Web Development Articles from York web designers Semlyen IT

Royal Fireworks Press

Royal Fireworks Press is an established publisher of books for gifted children. Their new site serves as a catalogue and e-commerce portal, and incorporates two different versions: one for school-based learning, and another for home-based. Users can switch between these two modes, which share content, but also contain pages and information unique to each version.

Royal Fireworks Press is our most popular e-commerce website, of which we are proud. Since the re-design the website has experienced a 14% increase in sales, which we predict will continue to rise. The site provides functionality, good visual layout and is highly ranked in search engines, all encouraging customers to buy books for gifted children.

The site was developed using CodeIgniter PHP Framework, with customised WordPress CMS, Mal’s e-commerce and Issuu integration.

Link Agency

Link Agency is a letting agent in Hull. The website integrates with CFP WinMan.

The letting agents site was designed by 7nine and coded by Semlyen IT.

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We have been so busy with projects these last few months that we haven’t had time to update our blog!

We designed and coded a new website for Cloudfree IT in August. They provide IT support for business in Yorkshire. The website is another of our highly-customised WordPress installations, with two linked sites running off the same domain – one for business users and one for home users.

Beacon Dodsworth are GIS mapping software and marketing technology consultants, their ExpressionEngine driven website has had a re-design, with a new integrated WordPress blog.

MyHouseAdvert is an online estate agents. They needed a website that encourages customers to use their services; this is done visually with price comparisons and fact boxes. An additional feature is the video web presenter created by www.tvwebpresenters.co.uk. This brings a dynamic aspect to the website that integrates well with the overall design.

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We are proud to announce our new Limited company: Castlegate IT. Over the years the company has been expanding and progressing, and to incorporate was the next step.

It is taking time to administrate the switchover, so we are currently still trading as Semlyen IT Consultants. There will be a new website and new branding coming soon, but with the same quality of service.

To help with the workload, Castlegate IT has employed two extra staff, John Hughes and Gemma Bason.

John has extensive experience in design, HTML, CSS and Javascript coding, with a particular strength in interface design which will be a wonderful additional to Castlegate IT.

I (Gemma) have joined to help with all the company admin and to take on updates and alterations to sites.

We still have the old team – Andy, Richard, Jamie, Daniel and Jim are all here to make your website a success!!

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When a website already has a #1 position for some searches, particularly those using location-specific terms, it may be time to think about building on this with new SEO campaigns. Scoot Cycling Holidays, who recently commissioned some SEO work, were already sitting at the top of Google for “cycling holidays in Yorkshire” and related searches, but found that being in this position was not bringing them as much web traffic, and thus as much business, as they wanted.

Their target market is visitors from abroad, primarily those visiting Britain from the USA and Australia, who might want to take a short countryside break in the middle of a tour of major cities. As such people may not have a specific county in mind prior to their visit, they may be unlikely to type “Yorkshire cycling holidays” into Google. Furthermore, when I did some search popularity research with the location set to the US, I found that the monthly searches that include “cycling holiday” are fairly low. Thinking this was simply a case of the UK’s “holiday” being equivalent to the USA’s “vacation” I tried “cycling vacations”. Surprisingly, this was even less popular, according to Google’s Keyword Tool. After a bit more research, I found that the more commonly used term is “cycling tour”, and similar variables.

Choosing exactly which phrases to optimise the home page for was tricky for this site – they wanted to keep their position at the top for “Yorkshire cycling holidays”, and were already on page 2 for “UK cycling holidays”, which, although less popular, still brought them some traffic. “England bike tours” was the primary phrase I chose, while keeping the Yorkshire and UK cycling holidays content included so that they would maintain their positions. As the site had previously had very dilute and unfocused SEO content, the SEO for the “cycling holidays” phrases was improved by the treatment, even though they were only secondary terms. The site has since risen several places for “UK cycling holidays” and remains at position 1 for “Yorkshire cycling holidays”. It has made an entry a little further down Google’s search results for “England bike tours”, in which it could not be found anywhere prior to any treatment. As the SEO work is not yet complete, this is a promising start.

The meta keywords before the SEO treatment: the existing content was dilute and unfocused – more than half of the keywords had little relevance to the content of the page, or the SEO target. Google pays little attention to these anyway, so they were of little use, and getting in the way of the real content.

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As the importance of SEO becomes more well-known, we’re taking on an increasing number of projects for small businesses who have existing websites and limited budgets. The websites that they originally set up may not have been built with SEO in mind, or even to best practice regarding the coding standards we would normally apply when building a new site. However, even with a small budget and half a day’s work, it can be possible to take a site that cannot be found anywhere in Google and give it a significant boost. This usually does not involve much recoding, and seldom changing the site’s appearance – it’s more a case of ensuring the right tags (for example, the title and meta tags) are in the right place and say the right things, and adjusting the written content to make sure it reflects what the site is about.

This may sound like common sense, but it’s quite easy to accidentally write a site’s content in a way that means it could be ignored by Google for what it supposed to be its target key phrase. A common mistake is making the title tag of the homepage just say “Home”. Another related problem is starting the website with a generic heading such as “Welcome to my Website”. These are the first things that Google will read when it encounters a site, so, if you are a York builder, as one of our recent clients is, these two important places ought to include phrases such as “builder in York“. If you have graphics and headers already proclaiming that this is what you do, it’s sometimes easy to forget that although the human eye sees these as prominent, search engines may not. Even if there is relevant alt text behind the image, Google wants to know that you’re so certain of your identity as a York builder that you’ve made it your website’s main heading. Preferably twice, in the title bar and as the H1 heading.

However, search engines, although not yet sentient (we hope) have evolved a bit of cynicism. If, for example, a webpage has headings declaring that the site belongs to a York architect, but the body text does not contain phrases such as “architect in York” or even mention the words “York” or “architecture” very much at all, Google may look at it, get a bit hopeful at the beginning about its relevance to architecture, but then be disappointed when the rest of the site’s content doesn’t follow through. It needs to be reassured that the title isn’t just a red herring. Fortunately, it’s quite an easy adjustment to make. If someone genuinely is a York-based architect, it’s a sensible thing for them to state on their website, if they haven’t already.

This is another illustration of how writing content for search engines should not be regarded as a separate art from writing for human readers. The fine-tuning of the details is what makes the difference.

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