We are almost to release our first alpha of the project but already its looking amazing, we just had to share it with you!

The post New Project appeared first on nWebDesign.

We have just completed 2 stunning design for a pub and a construction company:

And the insane thing is we only charge £399 for websites of this quality! You wont find better for that price!

Contact us today if you have any web requirements.

The post Recap of recent work appeared first on nWebDesign.

This is our rating of the best WordPress hosting in the UK:

FreshSites.co.uk

FreshSites offer UK WordPress hosting that comes with WordPress automatically installed. This means no fuss uploading, no configuration, you can just start blogging within minutes of ordering.

Their WordPress hosting is offered on their cloud hosting platform which means its fully redundant, if one of their server nodes crash, your WordPress site is automatically transferred to another in seconds! Their WordPress Hosting is also powered by enterprise quality storage units, each with redundant RAID 10 arrays. This means faster servers that are more reliable.

The Support staff are extremely helpful and respond to support tickets within moments. they know what their doing and its a refreshing welcome to find a web host this good.

They offer a 30 day money back guarantee and even give free domain names with certain packages. We now use FreshSites for all of our hosting needs.

24/7 support, automatic set-up of WordPress and at a really good price (and they nearly always have a special going!!)

TSOHost

We used TSOHost for a several years for our UK WordPress hosting, they have a solid network and a reliable speedy UK based support team.

They offer cPanel based web hosting with 1 click installs of WordPress, they backup any databases and store them in your ftp root for quick access (outside the public_html folder obviously) and their servers are load balanced for best delivery of your WordPress website.

As an example, one of our sites got hit by the “Digg effect” via google news when a big story hit over Christmas, within minutes they let us know about the insane amount of traffic pouring through to our site, let us know how quickly our bandwidth was being used up and offered some further advice about how to speed the caching up – You really can’t ask for better.

Tip:  The Clustered Platform: Ultimate Hosting Package  utilises cloud servers, which means even less chance of downtime, and even more performance

VPS.NET

VPS.NET offer cloud based virtual servers and cloud hosting ;on a rock solid platform. Their servers have high level redundancy with instant switchover if one of their servers fails.With VPS.NET you can buy blocks of server space and ultimately have 100% control of your hosting environment. if you’re a mid/high level tech setting up a UK WordPress hosting then this is a good option for you.

Another great feature is that they offer GEOHosting services, meaning your website serves its files from the closest server to the end-user, meaning that page load times are insanely good around the globe.

The post The Best UK WordPress Hosting appeared first on nWebDesign.

For example I’m going to use our site as a basis. A good strategy for selling services is targeting business in your local area, why go for the short “Web Design” keyword which has a lot of competition when i could go for “web design Aldershot” and get less competition!

Based on location i decided to mix up my keyword slightly as shown below:

Website Design Aldershot
Web Design Aldershot
Web Designers in Aldershot

Now all I need to do is optimize the landing page. Below is 10 great tips on how to optimize your landing pages.

Insert Your Keyword Into The Title Tag

Inserting your keyword into the title tag means when people search for the keyword in google, the result shows up in bold. This makes you stand out and often leads to better click-through rates (CTR).

Add a Meta Description With Your Keywords In It.

As you can see from the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) image above, the meta description tag is used on Google underneath the title our result. Google doesn’t always use the meta description tag to display on the results page as it has an equation to work out the quality of it. Try to go into depth with the description tag and detail the service/product you offer as it’ll vastly improve the quality score.

If your unsure of whether you have a meta tag on your webpage, view the code and you should see something like this:

Ignore people who tell you that you should have keywords meta tag too, Google IGNORES this tag as its seen as keyword stuffing.

Add A <h1> Title To The Very Start Of Your Page With The Keyword In It.

Adding a title to the content with the keyword they are after confirms that the searcher has found relevant information they were after on your page. It also confirms to google what this page is about improving your ranking in its results.

Add a paragraph detailing the very best aspects of your product/service to further confirm they have found what they were searching for. Make sure you keep this intro text short and sweet, no one wants to sit there and read an essay on your product/service, they just want to check your reliable, affordable and trustworthy!

Add A Call To Action

A call to action can be a button, a link, or even a phone number on the page. This NEEDS to stand out and shine as a clear method of reaching the searchers goal. Site designed in blue? add a green button to make it stand out, still not clear enough on the page? add some red arrows beside it to draw the eye to the button. Heres a great example of a call to action button:

A nice big green button with a black arrow pointing to it. This is what you should be looking to do. Basecamp say what their product does, who uses it and gives a great call to action.

Use Images To Break Text Up

Make sure your page isn’t just text, customers will get put off and sometimes and image can show what features your product has better than any text could.

Video Is Here To Stay, Utilise It!

Video is the biggest sales tool you can use these days. Adding a video and a call to action is the perfect combination for a modern refreshing website.

Keep Text Under 400 Words

Lets face it, when hit with a wall of text you can be put off from that website, Keep the overall content low, unless you have to (like this article). Its better to split text over pages.

Customer Testimonials Build Trust

Adding customer testimonials show other people trust you, and having real customer testimonials can reassure people about how your trusted in the community.

Don’t Sell What Others Do Wrong, Sell What You Do Right And What’s Unique

I can’t remember who told me about this one, buts it’s always done me well, don’t sell what your competitors are doing wrong, sell what you do uniquely and right. This way it doesn’t matter if the competition catches up, your still listing some great features about what your product does right and uniquely.

Tweak And Optimise

Never stop tweaking and optimising, Googles always changing, the web’s tool set for developing websites always change, think back, not long ago video was a dream, now its a major part of any websites selling technique. always optimize your text for where you want to appear in google and what appeals to users.

Of course a good SEO company like us would do this for you! Our web designs are built out of the box with everything we just talked about. Give us a call to talk about how best to optimise your landing pages on  020 3239 2445

The post 10 Landing Page Optimization Tips appeared first on nWebDesign.

nWebDesign have seen a huge increase in business recently over our Outsourced website design services.

Outsourcing your website design means you can add more products to your company’s portfolio or add that all important extra capacity when you need it.

We have a great portfolio behind us and we believe our web design packages are amazing value for money, you could make thousands extra a month for very little investment in time and money.

We provide outsourced web design services that include a branded phone support service and emails branded in your company name. To your end clients it seems as if our team is part of your company and at no point will they know of nWebDesign.

The billing is handled by you and we invoice once monthly for our services, and the more work you send our way the lower the price!

It couldn’t be simpler and could make your company more profitable in weeks.

Call us today on 020 3239 2445 to outsource your web design services to us!.

The post Outsource Your Website Design appeared first on nWebDesign.

I thought I would write a guide on the top 10 ways to stop the effects of panda on your website.

1. Stop Auto Posting!

Before the panda update you could run an auto blogger and do pretty well with targeting your blog to a particular subject and putting tools in place to link certain keywords.

The panda update has stopped this and put simply, theirs no way to recover from it and still auto blog. You simply have to write fresh, unique content. Try to create a content building service that revolves around a couple of unique content posts a week on your blog, this will do wonders of overcoming the effects of Panda.

2. Don’t Just Post Press Releases From PR Companies.

This was a big killer for one of my blogs. Traffic dropped 80% after the panda update, because we were just copy and pasting press releases sent to us from pr companies.

Now days you HAVE to read them and re-write them, if the press release was worthwhile to put on your website in the first place, making it unique by re-writing it will do wonders to your blog.

The simple fact is that it would have done more before the panda update too!

3. Make Sure To “NoFollow” Outbound Paid Links.

Put it this way, Google hates paid link building. Google doesn’t like the idea of websites selling authority and believes that link building should be natural.

There are websites out their that base the worth of their links on page rank, and even though PageRank  is old it can relate to the authority of the website.

Adding NoFollow will cut the effect that panda will penalize your website.

4. Don’t Just NoFollow Every Link.

NoFollwing every link is just as bad as leaving every link as default to do follow.

Linking to Authority websites in your websites category shows that you are associated with the websites category and also shows you’re not just a spammer.

5. Make Sure Your Address Is On The Website.

Google likes to see businesses take responsibility for their websites, posting an address gives your website  a respectable and responsible look online.

6. Create A Privacy Policy And Terms of Service.

Terms Of Service and a Privacy Policy work the same way as adding you address, it shows Google you’re a respectable and responsible website online. New UK laws around cookies also state you need to tell visitors of any tracking information so adding this will help with that too.

7. Check The Ratio Of Ads To Content Ratio Isn’t Too High.

If your ratio of adverts to content is too high, Google will rank your website lower as it classes is as a website only out to make money via adverts. we’ve all seen them, websites full of adverts without hardly any content, or domain squatters just posting adverts linked to the keywords in the title. The panda update has ranked these kind of websites lower.

8. Make Sure Your Website Design Has Been Coded Properly.

Badly coded website design is a real killer. Make sure you use a respectable website designer (like us!) who can code your site so its valid, and has a basic SEO Aware layout. Make sure titles are set correctly, 1 H1 per page with H2′s under it and so forth.

9. Act Against Plagiarism To Keep Your Content Unique.

As soon as your content isn’t unique anymore  it will be ranked lower. Act against plagiarism, make sure you get other copies of your work taken down. Make sure you state that your work is copyrighted to you! a great free plagiarism checker is http://www.plagiarismchecker.com/

10. Improve The Loading Time Of Your Website.

If your site is slow loading, Google will rank your site lower than a faster performing website. Make sure your images are small in size and not stretched a great tool to help with image size is http://www.smushit.com/ysmush.it/.

Make sure you don’t have to many calls to Css and Javascript files, if you can combine and minify them! check out http://code.google.com/p/minify/

Also make sure you use the async google analytics code, this will help load times massively.

One small tip i have here is that when we had the Facebook like widget from the Facebook developers it actually slowed our site down around 3 seconds and included over 10 calls to Facebook!

I hope this guide helps you and if you have any tips yourself please leave a comment as We are very eager to here other peoples experience with the Google panda update.

The post 10 Ways To Recover From The Google Panda Update appeared first on nWebDesign.

Here at nWebDesign we’re big fans of the mojoPortal cms (content management system).

If we get the opportunity to suggest a cms to clients, we tend to go for mojoPortal.

Now i know there will be a lot of you saying “but WordPress is amazing you should use that” or “Drupal is the best system out there”, so i thought id write a bit about why we love mojoPortal so much.

Its Written In .NET C#

One of the initial reasons we chose mojoPortal, was because its written in .NET (C#). Most businesses now days run windows solutions for their IT needs and having a .NET cms we can use for their website design means no change of software.

Out of the choice of .NET cms there are a few competitors to mojoPortal but we believe none come close to how advanced and easy to use as mojoPortal.

Its Biggest Competitor DotNetNuke Is Bulky And Its Performance is Slow.

DotNetNuke is widely regarded as the most popular .NET cms out there. We find the system bulky, too big for what modern websites need. mojoPortal has a smaller number of features as standard, but this is good because a lot of the time pre-written features don’t work exactly how a client wants them, and its easier to write exactly what they need than have to hack existing features.

mojoPortal Uses Industry Standard Features

mojoPortal uses  TinyMCE editor as standard which means end users can easily update their content as easily as using word. mojoPortal also has features built-in such as the AjaxToolkit, jQuery, google maps and bing maps so developing modern websites is a breeze.

mojoPortal Can Look Stunning

With the right mojoPortal Developer you can get stunning results, below is an example of a mojoPortal site.

Starting to see the benefits of a mojoPortal web design? Contact us on 020 3239 244 to get started

The post Why We Love mojoPortal appeared first on nWebDesign.

Steve Jobs co-founded Apple who were the first to bring a commercially available computer into homes in the form of the Apple II way back when in the late 1980′s.

After a turbulent time at Apple that saw him thrown out of his own company he decided to buy The Graphics Group (later renamed Pixar) from Lucasfilm’s computer graphics division for the price of $10 million.

Pixar went on to produce Toy Story (1995), A Bug’s Life (1998), Toy Story 2 (1999), Monsters, Inc. (2001), Finding Nemo (2003), The Incredibles (2004),  before being sold to Disney in 2005 for $7.4 billion. Steve also took a 7% share in Disney, the biggest shareholder in the company. Pixar went on to produce Cars (2006), Ratatouille (2007), WALL-E (2008), Up (2009) and Toy Story 3 (2010)

Jobs had founded a computer company too after he was forced out at apple called NeXT that produced computers for higher education, and back in 1996, Apple bought the company and made Steve jobs CEO again. Many refer to his period as apples “Return to profitability”.

Jobs headed up projects that put Apple back in the game releasing the iMac, and introduced a game changing device in the form of the iPod that literally changed the way the world listened to music. He later went on to release iPhones and iPads, one device that i sadly read about his untimely death on this morning.

It’s hard to find a person in the western world who hasn’t been touched by job’s legacy, from his iPhone, iPod, iPad, macbooks, films and computers. His legendary film company touched the lives of many children who grew up on the films, and many will still see his legacy for many years to come.

RIP Steve Jobs. February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011

The post RIP Steve Jobs appeared first on nWebDesign.

Make sure their website lists all the particular skills your interested in.

A professional web design company should list a range of skills on their website, marketing, design, development. Picking a company that doesn’t list a particular skill on their website means that if they SAY they can do it, all they are doing is looking it up on Google and don’t have any experience in the field.

Make sure their contactable when they say they are.

Picking up the phone to just check they are open when they say they are is a really good idea. Nothings worse than having major website issues and trying to contact your developer to fix it during their opening hours and no one responds. It could cost your business thousands and just isn’t worth it.

Get a quote listing every aspect you expect in your web design.

Imagine you’re expecting to receive a custom logo design added into your website, but your developer doesn’t remember you asking for that, maybe you asked for it in passing on the phone? When it comes to final design and it isn’t there you’ll go back and say you did ask for that but wont have a conversation log as it was verbal. Without a signed off quote you wont get it without paying extra.

Cost.

Although an overall budget is a good idea, cost shouldn’t be a major factor. With web design you get what you pay for. If you want a basic site with a couple of pages think then yes cost should be a factor, but if you’re expecting a fully functional cost e-commerce store for under £1000, you wont get the tools your business needs to sell online successfully and will end up doing your brand name damage.

‘I hope this article will help you decide on us as your web developer. Our opening hours are 9-5 Monday to Friday (24/7 for emergencies), always contactable 020 3239 2445 and we always send quotes in email form listing everything we ever talked about for a price that we believe is cost effective.

The post How To Choose A Web Design Company appeared first on nWebDesign.

There has been a lot of changes around the site and were so proud of them we thought we would blog about it.

Homepage now lists specials and services in a rotator rather than portfolio.

Our services are now grouped on a “services” page. pick a skill your interested in, click it and read more details about it.

Our portfolio has been styled better so show some of the fantastic work we have done.

Ajax contact form and less forms all over the site.

The post Welcome To The New nWebDesign appeared first on nWebDesign.