“Piers & Dominic recommended a London-focussed approach to SEO
as part of our initial web design strategy. The increase in web based enquiries
rose 3-fold in the first month.”
Hear more about what our clients have to say here
Ask seven different web or digital professionals what makes a good web site or application and you will get seven different answers.
Ask them what they would rank in order of importance and they will talk at length about low-bounce rates, accessibility, user-interaction, user-customisation, integrating social networking, search engine optimisation (SEO) among other riveting subjects.
Ask us the same questions and we will tell you it is about attracting and converting speculative customers into repeat purchasers. Or put another way, it is about carefully selecting technologies and techniques to create a fit-for-purpose website or application for your market.
So like our brand design process, we stress the importance of research and strategy before moving on to a design stage.
1 Research
There is absolutely no point in starting a website build until you know what your market wants from it. This means understanding your customers demographics, web competencies and online confidence. Knowing this will help you choose from the smorgasbord of technologies and principles out there – after all, it is not cost effective to employ them all. An understanding of this will help you gauge what you need to do in terms of choosing search Keywords, employing SEO techniques, accessibility and hierarchy of information etc, etc.
2 Choosing keywords and search engine optimisation (SEO)
Once we have completed the research it will become apparent how important a high ranking in search engines is to your business. For example, a service industry that relies on referrals and repeat business may find being highly ranked on Google for certain Keywords yields too many low-quality enquiries that are impossible to field to warrant the investment. On the other hand, one that sells products that are identical to a competitor will find a high ranking more crucial as the customers choice is likely to be based around convenience and value for money.
Whether we decide SEO to be high or medium priority (it is never low) it is better to decide on the Keyword search terms you want to rank well for early in the build – reverse engineering SEO can be time consuming, expensive and can undo your initial good work. Thorough research will reveal the Keywords that are aggressively fought for and highlight some less competitive ones that can often harvest better quality, warmer enquiries.
3 Information architecture
Information architecture is more than just the site map – it is about the emphasis you put on certain information within your website in order to do two things; let your customers find what they want quickly and easily and direct your stakeholders to the information you want them to see. Informed by the research in part one of the process a navigational and on-page strategy can be employed to ensure the best results.
4 Design
With parts one to three in place the design part of the process becomes less subjective and easy to quantify. This means we are able to present a rationalised and fit-for-purpose design solution that your customers and stakeholders find both intuitive and engaging.
5 Managing the build
With sections one to four complete and signed-off we employ the appropriate technology and assign the right specialists to realise the design and strategy and because we can speak both your language and geek we provide a pain-free build.