Wordpress SEO Expert

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New site: Essex Wedding Photographers

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New site: Essex Wedding Photographers Wordpress SEO ExpertEvery now and then I launch a new site and I really am just in love with it. This is such a project!

David Burnett from Image Control Photography wanted an update for his site, which was based on a very well-known (but it turns out not cross-browser compatible) WordPress theme. He works in the hotly contested wedding photography market, and needed to stand out from the crowd.

I made one myself that is a lot more dependable than the one he bought off-the-shelf.

Obviously, I’m more of a red and black person and the colour scheme might not be to my personal tastes—but everything is well laid out, easy to read, fully responsive (even on Windows Mobile IE) and has a good mix of high quality photography with text.

I’m going to have a glass of wine to celebrate this one.

imagecontrolphotography.co.uk

PS, Dave, my one confession is for some reason, the way I type doesn’t allow me to ever spell “photography” correctly. So if you find any references in the site to “photogrpahy”, that’s entirely my fault.

Personal site, responsive design

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Every now and then a technology comes along that really gets me excited, and responsive design is just such a thing!

It really started to take hold in 2012, and by now is an absolute must for your website. Basically it means regardless of what sort of device your site is being seen on; a tablet, phone, laptop or desktop, it looks great. The text is readable, even the layout adjusts (or responds, see how that works!?) to suit the display.

I just created this site today (so the client still needs to populate the content a fair bit), but you can see from the picture above it looks just as nice on mobile as a full screen.

I love web design.

How I work #2

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Last year I wrote about my penchant for designing everything from logos to databases and scripts on the back of envelopes.

My final sentence read, “How do you work? Scribbles? Itemised lists? Walls of Post-it notes?”

Well, the last item in that list isn’t just plucked from the top of my head—I love walls of post-it notes.

Often I’m asked to take a look at my clients’ site structure, to see if their menu is really working from a user experience perspective.

Below you can see one I worked on this morning, both the before and after shot. As it was, almost all their pages came under one top level heading, which meant most of their visitors’ interactions were going to be done under one sub-heading, while the rest of the menu was underused.

By sticking some Post-it notes on my wall I could easily rearrange it all so information is more evenly distributed, while also merging a couple of the original top level items so the content of each menu is obvious at a glance.

But this case-study aside, I’m always interested to see how people (including myself) best organise and plan in the physical world, before transferring that information to the digital.

How to spot good after-sale customer care

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This article is alternatively titled: Will you still love me, tomorrow?

I had considered something much more risqué to do with trying before you buy, but it seemed a bit crass in the context I intended it.

Whenever you buy something online, you have options. Product choices, price, and most of all, who to buy from. For every product there are several dozen people queuing up to sell it to you.

And the most successful online business are unsurprisingly excellent at selling.

But how can you tell who is going to offer you good after sale care? And the the case of products you buy to interact with online (i.e., online systems that you’ll log into to manage) how can you spot the people who care about you after you’ve parted with your cash, from those who just want to keep on selling?

I’ll start by putting this out there–for all sorts of reason, GoDaddy are not a company I recommend. In fact I do my best to warn people off them.

And this is a prime example of why. Below you’ll see a screenshot of the GoDaddy homepage. I’ve taken the liberty of highlighting in red, any area of the screen which is wholly, and unquestionably (I went easy on them frankly) devoted to selling.

Now to be fair their is a prominent support line number which is likely useful to both new customers, and exisiting ones.

But the only section devoted to existing customers is that small, plain looking “Log In to My Account” button on the top left. Now for sure a lot of business run this way, they are predominantly sales on the first page, and then the bulk of their information (and interactive systems) for clients is behind a password.

But I’d expect to see an obvious login box, with some graphic element drawing out attention to it. Not something so small my daughter’s Sea Monkeys could probably ride it like a tiny train.

GoDaddy’s after-sale support is well known to be, frankly, appalling. Unless you’re buying more products from them in which case they’d love to help you, yes sir, of course ma’am, have a nice day!

And you know what? I can see that right there, from their homepage. They haven’t given screen real estate to existing customers except in the most perfunctory, absolutely necessary way.

It’s just an example, albeit a solid one. Before you sign up for an online service (knowing you can very rarely try before you buy), have a look at how much they value their customers, by looking for screen space they’ve devoted to them.

 

10 Youtube URL tricks worth knowing

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So often when I’m embedding a Youtube clip on a website for a client, I’m asked to customise it somehow. Now there are a variety of ways this can be done, from removing the “related videos” at the end (which I always do for schools, at the American School in London we must have done this a hundred times a month!) to overlaying images on top of the video entirely, (see danielwagner.com for an example).

But like so many things online, as long as you know the basics yourself, there’s a lot you can do with those.

Just adding little bits of code to the Youtube URL for example can have a big effect.

Example:

4. Hide the search box

The search box appears when you hover over an embedded video. To hide the search box add ‘&showsearch=0′ to the embed url.

Here’s a great list of 10 tricks worth knowing.

The five pillars for your online community success

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I work with my clients on what I call the Five Pillars, which all lead to the success of their online community.

People tend to look at most of these elements in a microcosm. “How’s your SEO?”, “Are you making the most of social networking?”.

Seeing these as separate hinders your efforts to build and strengthen your online community, which you need to care about because those are the people who will pay for your products and services.

My five pillars are:

  • Core messages
  • SEO
  • Community
  • Social Networking
  • User experience

There is a great deal of crossover between them, as there should be when you’re looking at the big picture rather than focusing on single points.

Over the next few weeks I’m going to describe each one in brief, and in the interests of pith I’ll also do a tweetinar soon, summing the whole thing up in five tweets. That’s going to be a challenge.

Fortunately, I love a good challenge.

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