Web Design is, you guessed it, the act of designing and developing a website for the Internet. Designing a website involves a range of skills, such as software coding and development, however, the main concept of web design is user interface and experience. This includes aspects like the website’s appearance, functionality, layout and content.
Designing a website involves a range of different disciplines, such as graphic design, user interface design and coding. Common coding languages used for website design are HTML, CSS and JavaScript, this creates the underlying structure of a website and makes it functional. This includes the creation of pages, adding interactive features and optimising the site for search engines (SEO). There is a whole list of different types of web design, but the one that usually proves the most popular (and is a service that we offer at SEO Flatrate), is Responsive Website Design.
Why is it Important to Have a Well-Designed Website as a Business?
A business website is extremely important for a company’s brand and image. The design of a website is often the first thing that a consumer will look at and it may affect their decision on choosing your business or another competitor. If a website’s load speeds are slow, visually unappealing and difficult to navigate, a visitor is unlikely to stay for long. A website that focuses on creating a positive user experience will encourage a user to explore more content and engage further with the site.
Having a website that is designed professionally can expand your customer base. Having well-written content on your web pages is a great opportunity to enhance your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), this will place you higher on the search engine ranking pages (SERPs) and will in turn increase traffic to your website and business.
What to Consider when Hiring Web Design Services
When contacting a professional website designer, it is a good idea to have some initial ideas of what you are looking for. This involves finding a service that offers the type of website you require and having an idea about the intentions and visual aesthetics of your website.
What type of website do you require?
There are many different types of websites and as a business owner, you will need to decide what is best for your consumer base and own business needs. Here is a summary of some of the most popular:
Single Page Design – This is where all of the information is located on one webpage, this can be as long as you wish. This creates one linear journey for a user but isn’t very interactive.
Static Websites – This type of website is built with the intention of very little user interaction; these sites are often used to relay information instead of selling goods and services. A static website is usually created with more basic code and has a set number of web pages.
Dynamic Sites – Dynamic websites allow for more user interaction and use more complex code. These websites usually have a slower loading speed due to their intricate model but have the benefit of being more engaging.
Fixed Page Websites – Fixed design pages have a strict resolution and don’t change depending on the size of a screen. This allows for consistency but can make information difficult to read.
Liquid Design - This website manipulates its layout by shrinking and stretching the entire page to fit the size of a screen. This can cause a site to have very small or misshapen text and information if a screen is too small or large.
Responsive Web Design – A responsive website will change the layout of content depending on the size of a user’s screen. The webpage will manipulate itself by wrapping text and changing image size to best fit a user’s screen. This is different to liquid design as the individual content changes size instead of the entire page. With there being over 7 billion mobile users worldwide, it would be detrimental to your business to not have a website that can adapt itself to smaller screens.
The Website’s Function and Visual Design
As a business, you will need to decide the main aims of your website and who you want to target. Do you want to use your website to advertise, inform, entertain or sell products and services? This will also help you to decide what type of website design you require. Furthermore, you will want to consider how you can give users the best experience possible, this involves making the webpages accessible and easy to navigate, as well as ensuring your site has a good loading speed. After all this, you can start to consider how you would like your site to look with colour schemes, strong imagery and typography. If you are using a responsive website design, it is important to ensure that all of your images are scalable for all devices so that they do not appear pixelated when being stretched to fit a larger screen.
Why Responsive Web Design could be for You
A responsive website will always change its layout and information display depending on the size of your device. This means whether a website is being viewed on a mobile phone or a desktop computer, the website will change and adapt to fit the user’s device. This can be great if you have a business that is targeted at a range of audiences as the website will appear concise and easy to use for all users.
Responsive website design is a crucial investment to help build awareness of a company’s brand and allow as many visitors to access your website as possible. Google will now even penalise websites that don’t use responsive design as more people are accessing the internet through their phones and require content that is scalable. Responsive web design can also save time and money; instead of hiring web design services to build multiple different websites for each device, a responsive website will mean you only need one site for every possible device. With technology always advancing and screen sizes always changing, responsive web design allows you to stay on top.
Responsive Website Design for all Devices
If you require professional Responsive Website Design or are considering our Rent-A-Website services, then contact us on +44 (0)1202 911141 or email support@seoflatrate.co.uk.
Designing a website with your brand in mind is challenging at the best of times, on-page SEO is time-consuming, but if followed out correctly you will get the intended results on the search engines. Did you know that carrying out search engine optimisation (SEO) is of little or no use if your website is not set up correctly to allow the search engines to find and identify your content as relevant?
One question you need to be asking yourself is: “Is my website SEO ready?”
We have listed 6 additional questions below that you need to be asking yourself and your website designer when creating or updating a website for your business.
1. Is your website domain name user-friendly: be sure to have an SEO-friendly URL that has a keyword or keyword phrase within it, make sure the URL makes sense and describes what the webpage is all about. This is both good for the search engines to identify its purpose and to rank it accordingly, but this is also beneficial for its users who are searching for the products or services.
Keep it simple, easy to read, and if possible, make it easy to remember.
Suggestions:
a) Experiment with Keyword-only URL’s these have proven to be easier to rank. Search engines are constantly updating their algorithms, so remember what applies today, may not necessarily apply in the future. (December 2018).
b) Avoid using non-readable or default assigned URL’s, if the URL makes no sense to a human being, it simply won’t perform as well as if it was in a readable format.
2. Make sure the keywords used are appropriate to the cause: You will need to use the keywords that can be related to your product, service or brand, this allows the search engines to categorise you correctly and to rank you accordingly.
3. Make sure you use unique content: Always create and upload unique content to
your website, do not copy and paste content from other websites or internet sources. Information taken or gathered from third parties and that has not been written or researched by yourself will not pass as your own. The Search engines have a content checking algorithm in place, that can very quickly identify if you have written the blog or content yourself or if you have copied it from someone else. The best ranking websites rely on unique content only, so if you want to outrank your competitors please bear this in mind.
4. Make sure your website is responsive: A responsive website should function well on all screen sizes and on all modern mobile devices that the end user (your customer) may be using when they visit the website. Long gone are the days when websites only needed to run on a PC or desktop computer, with the number of smartphones, tablet computers, smart watches and mobile devices now out numbering the use of PCs, websites now need to be designed to ensure the user experience is maintained; no matter which device the website is viewed upon. This process is called “Responsiveness”. Having a responsive website to improve the user experience has become so important to the end user, that the search engines will no longer rank your website high in the results, if the end-user experience is not of the same high quality across all devices.
5. Does your website have an XML Sitemap: An XML sitemap guides search engine spiders otherwise known as bots, to understand your website structure and its content easier when it is crawled. Failing to add a sitemap to your website may result in your content being overlooked or missed when the spiders crawl your content. The larger the website the more likely it will become that some of your content may be missed and therefore will not be indexed by search engines. For this reason, websites that do not have a sitemap tend to rank lower in the search engines.
6. Heading and Meta Tags: Make sure you use your headings and Meta description tags to emphasise the importance of the content on your website. This makes it easier for the search engines to understand which information is of value to your users and will highlight an important message to the search engines for them to show in their results page. When we search content on the search engine’s we are provided with a wide range of results for us to choose from. These results are gathered using the information highlighted upon websites using the heading and meta description tags and will be ranked accordingly based on the Search Engine algorithm. Heading tags do not just have an impact on usability but affect your SEO too, websites failing to correctly make use the headings and meta descriptions will find they are less likely to appear in the search results for a given keyword or key phrase.
Finally:
Once the above has been completed, you are now at least on the right path to successfully promoting your website on the search engines. On-page SEO in combination with the correct number of high-quality backlinks and online marketing services otherwise known as off-page SEO or SEO for short, can in time improve your Search Engine Rank Position (SERP). SEO is a trust-building process for the search engines, only the best content and the most trusted websites will rank at the top of the results page. The Search Engines are constantly evolving and improving their algorithms to ensure that only the very best unique and resource rich content is shown to its users to choose from. Remember, the Search Engines are directories, there purpose is not to rank websites, but to provide answers to questions posed by their users. If your content is of a higher quality to that of your competitors and if it meets the criteria of the Search Engines’, then your website should show in the results page higher than content that is of less relevance to the search query. Remember content relevance is decided by the search Engine, so it is important to realise that just because you deem something to be of higher importance it does not necessarily follow that the Search Engine will agree with your findings and rank other content higher.
When an idea develops into a business opportunity, this is commonly referred to as a startup business or "startup" for short.
However, there is one thing that all startups have in common; they all require an online presence in the form of a blog or website, for example, to share and promote their products and services for others to buy.
Creating a new website can be a stressful experience, many startups may even consider trying to build their own website to keep the costs down, alternatively they may decide to hire an experienced web designer or web development company to help bring their business ideas to life for them. However, web designers and developers can be very expensive and sometimes the cost of these services can be very vague or unclear, raising the risk of encountering hidden charges that may not have been taken into consideration within the initial business plan and could prove fatal to a small startup with a limited budget.
For that reason, many startups and small to medium businesses today are choosing to embrace new and more modern ways of working such as ‘Rent a website’ services. Rent a website services remove the need for risk and binding contracts, so they are ideally suited to startups and small to medium sized businesses today.
Rent a Website's provide a totally 100% scalable online service offering, removing the need for minimum term agreements and providing a clear and transparent pricing model from the offset. There are no hidden charges whatsoever with Rent a website services and they provide a tailored approach to meeting the needs of any modern-day business looking to keep running costs to a minimum whilst remaining 100% flexible in their approach. Startup businesses can also benefit from the product scalability of a Rent a website offering, as they allow businesses to upgrade their services when business is on the up and downgrade them again should times get tough.
Startups who choose to rent their website instead of going down the old-fashioned route of hiring in a web designer and/or developer will benefit as there are no hidden charges and they can rely on an expert team to carry out all the work for them on their behalf, allowing them to concentrate on running a business and not worrying about their cash flow.
Rent a Website services should include the cost of the website build, website hosting, On-page SEO, monthly updates and a time bank for any monthly changes needed, the charges vary and can start from as little as £9.99 per month depending on the level of service required. Rent a website services should also be easily upgraded to include other services such as professional email, Search Engine Optimisation, XML sitemaps and more.
Why keeping the cost of development down is so important?
Building a website for your startup business could end up costing thousands of pounds and once you add up all the additional charges for possible changes needed to complete them this can easily spiral out of control. Bear in mind, that you may need to pay additional charges for on-page SEO or hidden services charges if the service over runs, or last-minute changes are required. It is also worth bearing in mind that updates and backups can at times be very time-consuming depending on the size of the website, so when taking out such services these should always be included as part of the project.
Key benefits of a Rent a Website service:
100% transparency, just one monthly charge to cater for all your needs
100% scalable to suit your business model
No contracts or minimum term
No hidden charges for hosting, backups or on-page SEO
Expert team of professional web designers on call
Personal account manager
SEO Flatrate provides a wide range of services for all types of online businesses throughout the UK and for most English speaking countries globally. We offer bespoke consultation for startups as well as established businesses. We can assist you in securing your domain name for your new business idea. Feel free to contact us today for a free consultation and to help you get your business off the ground.
If you would like to hear more about our services please contact the SEO Flatrate team 01202 911141 or email the office, we are here Monday to Friday 9am - 5pm
