Web Development Articles from York web designers Semlyen IT

York photographer David Bellis, a client who originally approached us for SEO work on his mainly Flash-driven main photography site, commissioned us to build a new website on a limited budget. The new site is focused exclusively on his work as a York wedding photographer.

As well as showcasing his wedding photography portfolio, this WordPress-driven site uses WordPress Ecommerce, a WordPress plugin from getshopped.org. The plugin allows David’s clients to log in to a private area of the site, where they can view their wedding photographs online, select those that they would like to buy, and pay online through the  integrated shopping cart system.

The WordPress content management system combined with some bespoke programming makes it quick and easy for David to create each new wedding album and upload photos, as well as editing other content across the site.

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Curtains 2 U is the online trading portal of Boston Spa’s branch of the Curtain Exchange franchise. As a curtain shop near Wetherby and Tadcaster, their geographical competition for search engine results is not high, as small towns would not ordinarily sustain more than one or two curtain makers. Their page on the franchise’s own website already tops Google’s results for “curtain shop in Boston Spa”, so there is no need for us to do any further work there.

We are currently testing the water regarding SEO for the much more competitive phrases “online curtain shop” and “buy curtains online“. Originally we built the site as a low-cost e-commerce solution. It features a budget bespoke catalogue management system, integrated with Mal’s Cart. As the site was coded by us, it was built to our usual coding standards which allow for maximum SEO treatment if required. The client did not ask for SEO in the original quote, but they have since approached us to add some optimisation, both for the main “online curtain shop” phrases, and also some secondary geographical optimisation to target nearby Wetherby and Tadcaster.

The site received a rigorous, in-depth SEO treatment, and also has a few backlinks from our other clients’ links directories (although the effectiveness of these is now uncertain…). It will be interesting to see how much improvement this treatment produces in what appears to be a very competitive area – can this site compete with the established sites? They may be older and larger, but may not necessarily be as concisely coded.

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Some SEO jobs can be more challenging than others. While many of our SEO projects are for straightforward phrases such “York estate agents”, there are some for which the target phrases are not so obvious to someone who works outside the client’s professional field.

One such project that we have taken on was for Pharmaceutical Market Access specialists Roboleo. Since we did not know much about this area, this project involved extensive discussion with the clients, to determine which phrases best described their site. The second phase of this preliminary work was working out which variations of these phrases were actually searched for, through the use of Google’s Keyword Tool and previous web statistics on the client’s existing website – after all, being top of the Google results for a phrase which nobody ever types into Google’s search box isn’t much better than having no SEO at all.

Another project we’ve just taken on is for driving instructor Andrew Taylor or AAA Instructor Training – but again, his field is specialised. Andrew does give regular driving lessons in Wakefield to learner drivers, but his main area of expertise is training others to become driving instructors themselves. As with any profession, there are acronyms and technical language which can be hard to contextualise just by looking at the site as an outsider to the area. It may have been relatively straightforward to decide on the phrase “driving instructor training courses in Wakefield“, but “fleet ADI training courses” was a little more elusive. I’m guessing only a driving instructor trainer – or someone who wanted to become one – could tell me that was a sensible phrase for which to optimise the site.

While the Roboleo site was designed and coded in house at Semlyen IT, the AAA Instructor Training site is a classic example of a website created using a third party content management system which was not very search engine friendly. In this case we have taken on the site ourselves and stripped out the CMS, which means that we will now have full control over adding the SEO content.

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Barbican Secure Contract Parking recently commissioned a website from Bivouac Design Solutions, which was coded by Semlyen IT. This site for a secure car park in York is another one-page site, which includes an embedded Google map.

The car park provides 24 hour access to its secure premises in the Q-Park complex on Kent Street, and customers receive a dedicated Named space and personal transponder. There are even a few extras thrown in with the parking contracts, such as meals at the nearby York Pavilion Hotel and Langton’s Brasserie.

In other news, the new e-commerce site for Andrew’s Golf is now live – you can read more about this golf accessories shop in my earlier post. Another recent development is the Shandy Hall online gift shop, which is now fully operational on the website for the Laurence Sterne Trust.

Glamping site Jollydays Luxury Camping have just commissioned a major project for their online booking and payment system, and the gifted education publishers Royal Fireworks Press have asked us to use Issuu to provide sample pages for the books available on their site.

On the SEO side of things, organic children’s clothing retailers Twigs4Kids have commissioned some additional work. Having obtained a no. 1 position on google.co.uk for the search “organic children’s clothes”, their next target is to improve their positions for the named brands that they stock. The first two that we’ll be working on are Frugi and Little Shrimp.

The next sites in line for us to build are a new site for York estate agents Nigel Naish, and an online outlet for York curtain shop L & G Adams.

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WordPress 3.0 “Thelonious”, the thirteenth major release of WordPress was released to the general public on the 17th June, 2010. After successfully testing our most commonly used plugins on our development/test blog we have decided to upgrade our own blog and will slowly work our way through our clients blogs.

Hats off to WordPress 3.0 as this upgrade has been a dream, not one of the plugins tested (so far) has been incompatible with WordPress 3.0 and as usual the automatic upgrade function ran smoothly.

WordPress 3.0 boasts “1,217 bug fixes and feature enhancements”, personally I didnt find it very buggy to begin with and I am still getting to know some of its standard features. However there are a few major additions that should prove to be very useful, especially when using WordPress as a Content Management System. The most notable of these being ‘Custom Menus’, ‘Header and Background API’s', ‘Custom post types’ and the ‘WordPress MU (Multisites)’.

We havent yet had the chance to build a blog or site from scratch using WordPress 3.0 (and I imagine not many people have yet) and so these features have yet to be thoroughly tested, but its looking good none-the-less. If you would like to read more about WordPress 3.0, take a look at the WordPress Blog.

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