Fresh from the farm
To celebrate the new year we’ve treated ourselves to a brand new website. And we’ve just finished putting the finishing touches on it!
You’ll recognise many similarities, but we’ve also made some significant improvements to the design, performance, and search engine optimisation.
Here are just a few of the improvements we’ve made:
Custom template design
Unlike many companies out there who claim to offer ‘web design’ as a service, we actually designed and built our website template with our own hands. Not an off-the-shelf template, and not outsourced to another company who charge peanuts for second-rate code which we can then pass off as our own work.
We don’t always build custom designs, because not all our clients have the budget or the requirements. Regardless, we believe our own work needs to show us at our best!
Responsive design
Our old site used mobile-friendly responsive design, but our new site presented an opportunity to design with mobile-first strategy. That means we built the site for mobiles first, and then added in styling and layout for larger screens on top.
This means there is less work to do for underpowered devices that are running on slower Internet connections. It also means less clutter on smaller screens, making the site easier to navigate. The result is something that’s easy to use whilst on the move — and easier to poke at with your fingers!
Website performance
There’s no point building a beautiful website if visitors get bored with waiting and end up clicking the back arrow before your site loads. We’ve always built fast websites, but we squeezed really hard to get as much performance as possible out of our new site.
We use UK-based hosting which scales dynamically to the number of visitors on your site, so that a sudden traffic spike won’t leave our site running at a snail’s pace. We also use CloudFlare to further optimise the delivery of our site content, no matter where in the world you are visiting from.
But don’t just take our word for it, see what Pingdom has to say about our website speed.
Search Engine Optimisation
Every website needs to be built with SEO in mind right from the start. So we put our money where our mouth was and made sure our new site uses the latest technical SEO techniques.
The most notable improvements include building our new bespoke theme from the ground-up using HTML5 and semantic markup. Both of these technologies help search engines to understand the content on this site and context in which it appears.
Some of the other tweaks we’ve baked in include Facebook OpenGraph and Twitter card integration, in response to the increasingly important role that social media is now playing in SEO.
We hope you like!
Please do let us know what you like and dislike about our new site. We understand that great web design is user-centred so it really is down to the people using the site to decide what works for them and what doesn’t.
We’ve worked hard to make our website accessible to as many people as possible, regardless of ability. To make continuous improvements we rely upon visitor feedback, so if you feel we can improve the standard of website accessibility in any way please let us know.
Now, how can we help you?
Would you like learn more about how we could help you revamp your website or build an entirely new site from scratch? Just give us a shout and we’ll get the kettle on.
