way...

The short answer? No - Google themselves have said that the new gTLDs (generic top-level domains) do not have any special advantage over the ones we're more familiar with:

"Overall, our systems treat new gTLDs like other gTLDs (like .com & .org). Keywords in a TLD do not give any advantage or disadvantage in search."

So that's Google's position on the matter (the above quote is taken from the official Google Webmasters blog). Unfortunately, it looks like your choice of TLD won't have much of an impact on your website's keyword rankings; for example, your cookery blog won't have any more chance of conquering the foodie SERPs if you change your URL from www.grub-with-gwen.co.uk to www.grub-with-gwen.cooking. Sorry about that.

However, this doesn't mean that purchasing yourself a new gTLD is completely pointless. The really good thing about some of these new gTLDs is that they give users a little more information about your site than the ultra-vague likes of .com and .org. For example, it's impossible to guess what kind of website www.samsonswan.com might be from its URL alone, but we can reasonably assume that www.samsonswan.cymru is owned by a Welsh company, or that www.samsonswan.music belongs to a musician or band.

And that can be useful for search engine bots as well as for humans. Let's say you own a second-hand car dealership in London called Marvellous Motors Ltd. Your customers are Googling 'used cars London' and you want to show up on the first page of results for that term. Purchasing a domain name like www.marvellousmotors.london will make it more obvious (both to human users and to Google's spiders) that you're a London-based business, and this may well improve your chances of ranking locally.

The new TLDs may also come in handy if you share your brand name with somebody else from a totally different field. Imagine, for instance, that you've just opened a new pub called The Branch & Blossom, but - shock horror! - it turns out that there's a popular indie-folk band by that name already. Anybody attempting to Google your new business will end up on TB&B's SoundCloud page or browsing a list of their upcoming gigs, and since they're already using the domain name you wanted (www.branchandblossom.com), you're going to have to pick a different one instead.

So what'll it be? Your instinct might be to simply pick the closest available domain to what you originally wanted (www.branchandblossom.co.uk or www.branchandblossom.org), but it may be a better idea to register www.branchandblossom.pub or www.branchandblossom.bar instead. This will let everyone know that you're a bar, not a band, and people searching for your business will find it easier to spot which Branch & Blossom website is the one they're after. This also works if you're on the other side of the equation; newly-formed bands can use TLDs like .music or .rocks to differentiate themselves from established businesses who share their name.

So while an unusual TLD won't necessarily help you to scale the SERPs, there are other ways in which it can help you. If you want to make your website's URL more descriptive of who you are and what you're about, using one of the many new gTLDs that have been available recently may well be a good choice for you.

Of course, if you already have a website with a standard TLD (such as .com or .uk), it would be foolish to discard your established URL in favour of a trendy new domain name with no history. This will break any links to your current website, and erase the reputation that you've built for yourself with the search engines (they put a lot of stock in domain age and history!)