Web Design & digital marketing services, Ireland & Spain. My name is Ian Stewart, I’ve been a web developer wince around 1990, back when the internet was still something very new! I’ve built hundreds of successful websites over the years and can guarantee a top-notch job!
Web Design Services
‘Web design’ is an often used phrase when talking about websites. It’s a little misleading as ‘design’ aften refers to the aesthetic look of a website and, to be honest. the ‘design’ of your website should be the last thing we think about.
‘Web development’ is a better description of the process of building a website, as there are so many factors which go it to the process before we consider the design.
Let’s use an analogy: a car. Instead of a website, you’re interested in buying a new car, a ‘custom’ car. The ‘design’ of a website would be the paint job. Essentially, “what colour would you like your car to be?”
Before we worry about the colour, I need to be thinking about the shape, integrity and strength of the chassis, the brakes, whether it’s manual or automatic, how big the engines is, the type of tyres and a hundred other things that affect the use and performance of the car. Its colour makes no difference at all.
Of course, we want your website to look good, it’s often the ‘front end’ of you business, being the most visible part. But if a page isn’t ‘technically’ correct, it’s unlikely to be ranked well by the search engines, so unlikely to be seen. Websites are meant to be attractive to the eye, naturally, but at their core, they are very ‘technical’ things. My advice, worry about content before worrying about design.
My background is in commercial design for print. I understand how to best present information and am passionate about ‘branding’ – keeping your public image consistent and prominent.
The most important aspects of any new website are, as follows…
The Age of your Domain
The age of your domain name makes a big difference to how Google, Bing and the other search engines see you. Older domains are seen as more reliable, having more longevity. The older the domain name, the more credible your website becomes. Also, website addresses tend to amass ‘inbound links’ over time (these are links from other websites and various places, pointing to your domain). If you’re considering a new website, with brand new domain name, this can be a problem and there isn’t too much I can do about that.
There is, however, a way to, sort-of, get around it – you could buy an existing domain name that someone else has previously used, then discarded. You might have to pay a little more for the domain, but many existing domains have been around for a long time and can have ten, hundred or even thousands of inbound links pointing to them.
There are a few issues with this approach, but they are all worth consideration.
If, however, you already own a domain name – excellent! The older it is, the better!
The Content and SEO
‘Content is king’ as I often hear. Quite right. The text and structure of content of any web page is the thing which most determines its strength and its ability to be crawled and index by search engines (Google, predominantly). Google isn’t interested in the colours used or what the images are, it cares about how the pages are structured and categorised.
Original content (text) is a must. One of the worst things we can do is directly copy text from other web sites. It’s perfectly ok to glean ideas from other sites, in fact, it’s an often essential part of building informative pages. But rewriting any test found is absolutely essential. Change the structure of sentence, replace adjectives,
And, in case it’s being considered, avoid AI-written text. Human is always much, much better.
There are a few basic ‘rules’ to follow when constructing online text. Try to keep sentences shorter. Use simple language. Use structured ‘headings’. Categorise as many pages as possible. This is called ‘taxonomy’ in the internet industry. Google just loves good taxonomy.
Read more about Content & SEO on this page.
The Loading Speed of Pages
Google really likes fast pages. Especially pages that load quickly on a mobile phone.
There are a few things we can do to speed the loading of pages, but we should start with a decent hosting company. I won’t name names, but some well known hosting companies are well known for their slow server times, most often because their servers are overloaded with websites.
That said, we would use special software to minimise the size of images, compress web pages in to a smaller format. We would also use ‘cached’ pages (these are web pages pre-formatted in to a small size, ready for delivery to browsers). Depending on the people you want reach, also consider what’s called a ‘CDN’, or ‘Content Distribution Network’.
This is all a bit ‘techy’, but it’s easily done as part of any web development project I would undertake.