Volute Blog

Website in a week: the task

Design and build a website in a week. From Scratch. Who's crazy idea was that? Oh, mine, I remember now!

Not that we recommend it but we thought that we would see what we could do in creating a fully functioning website in under a week.

Admittedly it wouldn't have a whole lot of content but it would be a start and have the ability to be expanded on later. We'll do our best to document it in our blog and let you know how we proceed. We'll keep you posted on Twitter feed @VoluteWebDesign and let you know how we get on.

And in case you are wondering, we are designing the site for a new product we are launching called Grow Your Own Website - a website service for new and starter businesses that allows them to have professionally designed, fully-updatable websites at an affordable price.

Website in a week: the preparation

Whilst we are designing a website in a week it's fair to say that the business proposal itself has been reasonably well developed.

Our concept for growyourownwebsite.co.uk was to allow new and small businesses to have a website that they can update themselves and that can grow bigger as their business develops.

Brand

We worked with Touch Design to develop the GYOW brand, finally coming up with a flower device in Volute corporate colours sat on an unfeasibly elongated stalk to indicate the growth potential of the website.

GYOW-logo-short

 

Domain

We had previously purchased the growyourownwebsite.co.uk domain (along with a couple of others which didn't quite make the cut when we had our concept brainstorming).

Twitter

We also set up a Twitter ID @GrowYourOwnWeb so we communicate on this popular social media channel. The Twitter limitation of 15 characters on the username also meant that we had to purchase the domains growyourownweb.com and growyourownweb.co.uk to protect our position. Don't forget to cover your position on Twitter as it is really important.

Initial websites

We had launch customers who had agreed to sign up to our service before it was formally launched. We had been working with them on helping us to refine our final offer as well as creating their websites and developing a variety of designs for future customers. We had also been developing a range of support materials, particularly help videos.

Tomorrow we'll tell you about our first full day's work - stay tuned.

Using title tags to get better search engine results

What's in a title?

 
Sir Richard Branson, Dame Ellen MacArthur, Lord Norman Foster - all have titles which show recognition for what they have achieved in their chosen fields of business, sport and architecture.
 
Titles are important on the web, too. Search engines use these as a key way to determine what a web page is all about. So if it matters to the likes of Google and Bing, it should matter to you when you are making changes to your website.
 
Fortunately, it isn't quite as daunting for those of you using our easy-to-manage content managed web sites as they will automatically generate the title tag based on the name of the new article that you have created. So our main top tip is to name your article appropriately.
 
Say that you have a page about your work as designers in the food industry. Our clients, Williams Architects named their page "Williams-Architects: food industry" Resulting in a top rank on Google, Yahoo! and Bing against the term "food industry architects."
 
If you what to do this on your CMS driven web site then:
 
  • Accurately describe the page contents - avoid using titles that have no relation to the content on the page
  • Create unique titles for each page - this way, search engines can use your title tags to determine how the page is distinct from others on your website.
  • Titles should be brief and informative - don't make them overlong or stuffed with unnecessary keywords.
 
Try making similar changes to your pages, and see if you can start to have an effect on how well your site starts to rank in search engines.

Volute limited

58 Seymour Road
West Bridgford
Nottingham
Nottinghamshire
NG2 5EF

0115 914 5839

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company no: 3865805

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