Tag Archives: website design

fire and stars holidays

Holidays in Wales

New holiday website just launched.

Fire and Stars Holidays provide barns, gypsy caravans and a dairy on their eco-friendly organic farm in West Wales. They also have an old bakery in the riverside village of St Dogmaels.

fire and stars holidays

All done with a bit of glam and style they offer a genuine getaway from the madness of city life. The whole thing is run by a couple of characters with all sorts of unusual and interesting stories to share.

They happily offer groups and party bookings as well. So larger groups and extended families can book accommodation for special occasions or get togethers.

Take a look at fireandstarsholidays.co.uk.

A collection of websites

Planning your website

Start-out in the right way on the Internet and you’ll achieve success much faster.

Here’s a simple tried and tested step-by-step guide to help you plan your website.

A collection of websites

The Basics

Every website is a combination of:

  • content
  • design
  • technology
  • and (much more subtle) credibility

Balance and synergy of these four elements gives your site a head start on the competition.

Know your Audience

Right from the start think about your visitors, your people, your tribe.

Who are they? Ages? Genders? How are you going to offer them something they want?

Have a Clear Theme

Your website needs to flow from your mission. At least it should have a clear theme or subject.

Be Credible

Most websites (yours included) require certain pages in order to be credible. These pages include:

  • home – a welcome message, introduction, links to products and services, call to action
  • about – aims and mission, history, who’s-who, principles and values statements
  • contact – all the ways your customers can contact you; telephone, email, postal mail
  • terms of use – includes the copyright statements and disclaimers notices
  • privacy policy – a statement about your commitment to keeping personal information confidential.

Of course, the above list does not apply to a one-page CV or PR site.

Your products, services, messages, articles, insights, testimonials, picture galleries, video sections, feedback forms, shopping carts etc. will also need pages too.

Talk to Search Engines

Keep on-topic and make your pages relevant to your main subject. Use deep-links to connect articles and pages together.

Search engines like it if you also have a sitemap and special ‘robots.txt’ file.

Think Community

Over recent years ‘Community‘ has become an increasingly important and relevant factor to consider. Particularly this aspect is covered by having a Facebook and Twitter presence.

Keep it Simple!

Remember to follow the 10 principles of online success. The primary one being, ‘keep it simple‘.

Make a Plan

Plan your content, your messages and how you want your visitors, followers, clients, customers, fans and friends to interact with you.

Keep it Fresh

Keep adding and expanding your offering. Don’t let it become stale.

Think Long-term

Maintain a long-term vision for your website. Allow it to grow for at least five to ten years. Longevity is a powerful influence on credibility.

Keep Focused

Remain confident and determined. Just keep building your website and it will grow and develop it’s own character.

Share the Story

Tell others about your website, your services, your blog, your offers. That way they will know to keep checking the site for new content.

Review Regularly

Regularly review your visitor statistics and the pages they are looking at and using. What number of contacts come via the site? Try to create content to increase the traffic, click-throughs, contacts, sales, newsletter sign-ups, etc.

The above is a quick guide to help you in thinking through your site.

Contact Tusler Design to get your website designed and online working for you.

Completeness

Completeness lifestyle and handmade gifts website

Completeness

Designer, creator and crochet guru Kasturi has a beautiful new website at Completeness.co.uk.

Kasturi has her ‘maker’s blog‘, a ‘gallery‘ of creations she has produced and ‘handmade gifts‘ available to buy.

The site features a directory of spiritual resources and useful links to help on the journey through life. All in all, rather nice!

JR Fabrications welding and fabrication in Carmarthen west Wales

JR Fabrications new website

JR Fabrications are an established company of welding and fabrication based in Carmarthenshire. Their new website is now online at jrfabrications.com.

You can find out about all their services, read their frequently asked questions and see examples of their welding work in the gallery section. There are some excellent testimonials there as well proving the high standard of their workmanship.

JR Fabrications welding and fabrication in Carmarthen west Wales

Fresh Mundos

Mundos supply gifts for discerning customers

Mundos (the high-street shop in Cardigan) has refreshed and re-launched their cool shopping site at mundos.co.uk. The store uses Magento ecommerce system.

The web site is hooked up to their EPOS system from the main shop using Talgara. So customers can buy anything they like in the online shop and know it’s available in stock – in real-time.

It’s a great example of a high-street shop making use of the Internet.

New look for ‘Cardigan Island Coastal Farm Park’

Our friends over at Cardigan Island Coastal Farm Park have completely re-vamped their web site at cardiganisland.com. The previous site was in place since 2005 and the owners wanted a new look and feel whilst keeping hold of the family centered identity of the farm park.

Visitors vs Qualified Visitors

There are two main groups of visitors to your website; qualified visitors and un-qualified visitors.

Qualified visitors being those people who come to your site and proceed to interact with, and do business with your company.

Regular ‘un-qualified’ visitors are those who engage with your web site but don’t buy anything or make any commitment by joining a mailing list or following you on Facebook or Twitter.

As you know yourself, real people visit sites for different reasons. It is possible to observe information about these real people by looking at the visitor data reports for particular web sites.

As a business person you are almost certainly interested in how your web site performs in relation to your bottom-line sales figures.

As the owner of a web site you are almost certainly interested in its traffic data. Meaning you are interested to know how many people have visited and how many pages they have looked at.

Beyond these overall figures there are further sources of interest. For example which pages have visitors looked at the most? How long are they spending engaging with your content?

Are they able to grasp the messages you want them to? Do they take the ‘call-to-action’ and contact you, join the mailing list, download the file or buy something from you?

Looking at the traffic data you can see trends or busy times for your site. You can see which terms visitors have used in search engines to find you. You can see which other websites on the Internet are linked to you and which give you the most traffic.

You can even set ‘goals’ in your data tracking to see how many times someone inquires, downloads a file, buys a product. And also when they make purchases you can see how they went through the buying process and if they stop you can see which page or form they left in-complete.

Over the long term you can use your traffic data to show which subject areas or themes your visitors are most interested in. You can then create more content for them and you can also point them to further calls-to-action to deepen their relationship with your company.