Website Designer York

How I became a website designer

I am Martin Waring, a freelance website designer and web developer living in York, England.

I started my career in IT in 1979, working on IBM mini computers. I learnt a coding language called CSP (Cross System Product). I was helping to build systems to manage spare parts for FRY's Chocolate Factory in Keynsham.

With that skill set in CSP, I got a job with Welbeck Financial Services in Bristol. I then remained in the financial services sector for the rest of my IT career until 2012. In fact, I didn't move companies again after that move. The company just changed around me. First, it became part of the Burton Group and then it became part of General Electric, the American company headed up by Jack Welch. Around that time GE was often voted as the number one most respected business and Jack Welch, the most respected business leader.

So that is how I (accidentally) got a job working for the most respected company in the world.

Friends and family who knew me and knew the reputation of GE often wondered how I managed to survive in that sort of highly dynamic environment. In fact, I loved it. GE recognised and rewarded innovation. In some downtime, I built an automated spell checker on a mainframe to check messaging on printed statements. This was in the days when spellchecking was something that you had a specialised handheld device for and I was rewarded for it. Quality was the watchword and quality was all about eliminating waste and doing things in a smarter way. Integrity was respected and I developed my style of working with people in those formative days at GE. I developed a reputation for no bullshit so when I turned up at a business meeting I would be greeted by business customers with something like: 

'Thank god you're here. Now we'll get somewhere with this problem'. 

I learnt then how to translate IT jargon into English, how to say "I don't know" when I didn't know the answer and not to promise something that I couldn't deliver.

I became the IT expert on data migrations. At the time GE was busy buying up portfolios of store credit card accounts and converting them to GE systems. Whenever there was a data migration to be done I headed up the IT team. First of all, to do due diligence on the business selling the portfolio of accounts. Then to assemble a team of analysts and developers to build the one-time software to perform the data migration. These projects usually lasted around 9 months. This finished up with my team camping out in the office over a weekend whilst the software was run, results checked and issues resolved.

I learned the importance of data analysis. Understanding what the data meant was critical for the success of a migration. I became the only Systems Development Manager at my grade in the business who still wrote programs to analyse and understand data files.

In the final three years of my career, the business became part of Banco Santander. It was obvious to me from the time of the take over that our days as a Systems Development department in Leeds were numbered. In fact, in the last six months, I literally had nothing to do. Santander didn't want us to build anything new that they would then have to take over. 

This was a golden opportunity for me. It was during those six months that I began to seriously study the art of SEO. I learnt from experts on LinkedIn, what were the key factors involved in ranking a website. What most experts agreed on, which is still true today is, "Content is King".

Content must be 

• well written, 
• easily understood, 
• authoritative, 
• relevant to your business 
• interesting. 

Everything else you do to support your website on social media and by link building is of secondary importance to good quality content.

I applied that knowledge to the first few websites I was building. This helped several people to get a first page ranking for local businesses without having to do too much work with external link building. I focussed primarily on getting the content right for the audience. 

Working with therapists & dealing with jargon

I was working for several therapists at the time and a common theme was that if they had an existing website the text content was usually full of jargon. They were trying to show to their colleagues in the therapy world, how skilled and knowledgeable they were. This left most people viewing the website seeking help feeling completely missed. I encouraged them to talk to their prospective clients rather than other therapists in their writing. Writing text in a way that a person seeking help could relate to. I encouraged them to put themselves in the shoes of their prospective clients and ask themselves what they would like to be able to read to know that: 

a) they were in the right place and that the therapist could understand their problem and 

b) that the therapist had the ability to offer some solutions to their problem.

It is very easy from the perspective of the expert on a topic to loose sight of where you began with your subject. You may expect everyone who contacts you to be up to speed with knowing the basics. I realised that most people didn't understand the difference between counselling and psychotherapy. They didn't know which of these services they needed. Some clients would know that they didn't feel quite right but be unable to name it without help from the therapist. 

The first step in writing text content for the site would be to describe how someone might be feeling if they were for example: 

• depressed 
• stressed 
• suffering with anxiety

The client needs to be able to identify with a description of the problem they have. Then they will be much more receptive to the idea that the therapist can help them with that problem.

I firmly believe that the same can be said about a lot of website content for different businesses. Google's guidelines for writing good content stress the need to make the text content understandable by a high school student.

Planning the structure of a website

My initial research into the world of search engine optimisation led me down a route that turned out well for my therapist clients. This can also work well for other businesses. 

I realised that someone looking for a therapist knows that they have issues. They probably:

• don't understand the difference between psychotherapy and counselling 
• may be sceptical of a whole bunch of jargon and strings of letters after the name of a therapist.

What really makes someone interested in working with a therapist is text content that shows 

• that the therapist has some understanding of the issue that the prospective client is bringing 
• the therapist can articulate this with words without resorting to jargon that the client may not understand.

Optimising individual pages

This methodology that worked so well for my therapist clients also translates into other businesses. These may also have multiple strands to their business. It would be a mistake to think that a single page can be optimised for many different keywords. The solution is to have many different pages addressing their own set of keywords.

So what is Meta Data?

Meta data is mostly not seen in a browser, apart from the browser title. Meta data sits behind the scenes and describes (in summary) to search engines, what the page is all about. It’s a bit like the index in a book except it’s largely hidden from the reader. The summary is short and sweet. It has to be as it appears on a Google search results page when you enter a search. So the key thing to note is that you will be lucky if you can get more than two keywords into the 160 characters of the meta description on your pages. Plus of course the meta title and meta description need to be readable and meaningful to the customer when they see them in the search results pages.

So how does that impact the planning of a website's structure?

So when planning a website structure, we will think about the different aspects of your business. Each strand of the business will need its own text content. I can help with keyword analysis to find out how many searches there are a month for different keywords. You could also do this yourself using Google's free keyword analysis tool.

We don't have to build all of the pages from the outset of course. You could write content and build the pages for that content over weeks or months. A website can be a game changer for your business so think of your website as a long term plan, not just as something that never changes. Over time you may find that you don't need to keep changing/adding to your site. You are getting more enquiries than you can handle but that's a much better problem to have than the opposite.

Do I have to do all the writing myself?

The short answer is yes. If your English is not good, with your permission, I would be happy to amend it to make it better and easier to understand. Consider using some tools like Grammarly to highlight spelling and grammar errors. Be very wary of using AI tools to generate content. This is super quick but is usually

a) Very high level and doesn't usually answer specific lower level questions that the customer may have

b) Likely to be duplicated all over the web

c) Identified as spam by Google's latest updates and potentially penalised. See my post about this here: Why Ai for blogging may not be a silver bullet

Website Development

From Frontpage to Rapidweaver and Foundation 6

I had been building websites since the 90s using Frontpage but it never really gave me what I wanted to see in terms of good design or flexibility. I made the switch from PCs to Macs having got tired of constantly trying to fix my PC operating system. I searched for the best web design tool for Macs and then discovered Rapidweaver.

In Rapidweaver I use a theme called  Foundation6.  When Foundation 6 was launched it opened up a huge range of possibilities. I could start with a blank page and build almost anything that I or my client wanted. I could take an existing website design and fairly accurately replicate it or make it even better. 

One huge benefit of Foundation 6 is that I only need to add the parameters I need to get the job done. Unlike other pieces of code, I am not faced with a huge list of parameters to fill in. This makes the volume of code generated smaller and more efficient which in turn makes the website page load faster.

International support forum

One of the biggest benefits of using Rapidweaver and Foundation 6, is that there is a global group of web designers who support each other. At most times of the day, I can pose a question on the Weavers Space forum and get support if I have an issue, or a 'how can I do this?' type question. Of course, this is reciprocal so if I see a question pop up that I think I may know the answer to, then I will chip in with my knowledge or experience. 

Accessibility

Foundation 6 also scores big with a key metric for Google which is called 'Accessibility'. Your website has to be accessible to multiple people on multiple devices. in simple terms for most people, this means that they need to be able to read what your website says, on even the smallest device. The text needs to be of a certain size and it needs to be of sufficient contrast that it stands out from the background just as one example. 

For partially sighted people there is even more reason for your website to be as accessible as possible. This generally focuses on making it possible for a screen reader to be better able to understand what the website is about.

Online Auditing

Online auditing is a big part of what I do. I use a tool that can run against a website, find all the pages and then check some key metrics. I use this because, with the best will in the world it is impossible to judge how well-designed a website is, as you build it. It may look great but underneath it may be performing dreadfully and not achieving its full potential because of some oversight on my part. I use various tools to check my work, especially with regard to whether the pages are correctly optimised for SEO purposes.

One of the tools I refer to often to check on how well my site is designed is called Lighthouse. This tool has been developed by Google. So my guess is that if you can score well using Google's own tools then a website is more likely to perform well in Google searches.

This screenshot below shows the scores from the Page Speed Insights tool for this page you are on now taken on 22nd October 2023, measured on mobile.