Website Design Aberystwyth, Wales

Pixelwave Web Design have just finished producing a Welsh version of a local artists website.

Clare Maynard, a landscape and abstract artist for whom Pixelwave Web Design have carried out various website maintenance task recently apporached me asking if I could produce a Welsh version of her website. She popped into my office on Monday with the necessary translations.

In the past, updates to her website took longer than they should as various bits of code that were common to each of her 100+ web-pages were repeated on each page rather than being in a separate file that was shared (via a SSI) adding another 100+ Welsh language pages would have exasperated this situation, so before building the Welsh pages I restructured her website to make future updates less time consuming and therefore less costly.

This restructuring also made the building of the Welsh pages much quicker, so they are already uploaded and live on her website.

Pixelwave Web Design has just started work on setting up a website for a Northampton based Wine Appreciation Group (WAGS).
 
They have been going for 40 years and consist of 12 active members which change annually. They meet on the third Friday of every month at a members house where they taste and rate various wines… And no doubt get a little tipsy!
 
Their new website will be based on a WordPress installation giving them full control of the content of the website. This will allow them to enter the results from their meetings each month and add any photos or images they may wish to publish. Eventually, the site may incorporate a database of the wines they have tasted along with their reviews and scores for each wine.
 
WAGS is non-profit making so their budget for this website is limited. I am therefore keeping things simple to start with.
 
I hope to have a working version of the website up and running by the new year.

I’m currently working on some Search Engine Optimisation and website promotion for Erozone, a Shropshire based adult exotic lingerie and sex toys shop. I shall be making a few minor changes on their website to improve the keyword density based on the results of a keyword analysis and will also be working on generating inbound links from other related but non-competing websites.

I’m also about to start similar work for a local company offering information about and the ability to buy investment properties in Bulgaria.

The modern internet environment is highly competitive and the basics of a well designed website with regularly updated relevant content are often not enough to compete for high search engine rankings within the major search engines. A certain amount of offsite promotion is also needed. This can be achieved in many ways. As part of my work for these clients I shall be explaining these techniques to my clients and encouraging them to do them. I can of course do much of it for them, but my clients know their particular businesses better than I do so I always encourage them to get involved as much as they can. By working together we will increase traffic to their websites and give them a greater understanding of the working os search engines allowing them to optimise any new content they add to their sites.

Yesterday I received an emergency e-mail from Australian based webmaster and journalist Gareth Powell. He and a friend had been trying to do some work on one of his websites (http://www.bloggeroff.com) and had broken the functionality and layout of the site rendering it unusable. They needed some help to sort it out, so in their words:

So we have called up the heavy artillery and gone to Alan Cole who runs Pixelwave Web Design on the coast of Wales

I’m not 100% sure what they had done to the website, but I got stuck into it as a matter of urgency and now have everything back up and running as it should be. I have also altered a number of things on the site so that it should be easier to use for its visitors, better optimised for search engine robots and easier to maintain for Gareth. It will probably need a few more tweaks over the next few days/weeks as Gareth gets back into the swing of using it, but at least it is up and running again now, which is a huge improvement from four hours ago.

Pixelwave Web Design is just about to start work on a new website for a UK farmstead. The website is intended to present the history of the farm, highlight the current state of affairs and encourage discussion about the future of the farm which currently requires a significant re-think in order to make it sustainable. This may involve additional houses and people living on site, new water supply, woodland management, growing biomass, combined heat and power plant, live-work units, solar and wind power, livestock farming, tourism, equestrian, conference and study centre etc etc etc.

As the content of the site will need updating regularly as new ideas and projects come along, the website will be based around a simple Content Management System allowing my clients to easily update the website as and when they wish without any website design knowledge.

I shall be working on this project over the next few weeks and it will no doubt have some extra features that I’ve yet to think about by the time it is finished. As always it is exciting to be starting a new project and I’m looking forward to getting stuck into it and making progress.

Following on from the dynamic banners I built for the promotion of Fairies World, I have been developing the idea by making the banners available as a single dynamically generated image which allows them to be inserted into websites such as MySpace and into signature files within forums and bulletin boards. This makes it easier for people to use the banners and therefore hopefully means that they will be used on a wider variety of websites, which in turn should increase traffic to Fairies World.

In a similar fashion I have built a ‘statsbar sticker’ for the extreme sports diary section of the Forces-of-Nature website. The diaries allow members to record their windsurfing, surfing, kitesurfing and other sports sessions and share them with others. The ‘statsbar sticker’ displays the number of sessions they have had so far this month, this year and in total and also displays their ‘Stoke Factor’. The sticker itself allows them to show off their stats on their own personal websites and within their signature files of forum posts. Wherever they place it, it is updated automatically as soon as they update their diaries on the forces-of-nature website.

As well as allowing members to display their stats, it also of course promotes Forces-of-Nature at the same time.

Pixelwave Design has just started work on an exciting new website design project for a UK based running shop.

The website will be a fully featured online eCommerce system with a comprehensive catalogue of products arranged into various categories. This will allow visitors to the website to easily browse through the running shoes, equipment and accessories that the shop has to offer and of course order online. The shop is aimed at serious runners and running equipment rather than fashion items, and will include several peripheral pages dedicated to topics such as running styles and gait.

The online administration tools will allow the shop owners to maintain the online catalogue themselves, enabling them to add and edit products, upload images, set prices and much more.

Originally the clients would have liked to have launched the online shop later this month, but due to several hold ups in their planning, they have only just given me the go ahead, so the launch date is likely to be towards the end of December, just in time for everyones new Years Resolution to get out running more!

It may soon be possible to register domain names with a .cym suffix specifically for Welsh websites if a campaign backed by assimbly members is successful.

The assembly members believe that such a move would help enhance Welsh culture and identity as .cym addresses wouldn’t be restricted to websites in the welsh language, but could also be used for websites with a welsh interest.

The governing body of domain names ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) will have to be convinced that there is a need for such a suffix first, but if they do businesses and individuals will be able to register their own .cym domain names.

Such a move may well help to unite welsh-speaking communities on the internet, but how will this affect webmasters and website owners in Wales? Should they all rush out and register their domain name with a .cym suffix? Should I, as a welsh based business, rush out and register pixelwave.cym? Probably not as it will take a while before people become familiar with the suffix and .co.uk will still be the generally accepted suffix even for welsh businesses. For those organisations and businesses with a predominantly Welsh customer base though it would be a nice touch for their website, and a way of displaying their Welsh roots and patriotism.

If the .cym suffix becomes available, Pixelwave Web Design will of course be more than happy to aid and advise you in the registration of a welsh domain name.

Update: Oct 2008
Still no news of when the .cym domain name will become available but in August the Assembly Government backed the scheme by providing a £20,000 grant to secure the .cym domain name for Wales. Read the BBC news article…

Pixelwave Web Design is pleased to announce the release of a new website design for a tourism group based in the Brecon Beacons.

Beacons Active is a group of tourism operators who have come together to actively promote the Brecon Beacons across the UK and internationally as a tourist destination.

The website built by Pixelwave Web Design allows local activity and service providers to pay a subscription in order to promote their businesses and add events to the ‘What’s On’ section. Subscribed members can update their listings and add new events as often as they wish. The site will therefore become an up to date, one-stop-shop for both visitors to the area and locals alike, all of whom will be able to find the attractions and services they require listed on the website.

Any website owner or web master should know that there are a number of factors that lead to a successful website.

First you need a good idea or a good service or product to advertise via your website.
Secondly you need a good quality, professionally designed website that will appeal to your potential visitors and works well on a wide range of computers and other web-browsing devices.
Thirdly you need to promote the website and spread the word about its existence as widely as possible.

The first of these is up to you, but Pixelwave Web Design can help you with the design and production of your website and also the promotion of your website. One of the most important aspect of website promotion is that of gaining good search engine rankings in a process know as Search Engine Optimisation. Onsite optimisation involves producing the website in such a way that it allows search engine to easy catalogue the site for inclusion in its database. Offsite promotion is equally important and involves (among other things) gaining as many inbound links to your website as possible. An inbound link is a link from another website to your website.

Many people tend to promote their new site for a month or so and then hope that other people will simply find their website and link to it so increasing the number of inbound links that it has. Unfortunately this isn’t always the case and most webmasters need to be a little more pro-active in their search for inbound links. Rather than ‘going out’ and looking for these links yourself, another approach is to simply encourage your existing visitors to add links to your website on their personal websites or on other sites that they visit. Many fairly successful website will have a community of dedicated followers, many of whom will be only too glad to show their appreciation of your website and link back to it, so why not use this dedication to your benefit and encourage them to link to you.

The easiest way to do this is to simply provide them with the information they need in order to create a link to your site. Rather than simply using a textual link though you are likely to want to add a bit of emphasis by providing images, buttons or banners that people can use to link to you. These are more attractive and therefore are more likely to encourage people to publish them and also encourages people to click on them which after all is the ultimate goal.

I’ve been working on Fairies World for a while now, it is a popular site receiving over 1 million page views a month, but we feel we can improve on this. A recent addition by Pixelwave Web Design is that of the fairy and fantasy art image galleries. These have proved hugely popular so I am currently working on a dynamic banner that will display random images from these galleries. The idea is to create a small snippet of code that people will be able to place on their websites to display these random images.

The banner should add interest to the website upon which it is published and of course create lots of inbound links for Fairies World.