If you’d like to turn your business website into a regular source of business enquiries or want to improve your SEO rankings please get in touch.

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1. Booking for August
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Booking for January 2012
Thrive Digital - Creative Web Design and Digital Marketing

They are based in Fordingbridge, Hampshire, they have over 50 employees & over 20 years experience in Civil engineering construction.

Recently Langleys have been involved in some notable projects like the Weymouth Relief Road and the new Twin Sails Bridge in Poole.

The brief

As Langleys had no existing website, the project was an exciting opportunity as a ‘from scratch’ exercise.

We wanted to build a website that was informative and search engine friendly to drive organic traffic. We needed to demonstrate Langley’s skills and experience and decided that the easiest way to do this was on a project basis.

Due to the nature of the business, the site was designed to remain unchanged largely, so we chose to code it using static html. Having said that, the design uses a modular style that means adding future projects is simple and time-effective.

The website design

The website design features a classic and intuitive tabbed navigation, with the tabs grouped and coloured in logical sets.

It’s fair to say, that groundworks per se aren’t the most inspiring subject matter visually, but we decided to use a flash-based homepage slider and a selection of excellent photography that collectively convey a real sense of scale and diversity.

The site’s main content zones were designed in a modular format, so that they could be added to and extended easily. Beyond this, the design relates extremely well to Langleys business; functional, unfussy but with keen attention to detail.

Screenshot of the new Langley Civil Engineering Website Design

The rook

The website design also features the quirky Langleys mascot. Initially it was difficult to find an inobtrusive way to fit  the rook character into the website design.

However, by adding him below the fold to the footer section, and giving him a cartoon strip feature on the contact page, we feel we managed this without letting him dominate or compromise the core design.

If anything he lends a sense of personality that’s unusual on a business website.

Screenshot of the new Langley Civil Engineering website Contact page

You can see the results above but better still, visit the new website to see for yourself www.langleyceltd.co.uk

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Case Study – Langley Civil Engineering – Website Design
Thrive Digital - Creative Web Design and Digital Marketing

It’s a bugger of a question as there really are no simple answers… There are so many individual factors it would take a month of Sundays just to list them. And then another couple of equally Sabbath-rich lunar phases to describe them.

Then, this morning I came across this extremely compelling yet succinct article by fellow beardy Matt Legend Gemmell (yes that is his  real middle name apparently…). He does a rather good job of laying out some basic principles:  SEO for non-dicks.  Read it.

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Good SEO is a by-product of not being a dick
Thrive Digital - Creative Web Design and Digital Marketing

Lust-Her, sell a wide range of intimate products, aimed predominantly at a sophisticated female market. The brand is headed by the ‘just slightly’ myserious persona of Lady Lust-Her who will relate products using sensual stories and anecdotes.

The new site is due to Launch mid-November so while that’s being completed, we’ve launched a new holding page, which hints at some of the styling, and features a simple coutdown timer and a quick sign-up form ready for launch.

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Launching Soon: www.lust-her.co.uk
Thrive Digital - Creative Web Design and Digital Marketing

The new results include what it considers to be important or helpful sub-sections under the main result. These are called Sitelinks, and you can see these in action by visiting Google, and searching for google for example.

Below you can see an example of this in action for a search for Premium Marquees, where I’ve highlighted the new sitelinks in the blue area. (Click the image for a bigger view.)

Pros and Cons

This is on the whole a very good thing. It will help searchers to quickly get to the most relevant information within a site without navigating through the homepage

There are perhaps equally some disadvantages.

For example, as a site owner you will need to consider if  your visitors will receive your key messages,  when they arrive directly at a sub-page rather than navigating  to your content through your homepage.

Equally, the sitelinks can be titled using the physical links pointing to them and not necessarily the page title. This means, you cannot always rely on the page title to dictate the sitelink title, which in turn means we are all going to have to pay even greater attention to meta descriptions (which provide the snippet info), and link titles.

These sitelinks do change based on the search terms specified however, and occasionally I’ve seen them change when the search results page is merely refreshed.

Importantly, you’ll notice from from time to time that Google will pick up odd pages that you or I probably wouldn’t count as a top-level links.  I’ve even seen examples of xml feeds, and assorted framed content that you wouldn’t use as standalone pages being referenced as sitelinks.

What can we do to influence these results?

Webmasters or SEO agents cannot tell Google directly which sitelinks to use, however we can tell Google if we think it’s picked a sitelink that’s not correct or relevant using their Webmaster tools.

So, if your site has been added and verified using Google’s Webmaster Tools, you can use the Sitelinks settings to demote up to 100 URLs. Demotions are effective for 90 days from your most recent visit to the page.

Also, review your search results and pay attention to different variations of your search term as they produce different sitelink results, for example.

Note: If you struggle to find your sitelink results, it’s probably because Google isn’t certain that your site is the right result. You’ll need to use trial and error to narrow it down to find a search term that actually produces the correct result. Try the following suggestions for a .co.uk website in the UK:

• business name
• business name county
• business name uk
• businesssnameuk
• yourdomain.co.uk
• www.yourdomain.co.uk
• http://www.yourdomain.co.uk

(Once you’ve found all the variations, don’t forget to refresh a couple of times too).

Finally, check all your meta descriptions and site’s internal links.  Make sure you use anchor text and alt text that’s informative and compact, and make sure you avoid repetition.

For more information, read Google’s advice on the New Google Sitelinks.

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Google Expands Sitelinks
Thrive Digital - Creative Web Design and Digital Marketing

The old website

Whilst the first website was reasonably attractive, it contained limited content and consequently offered little information for visitors, and very poor results in terms of placement on search engines. Here’s how the site used to look:

Screenshot of the Adapt Landscapes original website design

The action plan

Adapt asked us to help, and we recommended the following actions:

• build a new website which reflected the levels of professionalism present in their own work
• design the website so that they could showcase their services most effectively
• create high quality informative content that offered value to visitors
• consequently give site visitors a better user experience and easy access to information
• improve SEO through the new website’s structure and cataloguing of content
• improve organic search engine ranking (SEO) by creating an effective Google Places listing

The new website

Using WordPress as the framework, we designed a new website that was both visually appealing and easy to navigate.

WordPress is a fantastic online publishing tool that has endless third-party plugins. It was the perfect framework for Adapt, as it allows them to manage their content themselves. They can use it to regularly publish new case studies on completed projects and add images of work and services provided in a cost-effective way.

You can see the results below, but better still, visit the new website to see for yourself; www.adaptlandscapes.co.uk

Screenshot of the new Adapt Landscapes Website Design

Get in touch or follow us

We’ll be writing more case studies on our projects over the coming months, so if you’d like to read these, why not bookmark us, follow us on Twitter, subscribe to our RSS feed, or use the Share This widget below for other options.

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Case Study – Adapt Landscapes – Website Design
Thrive Digital - Creative Web Design and Digital Marketing

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Booking for August
Thrive Digital - Creative Web Design and Digital Marketing

You can see this year’s copy of the Southampton edition on top of last years. It’s about 60% smaller in every dimension, so height, width and depth.

Frankly my biggest suprise was that it hadn’t happened earlier! Thanks to the volume of people using search engines these days,  facing a choice, businesses are clearly choosing to spend their budget on digital marketing .

A true sign of the times.

It’s a shame in a way – their advertising used to be rather good.

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Search Engines Shrink Yellow Pages
Thrive Digital - Creative Web Design and Digital Marketing

They wanted an ecommerce website design that could attract customers to their products, which had a style and user experience that was synonymous with the quality and style of the products they offer.

We looked at a number of solutions on their behalf, and found an incredibly wide range of eCommerce systems to choose from, but we found few as comprehensive and well thought out as Magento.

After initally considering creating a custom Magento build using their Community Edition software, we decided to build the new Manjo website on Magento’s new ‘Go’ platform. Unlike an unsupported Community build, Magento Go is a hosted, managed offering that delivered everything Manjo required, and had the bonus of being backed up by top notch Magento support staff.

What was more, we found Magento Go was split into 4 tiered plans, which will suit pretty much all businesses, whether they have 1 virtual product or warehouses containing thousands. For Manjo, we selected the most appropriate plan to begin, and helped them to benefit from what Magento call their $1 Million Dollar eCommerce Stimulus Fund.  Essentially this represents a monthly saving of $15 for the first 12 months.

Magento Go does have a couple of downsides compared to a custom install, as it’s far more restrictive when it comes to extensions and add-ons. There are a few standard themes to choose from, but you can’t buy and add commercially developed themes, so there’s quite a bit of work involved initally to develop the design to suit the brand. Also, the default system configuration is appropriate for the US, so needed a significant reworking so that it was suitable for a UK audience.

Having said that the pluses far outweighed the negatives. We could make a very, very long list of those here, but in the interests of keeping it simple, we won’t. The bottom line is that the fantastic Magento functionality means that Manjo’s ecommerce website customers will get an absolutely superb customer experience that will certainly help with both conversions and repeat business.

To find out more visit the Manjo website.

Click here to find out more about Magento Go.

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Case Study – Manjo – eCommerce Website Design
Thrive Digital - Creative Web Design and Digital Marketing

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Booking for July
Thrive Digital - Creative Web Design and Digital Marketing