Website design

How Bluebird Care smash it at SEO

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Marketing organised bluebird care seo 3

Bluebird Care ranks highly for competitive keyword terms around home care. They have achieved this by implementing a comprehensive digital strategy. This includes technical optimisation and user experience. They’ve improved content, local search results and integrated marketing. Here’s how they ‘smash it’ at SEO.  User-centric website design This was not an overnight change. Bluebird Care … Read more

Is your website driving clients away? 

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Marketing Organised Is your website driving clients away?

Fixing slow load times and poor mobile experience will dramatically increase the number of website visitors who stay on your website and that could potentially turn into clients.  40% of users abandon a website if it loads in more than three seconds (BigCommerce) and slow speed can slash conversion rates by up to 80% (AfterPay). … Read more

Home care marketing 

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Home Care Marketing

The home care market in the UK is highly competitive. And in highly competitive markets, marketing has to be stronger to increase prospective client trust and drive growth. That’s the primary goal of home care marketing.  There are an estimated 12,500 registered providers and the majority of these are in England (Policy Bee). Thousands of … Read more

How to get your business seen by more potential customers

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How to get your business seen by potential customers

Today’s marketplace is massively competitive. When I first started working for marketing agencies it was ‘easy’ to get a website in 1st place on Google and to build a community on social media platforms that hadn’t yet cottoned on to monetisation of creator content.  In 2025, there are more businesses to compete against and on … Read more

Page speed insights

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I’ve done two SEO reports within the last couple of months for businesses in two different industries and both of them had serious page load issues. This can have a serious knock on effect for both SEO and engagement or conversion. Optimise web images Site 1, a luxury travel brand, had used big glossy images … Read more

Design collaboration with business stakeholders

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I’m interested to read the UX professionals survey by NN Group as they advocate the use of round tables with the business owner to review the initial designs and pick and choose the best of each design. In my experience, this doesn’t result in a cohesive whole. Many of the designers I have worked with … Read more

No one is signing up to my email newsletters

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Let’s overlook the obvious first check to make, which is how many people are visiting that page, and take a quick look at another issue that might be the cause. I tried to sign up this morning to a good cause – it had quite an unusual spam check, I thought – the email newsletter … Read more

Can’t pay, they’ve taken the ability to make online payments away!

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In response to security concerns of SSL 3.0 vulnerability to Poodle attack, Sagepay are upgrading their system and subsequently have announced they won’t be supporting Internet Explorer 8 and older from the 2nd December. Does this really matter when these users make up less than 5% of the global users in 2015? Biggest payment processing … Read more

Know your panda from your penguin?

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I was asked recently to explain the difference between these two algorithm changes made by Google in 2011 and 2012 respectively. Panda, named after a Google engineer, was designed to root out real content. It was no longer enough to stuff a bunch of keywords onto a page to achieve page one ranking. Google got … Read more

The perfect product page

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I’m a fan of simple layouts and one of my constant gripes is product pages on eCommerce websites. I just don’t understand why shop owners feel the need to cram endless pieces of twaddle onto their product pages. I want a price and a big buy now button at the very top of the page. … Read more

What’s wrong with my website image?

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There’s a problem with my website – this image isn’t showing. My images don’t look right, what’s wrong? I have spent a great deal of time over the years troubleshooting image uploads on websites. Sometimes, the issue is caused by the file name; the file has been uploaded with a space so it has been … Read more

Websites work harder in 2015

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We’re in the run up to the Christmas shut-down and project planning has been done to the year end, so I have been reflecting on the work that has been completed or will be completed this year. Website basics When I first started in the business of website design, business owners would come to me … Read more

We want Twitter/ Facebook/ Google+/ Instagram/ Pinterest/ Linkedin…

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“We want social on our site”, I get told. My first question is why? Does your target market hangout on Google? Is Facebook suitable for your B2B business? What are you hoping to gain from being on these platforms – sales, brand recognition, customer support? What type of social works on your website? I can … Read more

Copywriting woes

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A friend of mine is a freelance copywriter and she has just taken part in a survey of UK copywriters, most of whom were grumbling about the state of the industry. It seems that a copywriter suffers from the same problem that a graphic designer does, the customer often thinks they know better than the … Read more

Good website design doesn’t make me think

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Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug was a great read when I first read it over ten years ago now and so I am delighted to find that he has written a follow up revised version since (2014). I’ll admit, a lot of what Steve talks about I think of as common sense – in fact the strapline for the book is “A common sense approach to web usability” but I am surprised at how many people, good web designers among them, don’t take a logical approach to a website layout.

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