Web Design York | Beautiful, effective, website design and SEO

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Website Design & Build Mobile friendly responsive sites

Search Engine Optimisation Get your site found on Google

Manage your own text and images Content Management System and Blogging

Support and Maintenance Free for the first year

Website Design York

'Working with you to create a website that is beautiful, mobile friendly and easy to find on Google'

I am Martin Waring. I am a Freelance Web Designer based in York, UK and wherever you live I am committed to offering affordable website design and optimisation, making your new website design both interesting for your customers to read and easier for them to find in Google searches!

Most businesses today need a website to stay competitive, to find customers and for their customers to find them. Most new customers will find your website through an online search and foremost amongst the searches used today is Google so your website needs to be designed from the start, not just to appeal to your customers but also to be Google friendly.

Many small businesses invest a lot of time and energy in their website design but then find that the website disappears without trace in a Google search. Webdesign takes planning and a good awareness of what keyword searches your customers might use to find you. A website also needs nurturing. You don't just get to the top of Google in a few days, and then stay there.

When you do a Google search yourself, think about where you click first. Research shows that 70% of people ignore the paid adverts at the top and right of a Google search page and look to the first ordinary website listed and the next 2 or 3 listings. This is the sweet spot that I aim for in my website development and search engine optimisation process.

WEBSITE DESIGN

Mobile Friendly
Content Management
SSL security
Blogging
Personal Support
Website Redesign

SEO

Keyword planning from day one
On page optimisation
Frequent monitoring
Advice and support

What I offer

If you run a small local business (by which I mean that your customers are generally to be found in your town/city and surrounding area) and you need an attractive website to attract more customers or clients, I can offer the following:

Planning

Identifying what keywords your customers will use to find you. This is usually the most important stage and one that is often neglected. What are your customers looking for and what searches do you hope they will use to find you?

Photography and videography

Photography and videography using professional grade equipment. (I am also a wedding videographer.)

Website design and build

Webdesign and build, optimised for most current desktop browsers, including mobile tablets and phones. It is increasingly important that your site looks good on a mobile device.

Website redesign of an existing site that needs a refresh or better optimisation.

On-site Optimisation

Google optimisation of your website for small local businesses (this is usually referred to as SEO). I will focus mainly on Google. I'm not saying that I will ignore other searches entirely. Its just that if you get things right for Google then the other searches will fall into place naturally.

Monitoring

Regular monitoring of where your site appears in the Google rankings

Maintenance

Periodic (small scale) changes to the site are included in the price for the first 12 months so if you want to add testimonials or new pictures or videos - no problem.

What I don't offer

'Under the radar' techniques that might have short term gains but can potentially ruin your website's credibility ultimately
Large scale e-commerce, national or highly dynamic sites
Impossible guarantees. The sweet spot is a target to aim for for a given keyword. Sometimes it is not easy to achieve a sweet spot ranking due to the level of competition and no matter how much money is thrown into optimisation it will be difficult to outrank some of the big players. One of the first things I will do in the planning stage is assess what are the realistic chances of hitting the sweet spot for any given keyword combination.
I also won't guarantee how long it will take to get your site up the rankings. It can take months as rankings can improve with the age of the site (as long as the content is kept fresh).
Flash. There are some wonderful looking, highly animated Flash sites on the web where a lot of the content is invisible to a search robot and so is useless in a Google search. I build HTML and CSS based sites using Rapidweaver themes that are both human and Google search robot friendly.

What do I need to do?

Text content

To succeed in the Google rankings, i.e. to get into the top 3 for your chosen keywords, the website design is going to need lots of interesting, well written, easily understandable text. You need to think about what that might look like and commit to working with me to develop it. If your written English skills are not brilliant, I can work with what you produce and work it into a better format for you but you are going to have to do most of the brain work in producing this text.

I cannot simply copy text from another website, well I could, but trust me, this is not a good strategy!

The text needs to be easily readable, so do not use unnecessary jargon. Write as if you were explaining what you do to a brand new customer, not to a colleague. Use an online readability tester to get your text as readable as possible.

Writing the text does not need to be done in one go. We can launch a good looking website and then develop different pages over several months. This is possibly an even better way to approach the website as Google likes fresh content, delivered periodically as it shows that you’ve something new to say.

Prepare to be found

I have found some people who are reluctant, for whatever reason, to give out personal details on the web such as address or phone number. This can be quite a negative factor in ranking as Google is looking for consistency in NAP data (Name, Address and Phone Number) across many places on the web. If the NAP data is consistent then Google is happier that you are a legitimate business that has nothing to hide. If not and you are not showing Name, Address and Phone number consistently, or at all, then Google may think that your business is somewhat less trustworthy and rank the website accordingly.