Matchstick Solutions – Our New Website & Why New is Important
We have been busy in recent months redeveloping our own website and getting it ready for a formal launch. Naturally, we know the importance of a fresh and relevant online presence, it underpins our beliefs and goals as a company and it is something we practice as well as preach.
There are two main parties that your website needs to impress, and while there is some overlap between the needs of these two stakeholders, it is important to satisfy both. Your website is primarily your online ambassador to new and existing clients, making them a clear primary target, but to make sure it even becomes relevant to these visitors you need to ensure its effectiveness when viewed by search providers such as Google, Yahoo! and Bing.
Google, for example, indexes trillions of web pages. That is an astounding number, but Google runs billions of searches every month, finding pages in this vast directory that match terms input by users. Obviously not every site is relevant in your market and this number becomes significantly lower when you start to narrow down searches using key words but it is still a very big directory. “Web design Pembrokeshire”, a search term highly relevant for ourselves, returns in excess of 270,000 search results – not quite a trillion but still a large figure nonetheless.
Ensuring you rank in the first few pages, let alone at the top of the first page of results, takes time and effort. When we design sites for our clients we use search engine optimisation techniques to help the site be pertinent and attractive to Google and other search engines when they decide which websites are of the most relevance when they compile these results based on regularly updated, complex algorithms.
Aside from the ‘under the hood’ tweaks and techniques that make sure the website performs well when tested by these search providers, the front end content of the website is hugely important. For this reason alone, you can imagine that a website that is coming towards the end of a life cycle in terms of quality design and has stagnant content will not score well. Delivering a fresh vista with clear, relevant site content is a fantastic start to achieving the holy grail of a #1 rank.
Once you are there and working hard to stay there, it is over to the visitors. You may be at the top of page one of results for an important search term in your industry but if the first thing the visitor sees when they click on your site is not visually pleasing then all your search engine optimisation time and effort is futile. Web design trends move quickly, and often dramatically - what is relevant in terms of look and feel today may have been nigh on science fiction two to three years ago due to the rapid advancement in the technology industry as a whole. Before the advent of smartphones, for example, nobody was worrying about how their website would look on the smaller screen of a mobile phone but now responsive web design is absolutely paramount – ensuring your site is visually brilliant and easy to use whatever device it is being viewed on.
For this reason, it was important that we develop our own new website, making it appealing and visually attractive and stimulating to the people who visit it and allowing us to get our message across in a clear, concise manner while also allowing people to find the information they required without any unnecessary carry-on.
We love the look and feel of our new home and we have worked hard to make sure it ticks all the boxes for everybody who looks at it, be they new or existing clients or the scans of Google, Bing and everyone else. Thank you for taking the time to take a look around and be sure to get in touch and let us know your thoughts and any queries you may have about the relevancy of effective design.
