We've been designing websites for over 17 years and we know a thing or two about what we do.
We just want to make the Internet a better place, one website at a time, and we hope that you'll give us that chance with your business website.
Your business website is such a vital asset that you need it to be right, to be optimised so that your customers can find what they want swiftly, that you get the right message across, and that your website performs in your very competitive marketplace.
A perfect combination of being small enough to take personal care of your Internet needs, merged with over 17 years of experience, to provide you with the best quality service and online web presence.
At Clarke Design we believe that the web design services we offer form a complete and unrivalled package to help provide you with the quality web presence that you and your clients deserve.
Your business is unique and thus your website needs to be unique too, with a distinctive look and feel tailored around your target audience.
It is essential that you maintain your corporate image online combined with an insightful website design ensuring you and your business stand out from the crowd.
You need to ensure that your complete website is managed for you from start to finish, giving you the confidence that your online audience will find your website indispensable so they keep coming back to you time and time again.
You need to make sure that your website is well maintained, compatible with all major Internet browsers and all mainstream internet enabled devices.
Responsive Website Design is a modern approach to the ever changing world of devices that can browse a website.
Computers, desktops, laptops, tablets, e-readers and smartphones all want to look at your website, yet all have different screen sizes.
So how do you determine what size to make your website and how to present to your audience when you don't know what size screen they'll be using?
Also, what about tomorrow? What new gadget or device will be brought out next week and what size screen will that have? Surely you don't have to redesign your website again?
With a wide and varied customer base that is diversifying continually, from high street shops and mail order companies to adventure groups and motoring organisations.
You want the experience with our existing clients to be passed on to you, to make sure that your web presence is maximised and your business benefits from our services.
Designing websites for over 23 years
CLARKE DESIGN focuses on the quality of your website design and not the quantity of our client base. By providing a personal service in website design and associated website hosting you get the best Internet presence for your online business.
A perfect combination of being small enough to take personal care of your Internet needs, merged with over 23 years of experience, to provide you with the best quality service and online web presence.
With a wide and varied customer base that is diversifying continually, from high street shops and mail order companies to adventure groups and motoring organisations. You want the experience with our existing clients to be passed on to you, to make sure that your web presence is maximised and your business benefits from our services.
WordPress is a content management system originally designed for bloggers to write articles for their websites. Since 2003 it has been enhanced considerably to become one of the most popular choices for website designers and business owners alike to support their online presence. It now powers over 60% of the content managed websites on the internet.
WordPress is extremely robust, incredibly customisable and so very easy to use to maintain the content, look and feel and other aspects of your website.
Keeping your website up-to-date is absolutely vital and most content changes should really be done by you, the website owner, rather than your website designer.
WordPress was originally designed for bloggers to showcase their articles online, and this functionality remains at the core. Over the years it has been enhanced to do so much more than this. It allows you to manage pages, menus, photographs, videos and rich media, galleries, articles and so much more.
It is the chosen platform and architecture for over 60% of the world's content managed websites, so with credentials like this, it is proven and here to stay.
WordPress is extendable, very, very extendable. There are a whole host of extensions that we can add onto your website to make it truly stunning. Booking systems, events management, eCommerce shopping baskets, the list is almost endless.
Clarke Website Design are experts at WordPress website development. We can build, theme, enhance and develop your WordPress website. We can implement enhancements to your existing WordPress website or convert a static website in to a content managed website using WordPress as the base architecture.
WordPress is extendable, very, very extendable. However sometimes you just cannot find exactly what you want amongst the vast array of downloadable plug-ins, templates and widgets. You need to hand craft something to meet your exact needs. You just need a very subtle tweak to something that you already have, or want to create something wonderful from scratch.
Clarke Design are experts at programming WordPress
We create for you, one-off bespoke WordPress plug-ins, customise existing website themes, develop extensions and widgets to do exactly what you want.
We've written highly bespoke plug-ins for all kinds of data management systems, stock control, eCommerce, payment systems, directories, galleries... the list goes on.
You may be confusing WordPress (the open-source software package, found at WordPress.org) with WordPress.com. The former is a fully-fledged software package while the latter is a service that hosts personal websites.
WordPress began as a personal publishing system way back in 2001, but around 2008 had evolved into a complete Content Management System for websites.
It can be installed on your own server (or that of your website hosting provider). You own everything that's created there and have full, unlimited creative freedom.
WordPress is built using widely used, fully tested programming languages including PHP and SQL, and can accomplish just about any task asked of a website. It is very extendable with a vast and growing library of plugins. Many of these start off as free, which means you can get the site you want faster and at a lower cost than if every component were hand-coded from scratch.
The look and feel of the website can also be pretty much anything you can think of.
WordPress now powers over 20% of the world's websites - that's more than one fifth of the internet, so it's proven, supported and decently here to stay for the foreseeable future.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is all about getting your website found when people type in specific phrases into one of the major search engines. Trying to get your website onto the first few pages of Google, Yahoo and Bing is vital for every business.
The key to this is knowing which phrases people are typing into which search engines. Then making sure that your website ranks highly for those phrases.
With a little help from Clarke Design, we can help you to achieve better search engine ranking and move your website up the search engine ladder.
SEO Website Audit
Understanding the current state of your website is absolutely vital to ensure that you know where to start your search engine optimisation from and thus where to take it.
SEO Keyword Analysis
If you want to succeed online, you've got to spend enough time and effort finding out the keywords that your customers actually use during their online searches.
SEO Link Targeting
Link building is a vital part of any website promotion strategy. Search engines trust websites with lots of high-quality inbound links as this helps to build your online credibility.
SEO Competitor Analysis
If you don't spy on your online competitors, how can you know what to do to rank higher than them? Competitor analysis helps keep you informed about them.
SEO Warnings
Many people see search engines as the “magic bullet” that will drive everyone to their website and make them the business millionaire they dream of. This is sadly seldom the case.
Search engines are just one way of marketing your business and are only every reactive. You sit there waiting for someone to type in the right phrases into a search engine, wait for them to find your website amongst the list, wait for them to read your website and then to contact you. Hardly a recipe for guaranteed business...
Whilst search engines are a very important part of the internet and of your website, great care must be taken not to rely on them too much.
You must take a proactive approach in marketing your online business and drive people to your website using every conceivable method. Don't abandon traditional marketing, advertising and PR methods and never miss an opportunity to tell someone about your website.
Content is King
The more content you have the better. Think about it.
You've got to prove that your website is the best for the phrases you've chosen and you can't do that on a two page website. You need to demonstrate that you are the best at what you do. You need to have engaging content on your website and lots of it.
Most information on the internet is effectively free, I mean you're not charging people to read your website are you. So if someone has a choice about whether to read a two page website or your much larger website to seek the information they want, which site do you think that they will choose.
Search engines are no different. They like to see lots and lots of content talking about a particular subject. They rightly think that a larger website is probably better than a smaller one.
Building content is a superb way to help the search engines like you, especially when you use all of your key phrases. Write articles on your website, add news often about your company and business sector. Add extra pages about your services. Add new products and services. Explain more about the benefits of what you can do for your customers. Add testimonials, case studies and stories about your customers.
There are lots of ways to write more content for your website. Just remember to do it and do it often. Search engines know when you've updated your website and will check back often to see what you've been up to.
Assess Your Keywords
You may have quite a few keywords and keyword phrases that succinctly describe your product or service. You need to research how effective each keyword and phrase is by answering 2 questions:
Clarke Design can access the most popular search engine results for you to let you know how many people (usually over the past month) have entered a particular keyword or phrase and can also advice on alternative phrases.
Get Yourself Linked
Link Popularity is the number of web pages that link to a specific website. This is now a critically important factor in driving traffic to that website.
New sites and sites with low link popularity are at a major disadvantage and may find it very hard to attract new visitors via search engines. Increase your links and you should increase traffic.
Google states “The best way to ensure Google finds your site is for your page to be linked from lots of pages on other sites. Google's robots jump from page to page on the web, so the more sites that link to you, the more likely it is that we'll find you quickly .”
