Website Design Dorset

Bournemouth has been my home on and off for pretty much for the last 15 years or so. In that time I’ve also lived for brief stints in Israel, Australia and New Zealand as well as spending a sizeable chunk on the dropout backpacker trail. For some reason though I allways seem to end up back in Bournemouth, which is funny as I’m not sure that I actually like the place.

Don’t get me wrong Bournemouth does possess a certain charm with seven miles of golden beaches, nice gardens and a wide variety of drinking holes that turn out what can best be described as an eclectic mixture of drunken chavs, students and hen nights.

It also has a slight identity crisis, Bournemouth Univeristy is actually in Poole and the airport is technically in Christchurch. That said the Bournemouth International Centre in pretty much in the centre of the town but I’ve yet to work out how that makes it international.

If you feel like having a good laugh take a look at the Tourist Board Website. It proudly boasts of 100 Great Things to See and Do which for some reason they’ve elected not to list on the website, they do however supply a series of PDF downloads which list about 30 attractions of which only four are actually in Bournemouth.

Maybe I’m being a bit harsh, if you like a drink the Goat & Tricycle is well worth a visit, as is the Brunswick in Charminster. The casinos have a relaxed dress code and the tourists are only here for  few months of the year.

Touching Base is closely related to touching cloth. Not only do they share the same first name but when either is mentioned you can be sure that even though only a tiny nugget of crap has escaped from an orifice the flood gates may soon open fully letting loose a tidal wave of diarrhoea.

I find that the most amusing way to deal with this particular phrase is to imagine that it’s a euphemism for a bizarre homosexual act, that way the next time you hear a board room full of suited Ruperts enthusing about touching base you’ll struggle to hold the laughter in.

Suggested alternatives:

Simple really, just stick to good old fashioned plain English phrases such as the classic We’ll talk later.

What the hell does Blue Sky Thinking mean? Every time I hear the phrase I cringe and have to bite my lip to stop myself launching into an angry tirade at the hapless moron who’s stupid enough to have used it.

From what I can gather the phrase is used either to simply suggest that something is a good idea eg. “Now that’s what I call blue sky thinking” or that somebody had better think of a good idea quickly or their department will be well and truly in the brown stuff eg. “We need to do some blue sky thinking.”

It would appear that the phrase is interchangeable with the equally sickening thinking outside of the box but without somebody giving me an actual definition I can’t be 100% sure of this, it’s merely a hunch I have.

I seem to remember reading somewhere that oxygen affects the brain’s ability to function and that if you were to climb to an altitude where the sky is actually blue the brain would be so starved of oxygen that you would probably die. It was pointed out to me that people in aeroplanes rarely die of oxygen starvation but the only good idea I can think of that goes hand in hand with air travel is getting extremely drunk.  Unfortunately as the authorities tend to frown on this sort of behaviour the result is a paradox that runs and increased risk of deep vein thrombosis rather than desired breeding ground for inspiration.

Suggested alternatives:

You could use the term good idea or, if you’re feeling especially generous, great idea.

Choosing a domain name is one of the first things people do when starting an online business. The obvious choice would be to try and get hold of you companies name, or to try and pick up something snappy but it’s worth spending some time thinking about it.

What domains are available?

Oviously it makes sense to find out if a domain name is available before you set your heart on it. I use the search facility at www.simply.com It’s no different to any other out there but because I have an account with them I can purchse a domain within seconds if I find something that I like.

Using Keywords

Firstly it’s pretty fair to say that the majority of really good domain names have allready been taken, pizza.com sold recently for $2.6m but that doesn’t mean that you can’t find something suitable for your business. Using a domain made up of relevant keywords is a good idea, especially if they can describe exactly what your company does, we were able to register www.secondhand-motorbikes.com for a client who, surprise surprise, sells secondhand motorbikes. Now you’ll notice that there’s a hyphen in the middle but this shouldn’t put you off. It also helps if you’re able to distinguish between the online aspect of your business and the offline. If the purpose of the site is to generate new business then using your company name as the domain might not be the way to go because if one of your clients is seraching for your company on the web the chances are that they know about you already… having said that company branding is something that you might want to think about… it all comes down to your overall strategy.

Short and snappy domains

Nobody enjoys typing in an overly long domain name to access a site, keeping things short make life easier for your customers and also looks good on stationary. Be aware that you might have to compromise on this… if your a butcher it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to get your hands on butcher.com but if you’re aiming for work in Yorkshire perhaps yorkshirebutcher.com would meet your criteria.

.co.uk or .com What’s the difference

I allways advise my clients to go with the .com suffix if it’s available. I’m not 100% sure that this makes a difference to SEO but I believe that it does a little bit of good, it certainly can’t do any harm. Perhaps more importantly though it looks a lot better and for the sake of a few extra quid each year it’s definately the way to go.

Search engine optimisation, often abbreviated to SEO, is a term used that applies to a whole host of techniques used in order to improve a websites ranking in search engines such as google. The basic premise is that the more visitors a website has the more money it will make so it’s something that any business with a web presence should consider.

Something that I allways like to ask clients is whether or not they would prefer to have the best looking website in the world that only had five visitors a month or an awful looking site that had a millions of hits a day… it’s pretty obvious what the ‘correct’ answer is.

A decent SEO campaign should start at the planning stage. It’s important to work out what visitors you want to attract in the first place as numbers alone doesn’t make for a successful site. It’s all very well having 1000 visitors a day looking to buy a toaster but if you don’t sell toasters what’s the point? Before the look of a site is even considered you should think about what people will be searching for in google, these are called keywords and getting these right is very, very important.

After you’ve decided on keywords it’s important to make sure that the code that drives your site is well written and adheres to W3C Standards. If you would like to know if a site adheres to these standards you can use the very handy online validator which will tell you if there are any errors in the code. It still amazes me how many web design companies have badly coded pages on their own sites… hardly a good advert.

Next comes the content on the site. When we web geeks use the word content we can be referring to a lot of things but in this case the chances are we’ll mean the wording on the pages. This is becoming increasingly important when it comes to success in the search engines.

Then there are inbound links from other sites. These are seen as ‘votes’ for your site, the more links you have he more important your site is considered.

There are a whole host of other methods and tricks of the trade that I like to keep close to my chest… but perhaps the most important thing to consider is that if anyone claims to be able to guarantee  your website a front page entry on google steer well clear!

MSAMFG proved to be an interetsing project to work on. The hardest part was trying to figure out exactly what the company did and how their potential customers are… once we had that figured out the rest was easy. In short the comany offer a wide range of services including box production but the heart of the business is the production of composite core materials mainly for the marine and aviaion industires.

The Brief

The company simply wanted a professional and modern looking website that would reflect the technology that they use.

The Solution

As this project was all about projecting an image we elected to build the site soley in flash. As dislaying images as sheets of materials is not exactly exciting it was agreed that images of Sunseeker Yachts and planes would make for a slicker looking website. More in-depth explanations on the services could be accessed via pop-ups. Using some very nice page transitions we were able to produce a very high end looking site that came in well under budget.

The Finished Site

www.compositecore.com

JPL Plumbing are a Bournemouth based company who, like most clients, found us using a goole search. They had looked at the WDB website and seen that we had already built a plumbers website and were interested to hear how we could help them promote their company online.

The Brief

JPL Plumbing generate the vast majority of their work from advertising in the Yellow Pages, they wanted us to build a website that the could direct customers to as well as generating traffic from google and the other search engines. It had to be easy to navigate, have a professional appearance, list all the plumbing services clearly and encourage visitors to call the office.

The Solution

The first thing was to select an appropriate domain name that would help with getting traffic to the site. Although the company is called JPL Plumbing and they cover most of the South of England the website is to focus on plumbing in the Bournemouth area. As luck would have it www.bournemouthplumbers.com was available. For the professional look we opted to use a flash page as the page will not need to be updated on a regular basis. For the search engines we would write XHTML pages serving as alternative content.

The Finished Site

Bournemouth Plumbers