Exeter based Design Credo have created a new mini website to promote the superb office space available for rent at Renslade House, Exe Bridges in central Exeter.

Renslade House has recently benefitted from a refurbishment which is echoed by the new “Podium” brand design by Design Credo. This brand has already been applied to the recent brochure that we have designed for Renslade House. DesignCredo have also undertaken the location photography for this project.

Companies involved in the overall project include Urbina, Turner Locker and Alder King.

The website is a quick loading liquid design based on a Matthew James Taylor layout. This fluid structure is quick to load and is tried and tested on the troublesome IE6 browser. In addition code is structured to allow content important for SEO to appear towards the top of the page.

Search Engine Optimisation is of vital importance to any site. In a competitive market a site that can be found by search engines will ultimately reap dividends.

Communication is the word, yes communication. It all goes horribly wrong sometimes.

I am a slow speaker, I know I am but once many years ago this was really brought into focus when I was trying to teach a friend how to ride a drop handlebar bicycle. She fell off at the point that I had said “take your hands off the lower part of the handlebars” and never got to hear me say “slowly, one at a time and move them to the top of the bars”. She survived (we didn’t). The point was that the communication clearly failed.

Why Mining

Frequently I hear people say things like “I need a website” or “I need an A4 brochure”. Rather foolishly some might say, I usually engage in a bit of Why-Mining by asking “why?”

To aid communication the emphasis is on the why not the mining. Why-mining is an effective although slightly annoying tool. Quite simply people frequently tend to already hold many of the answers that they seek, they just need someone to stand in front of them and ask them “why?”

“I need a four page A4 brochure”
“Why?”
“Because my competitor has one”
“Why does it need to be A4?”
“Because thats what they always are?
“Why do you need four pages?”
“Dunno”

Eventually you will get to bedrock and even if this bedrock is “I don’t know”, that will be a good place to start.

The bottom line is that what we at DesignCredo are trying to find out is what is the customer’s story, the unique thing that they are trying to communicate to others.

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Exeter design company Design Credo is extremely pleased with the initial performance of the WordPress website that they have created on behalf of Topsham’s Nest interiors. The site has well and truly hit the ground running with large numbers of visitors already viewing the site on a daily basis.

The built-in capabilities of this WordPress site enable us to see that within days of going live the site is getting extremely good viewing figures. This is like having hundreds of extra people looking around the shop on a daily basis.

The website is based on the WordPress platform but has been designed to give a strong visual appeal. DesignCredo have undertaken photography for Nest Interiors to strengthen their existing stock of images. The site aims to capture and convey the rich visual appeal of the Nest Interiors shop.

Great SEO results

A great website is of little value unless it can be found. Of course searching on the company’s name puts it top but more relevant search strings such as ‘new + england + style + furniture + devon’ perform extremely well, less than a week from the site being live. Further to this simple search strings such as “Lexington + Devon” provide first page Google results with more detailed searches such as “Lexington + Chesapeake + Cushion” giving a position 1 on a worldwide Google search.

This is extremely important for a company selling quality brand items such as those from Lexington. Putting it simply Nest interiors although based in Topsham near Exeter in the South-West of England are able to create national and international interest.

Add to this the inclusion of PubSubHubbub technology to ensure almost immediate submission of website developments to Google and we have a very search engine friendly site.

However, this is just the start. Design Credo will use various collectable data to monitor where site-traffic comes from and will continue to develop content that will create a good hit with Google searches.

This is a development of the reply that I made the other day about getting a good Google response to your blog.

Search Engine Marketing is a must if you are to going to get people to view any website. Nowadays everyone seems to be an SEO specialist, at least they do in Exeter and Devon, I imagine it is the same throughout he UK.

I am more aware of the abilities of WordPress than other blogging platforms so this is what I will use as my reference point. I have to say that I am totally enamoured with WordPress, I think it is great, but first a bit of general knowledge.

WordPress comes in two distinct flavours

1. .com Most people start with a free WordPress blog which you can start straight away and I would recommend you to go and sign up. If you blog a for a while and chose to migrate to self-hosted this can be easily done.
2. .org If you have access to hosting then self-hosted blogs open up a world of possibilities. You will need hosting with a database which is necessary to store all of the posts, images, comments and information about the site. My hosting supplier now throws one in with even the starter hosting package. You don’t really need to understand about databases (MySQL) but it can be quite interesting looking around, seeing how all of the data and information is organised.

WordPress can be thought of as a modular entity.

1. Core
   The site itself, everything that is needed to make it work. This includes a user friendly interface that will allow you to update the site without knowing about web deign.
2. Themes
   There are a huge number of available themes that make the basic WP blog look different (1 column, 2 column, colours styling etc.)
3. Plugins
   These add to the functionality of the blog, they make it do more things, (display images in galleries, add contact forms, etc. )

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A few little design helpers here, the links will appear in my blogroll in the sidebar. These are fun but useful tools to make web design easier.

Color Scheme Designer

A neat website that lets you visualise potential colour schemes to a set of parameters; mono, triad, compliment, etc.

A simple interface, this site is probably quite useful for testing the ground with new customers.

Typetester

Again a really simple interface that will let you visualise how text will look on screen. A full range of settings (font, leading, line-spacing etc) makes this an incredibly useful little tool.

Web-Developers Handbook

Not as visually appealing as the previous two links but a great resource all the same.

Use it to drill down to required information or just browse through it over a coffee.

Serendipity is the effect by which one accidentally stumbles upon something fortunate, especially while looking for something entirely unrelated.

In my last post we looked at some basic issues to do with improving Search Engine Rankings or SEO. I suggested that there was scope for to make marked improvements in their rankings. So lets look at an example a simple startup site.

Serendipity Ilfracombe

Holiday accommodation is a deeply competitive market, particularly here in the South-West. Resorts have their ups and downs, Ilfracombe would appear to be on the up. However there are an awful number of competitors in this market.

People are far from rational in their everyday behaviour. Some have neat tidy minds but for many of us it is a bit of a sprawl. Memory is optional and to be honest getting the shopping done will probably knock that important phone number out of the ‘things to remember’ file. Anyhow we no longer remember phone numbers do we? I can remember the phone number of the house I lived in when I was a teenager (Waddington 688) but I don’t know the land-line that I pay for now, I don’t really use it. People may remember a name, a place, they may know what to look for and although they may not know the full ins and outs of Boolean searches. The way that many people use search engines borders on the bizarre, often people have found a way that works and have never ventured towards improvement.

So, Serendipity, Ilfracombe. If you Google those two words as I just have you see my customer’s site at the top of the page. This is a start. The website has been up for a relatively short period of time (a couple of months), it is early days yet. Of course, unlike Starbucks people won’t necessarily know that Serendipity exists, this isn’t enough. However some might, or they may tell others about the accommodation and its name. It is easy to remember this one bit of info and to access the website from this simple search

“Tariff, Holiday, Ilfracombe” results in a position two result with “Booking, Holiday, Ilfracombe” giving a still respectable position 11. “Well, Priced, Holiday, Accommodation, Ilfracombe” gives a P2. Interestingly (for me at least) “well, priced, holiday, devon” gives a similarly high ranking (P2) as indeed does “well, priced, holiday, south-west”.

We are now getting into the realm of useful results. We can see that the Google results will work for those with a brand awareness and those who have never even heard of the resort.

Although a small starter site it was designed with search engines in mind. Headings, titles and text all serve a purpose. It is still early days but, we seem off to a good start.

You can download a PDF brochure for Serendipity here.