Website Design and SEO

A brief exchange that demonstrates the choice between a ‘trendy’ and ‘does what it says’ type website name. There is obviously a compromise website type name that combines both (example: delicious-webdesign.com).

[New Website Owner] Thanks for your ‘frank’ comments! I must stress that I am at the very early stages of setting up my company and that is is NOT a web based service. I see the web site as a necessary part of good business practice but not as an essential part of winning work, which will largely come through open tenders.

Reflecting on your comments I ‘Googled’ a range of businesses that operate in a similar market. Some have ‘exotic’ names (Pegasus, Morpheus, Rubicon,etc) – others have more specific names Community Consultants, Community Evaluation Services ‘its on the tin’ type brands. I am aiming to set up a ‘network’ of consultants that work in one or more of the following fields

Strategic Development (Strategic and operational planning)
Evaluation – Outcome based analysis of projects, programmes and strategies
Research – Surveys, statistical analysis, demographics, evidence, etc
Community Development  – Neighbourhood planning, local regeneration
Change Management – Mergers, Restructures, etc
Sustainable Development

Our target market will be Central and Local Government and the Community Voluntary Sector. There are big changes happening in these areas regarding organisational development and new forms of service delivery. Can you tell us a bit more about transferring the website.

To answer your questions.

1 What other websites do you like the look of in terms of appearance and what they offer? The example you gave looks OK but I don’t foresee the need for blogs

2 How many images will you be able to supply? As many as needed – I have a library of case study images

3 Do you have any branding or a company logo? do you have it electronically ? ideally in  ‘photoshop’  psd format No – just starting out dont even have a name yet? (Well I agree that the names that I have registered dont do it!!).

Maybe something like search.com (Strategic development, Evaluation, Analysis, Research, Community development and H!) !!

Understand your company not being a web-based business but as you know its inevitable that people know you have a website and can find the info they want on your website during the tender process and we will do our best to ensure you end up with a website that enhances your tender winning potential.

[Website Design Company] The choice of domain name is largely yours (depending on whats available of course) but I would choose a ‘it does what it says on the tin’ type name personally to give you that ‘SEO’ benefit and the ‘clickability’ benefits where a potential client will be drawn to your domain in a search results page as they can see what you are about just by your domain name.

search.com would be good but that one is owned by cbs and would probably cost a few million pounds.

In summary you need a standard 5-6 page brochure website with a logo, how many case studies do you anticipate having on the site? Believe the Case Studies page could be a repository of case studies (link to previous cases) and that would allow us to easily add new pages / sections when you provide them.

Going on your examples and the information below we will need to create you a 12 page website with logo that will be expandable as an when you supply more case studies, you will supply the photos and webcopy (text) and we will include the hosting / domain registration and setup / email setup / the website design / optimising the site for the search engines / review of all the  webcopy you supply for the website.

This premium website will take about 2 weeks to begin this project then it should be complete within another 2 weeks. If you want to enhance this package we can upgrade it to our ‘premium plus’, this will allow more pages but more importantly will allow a 1 month SEO project on the website once its completed (promote it in the search engines). Either way both packages will leave you with a professional / easy to use / clean / search engine friendly website.

Regarding transfers, It will cost us initially but that cost is part of the package deal, after the end of the first year your costs will be the same as if you didn’t transfer, so you will just pay the hosting fee of £45 per year. Very very few clients choose to register and host their own websites and its probably cost effective for you to have your websites on our register and our hosting.  Additionally it reduces your admin as you only have one company to deal with (instead of us and namesco).

[New Website Owner] Thanks for your clean, clear, concise information Could I have a quote and a deadline – please.

[Website Design Company] The website has been transferred and now hosted. We have a holding site setup with email / contact form setup / tested and working

Here is some faqs about website hosting and the process of transferring your website to us once we begin your website redesign:

Q The only thing in switching servers is that we all have emails coming to phones/iPads and laptops. Is this much grief to change?  Also I pay £65 for the hosting and with you its £45, does that mean you have slow servers or a worse service?

A Hosting costs are all relative; with us we use award winning hosting in the UK. You are currently on one of the cheapest and nastiest hosts that are based in Germany, the  financial cost for hosting doesn’t represent the difference in service and would suggest you change over asap.

Changing Hosting / Servers is something we do for new clients almost every week, you get some new email setup details that we can help you change over remotely if you cant do it yourself with the instructions that we give you.

We now have everything we need to begin apart from the decision about your existing website, you need to decide to either
1, Transfer it to our hosting / register (recommended)
2, Give us access to your admin / hosting panel or give us the FTP details to allow us to upload to your server

We would recommend transferring it to our server as the initial transfer and hosting will be included in your project cost and your existing host is not on the ‘recommended list’ for us and most reviewers or hosting and also its based in Germany (not ideal for your sites optimisation / promotion)

Therefore please give us the sites ‘EPP code’ to enable transfer / give us access to your 1and1 admin details to do it for you or give us the FTP details to access your existing website.

As soon as commence the transfer or give us the hosting access details we can then complete your website project brief for your designer / developer and would hope that sometime the week the coming one we can commence development.

We have 3 hosting accounts but probably put the majority of our new clients with an award winning UK based website hosting company, the transfer process is totally managed and taken care of by us so you don’t need to get your hands dirty. We will setup your domain email accounts and give you setup instructions and even remotely set this up on your machines (if you use a email client like outlook)

Generally we use Dreamweaver as web editing software (this is the industry standard editor for changing the code). But I think you were asking about a CMS system.

If you want to be able to update your own text on the page then we can do this for you as long as you tell us what pages you want the text updated for. Normally for quick / simple text changes we dont charge for a one-off change as long as you email the page and ol