The internet is always changing, as are the rules and standards of web design. What looked fantastic five years ago will probably look very outdated today, and we are frequently asked to redesign our clients' websites to help them stay current and impress the current generation of web users.
Howard G Davies recently asked us to refresh his website, which was beginning to look a little bit tired by 2015 standards. As usual, our design team rose to the challenge, combining a bold blue-and-white colour scheme with carefully-chosen images and a simple, eye-catching layout to ensure that the revitalised website would look bang up to date.
Howard G Davies & Associates are a team of safety consultants specialising in fitness equipment, which means that they inspect exercise machinery before it is distributed and sold. They also help gym owners to ensure that their premises are as safe as possible, and in the event of a fitness-related accident, Howard and his team can serve as expert witnesses during any proceedings that follow.
If you need some work done in your home, you may well be interested to hear about our latest project.
ATW Property Services carry out all kinds of gas, plumbing, and electrical work throughout the UK, and the brand new website that we've just completed for them makes it easier than ever to make use of these experienced professionals and their unsurpassed expertise.
www.atwpropertyservices.co.uk, which was entirely designed and developed by the Designer Websites team, is a responsive website with an attractive design and superbly straightforward navigation. The new site enables customers to learn all about ATW's assorted services and contact the company with ease, and the slick responsive design means that this can be done on mobile devices as well as on traditional desktop computers.
Here are a few examples of what ATW Property Services can do for you:
- Boiler servicing/replacement
- New bathroom fitting
- Electrical installation, inspection and repairs
- Central heating design and installation
Whether you're a homeowner, a landlord, or a property developer, we strongly recommend that you visit ATW's new website today and take a look at our latest work!
My Garment Factory Cardiff is a personalised clothing website targeted - as the name suggests - specifically at Cardiff and the surrounding area. The site was set up with the aim of cornering the custom clothing market in South Wales, and the MGF team are certainly doing well on this front; they already occupy some of the top Google results for terms like
printed clothing Cardiff and
embroidered clothing Cardiff.
With traffic pouring in and their website now established as a major competitor within its target market, MGF started thinking about how they might improve the service they offer. Wishing to maximise their website's conversion rate, they contacted us to ask if we could help them to make the site more mobile-friendly; they were receiving plenty of visits from smartphones and other mobile devices, and they wanted to ensure that they weren't letting this potentially valuable traffic go to waste.
So we set about creating a responsive design for My Garment Factory Cardiff, and we're pleased to announce that the new version of the website is now live. Being responsive means that the new design adapts to your screen size; for example, if you visit
www.mygarmentfactory.co.uk on a mobile phone browser, what you see will be slightly different to what a PC user would see on the same page. This allows us to optimise the website for different devices, making the personalisation process equally easy on desktop computers, smartphones, tablets, laptops, and all other devices!
With two state-of-the-art clinics and such famous names as Dr Christian Jessen on the staff, Doctorcall are undoubtedly among of the UK's very best private healthcare companies. While based in London and Manchester, Doctorcall do operate throughout the country, and they recently asked us to create a new website that was worthy of their nationwide renown.
To do this, we had to condense Doctorcall's long list of services - ranging from home visits to flu vaccinations, STI tests, and Botox injections - into something manageable and easy to navigate. In this respect, we believe that we have succeeded; the new site looks clean and professional, and its straightforward responsive design makes for a fantastic user experience, even on smaller screens.
The real challenge of this project was the website's multi-faceted nature; at first glance, Doctorcall.co.uk looks like a simplistic brochure website (albeit a relatively advanced one), driving users to make enquiries and appointments using a built-in booking form. However, the site also contains ecommerce elements, enabling users to purchase a variety of home testing kits, cosmetics, and other Doctorcall products online. Additionally, we had to make sure that the site would be able to support Doctorcall's occupational health services; flight attendants, offshore oil workers, and many other professionals are required to undergo a medical examination before commencing work, and so we added a series of more specific forms to the website for people who might need to book an occupational health check with Doctorcall.
The Doctorcall website is fully integrated with an advanced clinic appointment booking system called Qinec. This integration allows patients to seamlessly book appointments online with the chosen clinic and doctor.
Overall, we feel that the Designer Websites team overcame all challenges and produced a great-looking, highly functional website. As mentioned above, the new site is fully responsive and very easy to use - click here to visit it for yourself, and feel free to let us know what you think.
Last month, Google issued an ultimatum to webmasters the world over: make your websites mobile-friendly before April 21, 2015, or we'll stop showing you in our mobile search results. You can read the official announcement on Google's blog; search experts have nicknamed the promised algorithm change "the mobile SEO-pocalypse", and with that mid-April deadline now less than a month away, innumerable business owners are scrambling to make their sites look good on smaller screens so as to avoid losing their Google traffic.
Now, we're not here today to give you responsive design hints - the internet is already packed with articles explaining how to make your website 'mobile-friendly', and if you want our help, you can request a quotation here. However, we have noticed one potential issue that few others seem to pick up on, and it concerns your website's text.
You see, when web designers create a new design for an old website, they will often just copy and paste the old site's copy into the new design. This approach can create some problems for the end user, even if the information within the text is up-to-date. Here's a fictional example:
- Alice is an interior designer who owns her own business. She has a brochure website - let's call it aliceinteriors.com - that she uses to drive enquiries. Would-be customers fill in a contact form on the website, and Alice calls them up to discuss their requirements, quote prices, and so forth.
- Alice has heard about Google's upcoming algorithm change, and she wants to make her website mobile-friendly before April 21 to make sure she doesn't lose any business. She hires a local web design company to create a new responsive design and optimise the site for mobile users.
- A responsive website is effectively several different website designs in one, and aliceinteriors.com will now look different depending on whether Alice views it on a PC or on a smartphone. For instance, the site menu will likely be represented by the ubiquitous hamburger icon on smaller screens, and certain elements of each page may appear in different positions across different devices.
- While looking at the mobile version of her website, Alice notices an issue: the text on her homepage tells users to "Fill in the form on the right", but in the mobile view, Alice's all-important enquiry form is placed directly below the text in question.
This imagined scenario is just one example. Broadly speaking, any written reference to site layout ("Click on the link below", "Select an option from the menu above", etc.) becomes problematic - if not outright misleading - when placed within a responsive design. Unless you and your web designer can find a way to ensure that certain items remain static across all views, it may be better to remove any such phrases entirely and find other ways to draw attention to your website's key elements.
Either way, there's an important lesson to be learned here: when optimising your website for mobile users, be sure to read through your site's text in each different view to make sure that you aren't confusing people with smartphones!
