Well, we’re nearly at the end of January and I have been really busy so far this year! Before Christmas I spent most of my time producing a town guide, Focus on Faringdon, but I have also been building websites for a wide range of clients.
Gerard at Profega already had a website but wanted to give it a fresh new look and move it to a platform that would perform well and was easy to access and update. WordPress was the obvious choice! He had already had a banner designed, so I chose a layout and colour scheme that worked well with the banner. Gerard’s existing site was performing very well in Google because he had worked hard on his SEO and he was keen to remain highly ranked, so I had to do some tweaks to make that happen – for example, the existing pages all ended with .html but WordPress doesn’t affix that to page links automatically. After some searching around I found a plugin that did exactly what I wanted, and I’m pleased to report that the new site not only looks fab but is still ranking very highly on Google!
Natasha has just started her own business, offering bookkeeping services in Oxfordshire, so when she came to me for a website it was natural to buy the domain name oxfordshirebookkeepingservices.co.uk! While the website is based on a theme, I tweaked the colours to make it fit in with Natasha’s colour scheme, and the finished site looks clean and professional. It’s already performing well in Google despite only being live a week or so. As well as the web design and hosting, Natasha is also taking advantage of the straightforward web-based email service that comes with the package.
This month I was approached by a fell0w 4Networker who wanted a new website for his wife’s business, Finishing Touches. Akido is from Japan and she runs workshops in Japanese gift-wrapping in Kent. She had a site, a free GoogleSites one, but wanted something that looked much more professional but was just as easy to use. The sticking point here was the choice of theme – I made several suggestions but none were quite right, so I started building the site with a temporary theme, something very simple and plain but also elegant. To my surprise, Akido liked it so much that she decided to keep it permanently!
Finally, I have just made live a site that was bought as a Christmas present! I met Denise on an SEO training course I recently attended and she asked me to build a site for her boyfriend, who is an electrician, trading as Bristol Sparks. They already had a domain name but had experienced problems with their previous web designer and had lost control of the website, though they had managed to get the domain name back. Denise found a premium theme she really liked and we used photos from istock.com to create the slideshow effect. This was quite a big learning curve for me because the theme wasn’t as straightforward to change as it looked, and I had to do quite a lot of delving into the CSS coding. I’m really pleased with the finished site, and I hope Denise and her boyfriend are too!
These are just some of the sites I have been building recently … if you would like a free consultation for your website, or any advice on WordPress, just drop me a line!
