Overview

This one kept us extremely busy. Server set-up, deployment and keyword targeted content for 26 websites and continued SEO for 10 websites.

The Company

http://debt-advice-birmingham.org.uk

Debt Local are a company who provide debt solutions to individuals from 26 locations across the UK. They provide qualified local debt advisor’s who are able to visit your home and provide you with a more personal solution to your individual financial needs.

The Brief

Debt Local wanted to target 6 specific keywords in each UK area. Their goal was to provide informational content to the websites visitors and to also rank highly for the chosen keywords.

The Keywords

The chosen keywords were:
debt advice (area)
debt help (area)
iva (area)
dmp (area)
dro (area)
bankruptcy (area)
The content on each of the 26 websites was carefully put together by MJR Web Design. Although the subject matter of each website was the same we wanted to avoid Google’s duplicate content filter so we made sure that each site had enough differences in order to be considered unique.

SEO

A job well done every website was indexed by Google, Bing and Yahoo. We were retained by Debt Local to undertake full SEO on 10 of the 26 websites. Over a 4 month period we utilised a number of white hat techniques. Our SEO reports show that we achieved an astonishing 45 out of 50 first page results on Google and 50 out of 50 first pages on both Bing and Yahoo!!

Conclusion

A thoroughly enjoyable project. Producing targeting content that then helped us to achieved SEO results that we are really proud of. Our Local SEO service starts at £100 per month (min 3 months) why not give us a go!

Overview

Another fantastic project. This is one of the quickest website we have ever put together for a client. A distinct vision which we bought into from the off and translated into a clean, beautiful and very effective website.

The Company

http://martellolakes.co.uk

Martello Lakes is a large development in Hythe based around a 15.5 hectare lake. it is owned by the Nickolls family and is being developed by Camland Developments. The scheme will consist of 23 hectares of residential housing and incorporate shops, restaurants and a local community centre.

The Brief

Camland developments commissioned us to create a website using information from the promotional brochure. The website should be appealing and informative and encourage potential customers to make contact.

The logo

Martello Lakes didn’t have a web identity when we took on this project. it was merely a concept. Utilising ideas from the brochure we came up with the Martello Lakes logo. the log uses the lake as a focal point as it is a major feature in the development. The long grass and green area are used to signify growth (the grass grows around the lake) and to signify a clean and tranquil environment to live and work in.

The Website

The website is clean and simple. Each page is split up in smaller bite sized pages using the left hand navigational menu. This allows the website to be informative without overloading the visitor with information. We’ve also made sure that every page is complete with a contact form which makes it easy and encourages website visitors to make contact. The light green colour matches the branding of Camland Developments and gives the website a clean, countryside feel.

Conclusion

A simple website. Clean, informative, effective and a pleasure to produce. Its also extremely seo friendly ranking in position 1 on google for “martello lakes”.

Overview

I thought it was time to update you with some of the projects we have undertaken. This one was undertaken quite some time ago. Its always good to see a company build up their business with a great website at the core. Its exciting to know they we have helped them grow as a company

The Company

http://nationwidecouriersltd.co.uk

Nationwide Couriers provide same day couriers services across the UK from their base in Birmingham. They are extremely reliable and pride themselves on being as cost effective as possible.

The Brief

We received the instruction for a fully functional website with a small amount of e-commerce whereby a visitor could receive an instant quote, book and pay for courier services all in the same transaction. This was in response to similar systems that competitors had in place.

The Website Branding and Layout

At MJR Web Design we believe that joined up media is extremely important in business. so we wanted to create a website that reflected the colours and elements that were currently being used in the companies offline marketing. We also wanted to create a layout that was simple and easy to navigate. We realised that booking this kind of service is often part of a company representatives daily duties. Making it as fast and direct as possible is important. Less time spent booking couriers leaves more time available for other duties. The buttons on homepage allow customers to quickly reach the booking and payment stage.

The Instant Quote Page

We convinced the owners to have this page created for one primary purpose only. Although it provides two very good purposes. The main purpose of this page is to provide customers with the ability to receive a quote for services without having to filling in a big form and submit all their details. The additional benefit that it provides is the click here to book button which appears next to the quotation amount. This send the customer in to the booking form but with the added advantage that they know what to expect cost wise.

Conclusion

A simple but powerful website that combines the power of google maps with paypal and provides it in a fast, effective and intuitive interface.

Overview

We have been extremely busy and I haven’t posted anything for a while so I thought it was time to update you with some of the projects we have undertaken.

CookeandPowell.com

We received this instruction from another Web design company called Coast Publishing. The brief was to make an existing html website integrate well with WordPress. A news section was to be added to the website and then the client would use WordPress as a CMS to update the website. The project involved importing the existing pages and content into a fresh install of wordpress. We rebuilt many of the pages, menu bars and quick links to utilise the WordPress hooks and code to full effect.
There was also some database work needed in order to get the website up and running. Setting up of the database in Plesk and making sure the proper permissions were in place to allow editing of the website from within the WordPress environment at a later date.
A simple project that has resulted in a website that I am quite fond of. Easy to navigate and very pleasing on the eye.

Claiming your Blog (5 Steps)

Here’s what you need to do in order to claim your blog:

1. Sign up for and verify an account with Technorati
2. Sign in to your account and click on your account name in the top right hand corner
3. You are now in “My Profile” scroll down to the section entitled “My Claimed Blogs” and fill in the URL of your blog and click “Claim”
4. Fill in the requested details – Blog Title, RSS feed URL, a description of your blog and any tags that relate to your blog (eg. Banana Blog would have the tags “banana” “fyffes” “bananas”) When you are done click on “Proceed to Next Step”
5. You are then sent a unique code by email such as N75RPBMSHHCU and asked to create a blog post and publish it. Technorati looks for this code in your post in order to verify that you own the blog.

I am as baffled as you as to why they use this method to verify blog owners. Why they couldn’t use a similar method to Google and Yahoo where you add a unique meta tag is unbeknown to me.

Anyway, there you have it, in 5 Steps. I hope this helps some of you to get on-board with Technorati and discover lots more technology related stuff!

Questions and ideas often spiral around my head late at night but – never write them down or put them into action.

I decided to write this entry on a handheld and see if it publishes successfully *if you are reading this now then my test has been successful!!

Variance Capital

We recently undertook a small project for Variance Capital Management.

Who are they

Variance Capital Management is a capital introductory firm for single manager hedge fund strategies. Variance Capital will only represent well capitalized fund managers whose capacity to generate alpha is tested over time.
The firm was founded in early 2004 by Martin Frenette to meet the growing demands of the institutional market place and their need to better understand and follow the development of the hedge fund industry. It brings strong international ties in Canada, the United Kingdom, Switzerland and France.

What did they require and Why

Variance Capital use their blog as a business information portal. They provide international Hedge Fund Services and use the blog to update interested parties on their business activities. The blog was 4 years old and was looking a bit worse for wear. They required the following work to be carried out:
1.error messages in footer removed
2.Add a photo and Tag cloud with keywords that grow as people click on them
3.Add rss feed capability

What We did

The blog was hosted on a very old version of WordPress. It contained no support/options for Widgets, Plugins and Permalinks. At this point, I realised that a fresh install of the most recent version of wordpress was probably the best solution. However, there we some 200 posts and multiple comments that would need to be retained as well as all over the navigation bar page content. This was not going to be as easy as I had hoped it would be!

The Backup

The first thing to do was to back-up the entire Mysql database. I couldn’t install the WP-DB plugin (that would of been too simple) or any plugin at all, whilst we are on the subject. So I had to manually export the database as an SQL file from within Phpmyadmin. Rather than export the whole database as one big file and risking it being too big and wordpress not playing nicely with it. I decided to create an SQL file for each table. Before removing the entire database.

The Upgrade
This went incredibly well using the Famous 5 Minute WordPress install. We now had a full functional WordPress site. But we needed to populate the site with the pages, posts and comments from the old website. This was done by importing the data from the relevant SQL files into the new database. Because I had made each table an individual SQL file the files need were of a relatively small size and the import was completed in minutes. WOW – A full upgraded WordPress website with all the information from the old installation.

The Theme

The final task involved adding a theme and modifying it to include the photograph on the right hand side. I’m not a great believer in re-inventing the wheel. If you can find something that does close to what you want it to then why not just modify and improve it rather than creating the same thing again from scratch. after all, You don’t rebuild your whole house every time you decorate!

The RSS feed

There’s not really much to say here. We upgraded the dated version of WordPress to the Newest Version which comes packaged with built in RSS and Atom feeds. All that was necessary here was to use the relevant icons and create a link to the RSS feed address.

Finally

This project was about keeping everything simple and functional and providing the Variance Capital customers with a positive view of the business and direct access to the information.
If you are looking for a similar solution, our extensive experience with WordPress and setting up blogs could help you get your business off the ground. So why not contact us and tell us about your project?

When choosing a Freelancer, you should look closely at their skill set and match this to your web project. In order to do this, you need to understand the differences between the types of Freelancers and the results that their skill sets produce.
In an ideal world, the fee’s for using an agency wouldn’t be quite as daunting an expensive as they are and all projects would use all the skill sets mentioned during a web build. Let us take a look at the different skills and what you can expect to get in return.

The Graphic Designer

Graphic designers produce and communicate their clients’ messages with high visual impact. Graphic design solutions are required for a huge variety of products and activities, such as websites, advertising, books, magazines, posters, computer games, product packaging, exhibitions and displays, corporate communications and corporate identity.

The Result

As you would expect you will end up with a visually stunning website for all to admire. However, As your website is Graphically intensive the pages may take a long time to load. The code used by the Graphic Designer will probably not be valid and could result in your website being misread by the Search Engines and the Website Architecture most probably won’t allow for future development and growth of the website.A Graphic Designer is suited to projects of a presentational or marketing nature, where a product or service is required to look appealing in order to sell it to viewers.

The Web Developer

A web developer is a person or team of people who are specifically engaged in the development of World Wide Web applications, or distributed network applications that are run over HTTP from a web server to a web browser.

The Result

A perfectly functional website allowing for ease of update by you and coded with an emphasis on speed and validation. However, the graphical elements of the website will often leave a lot to be desired and the web page layout will often be dictated by rules rather than by user enjoyment and engagement. A Web Developer is suited to projects where you would like to extend the current functionally of the website For instance, maybe you want to make the website available on your customers mobile phones.

The Web Designer

Web design is a mixture of Graphic Design and Web Development. The styling and development of objects occurring within the Internets information environment. The aim is to provide high-end consumer features and aesthetic qualities.

The Result

A good Web Designer considers all things from the users perspective. They are not experts at Web Development but have the ability to produce websites with valid system Architecture. They will also not produce stunning high resolution graphics as they understand the trade-off between the quality of image needed and the optimisation needed to deliver content to your customers rapidly. In essence a web designer is an all-rounder and often the best choice for most web design projects.

With all things consider it is the type of project that you require completed and the customer base you attract that should dictate your choice of Freelancer in the end.

Is Google SEO Friendly?

The Google team decided to take a look at the homepage’s of 100 products and score them on a number of criteria including Heading tags and Description meta tags. The results really are quite interesting and show Google’s proactive approach towards a richer search experience for its customers.

Thinking About It?

The question now is will they take it a step further? For a long time I have often wondered where Google product websites would rank if they weren’t part of Google and didn’t benefit from its self assessed high Page ranking. There are many low scores in the report and this seems to indicate that many of the product websites probably wouldn’t make the first page on Google for their specific search terms, If they were external to the search engines catalogue.

And Finally….

In reality, I do not think that Google will ever entertain the idea of ranking its own sites in the same way as it ranks external sites. As a business you always rank your products ahead of the competition whether they are bigger or smaller than you.

You can download the Google SEO Report Card here.