Wow Creative & Performing Arts Directory

Overview: We were asked to design, and develop a unique portfolio directory website so our client could allow creative people to list a personal online portfolio, as well as obtain a listing in the site directory. The site had to have a client messaging system, so the creative people listed did not have to display full contact details on site (but still be contactable), a members area, free listings right through to premium.

Details: From the brief, we knew that members would need full and easy account access, so they could personally upload ther own portfolio (including images), members needed to be able to receive message via the sites secure messaging system and we would need to implement a full e-commerce solution, together with a boolean directory section, to display listings. Plus functionality for Jobs and casting calls to be listed.

Solution: We built a hybrid directory/e-commerce/news and information websites, together with a secure messaging system to facilitate contacts and personal user account facilities, where a user could upgrade from a free account to premium as desired. We also trained out client so they can fully administer the site themselves. Our client was bowled over and thanked us for all our hard work on this project.

You Can View Our Portfolio Here

Details: From this initial simple brief, it became clear that this would not be a ‘run of the mill’ website. The website would need a members area where users could view previous orders, articles, information and a fully integrated booking and payments system. The order and payment system had to be both fast and easy.

Solution: We built an ultra easy to navigate site, with nothing more than 2 clicks away from the home page. This has ensured that the site is super fast no navigate and easy to use. The target age group made it imperative that the site was built to work perfectly on iPhones, iPads, PDA’s and on Android which has been achieved. Unlike other sites in this genre that require you clicking, clicking and clicking some more…to get through to the order form, we have achieved an easy ‘one page’ checkout for users. The clients is extremely pleased with the results.

You Can View Our Portfolio Here

Details: The websites/audio books store’s were out of date, most functions were not working any longer if at all or correctly and the designs simply did not reflect Tony’s creative products.
Tony wanted to be able to add/remove products and add new content when he wanted too – without the need to train as a web designer or developer!

Solution: We built the ‘new improved’ sites on our hosting to solve the hosting problems that had been experienced. We assisted Tony in getting full and rightful control of his domains, sites and email. We totally re-built the sites from the ground up, salvaging only the content. Which included: redesign of both sites to reflect Tony;s creative nature and products. Adding a working store for downloads and physical products. We built his sites into a CMS framework that would be easy for him to manage, gave the sites all ‘mod cons; including but not exclusively: RSS feeds, translation and sitemaps. We moved and improved all the written content, layout and errors, fixed broken inks, changed the entire site navigation, sorted, sharpened and thumb-nailed his new site images to be crystal clear, improved and added extra site functionality, added some nice new ‘state of the art’ features, applied on site SEO, added legal pages such as ‘Privacy & Terms of Service pages, vastly improved his website speed etc. and the result can be clearly seen. Tony’s first reaction when he first saw the sites was “Wow” so you can take it from us, that he likes his new websites. See images for Sapphire Audio Books and Charlie Horse Publishing.

Old Website & New Websites

You Can View Our Portfolio Here

Details: Whilst Philippa had some strong ideas about what ‘The Counsel Of Grandmothers’ function should be – she was unsure of how to achieve the desired user friendly website she wanted. We talked to Philippa in depth and found that she wanted a social area where the over 50′s could meet online, interact and share their knowledge, learn about modern technology and share a few laughs along the way! She also need a website that she could fully manage herself.

Solution: We realised quite quickly that the best solution for ‘The Counsel of Grandmothers’ would be a very user friendly forum framework. We applied our knowledge of the end user needs with larger text and a classic easy on the eyes colour pallet. We also trained Philippa on how to administer her site and she is doing very well. We also think she should be very proud of how much she has learned in a short space of time.

Philippa is extremely satisfied with her website and has provided a very nice testimonial which you can view here.

You Can View Our Portfolio Here

Overview: Kwik Claims 4u came to us wanting a rather special lead capture business website design.

Details: They needed a professional and informative website that would have a conservative ‘wow factor’.

Solution: We have provided a full and informative website, with a very fancy image splicer display gallery.

Sarah came to us as although she felt her site was ‘OK’, it wasn’t performing in the search engines. We performed an in-depth keyword and market research analysis and we found the problems.  A whole new CMS (content management system) was installed and we re-designed the website in close consultation with Sarah. We applied full SEO and gave extensive free marketing advise also.

This is what the Children’s Playhouse Company website used to look like before we got to work on it and gave it a website makeover!

The improvements are self evident. With a new CMS, navigation, correct keywords, SEO and lots of added functionality, the new site is set to soar through the search engines. The Children’s Playhouse Company are thrilled with the results of their website makeover and said:

“I did not realise how much I needed the help and advice of Dee from SEO.  I thought I was doing okay with the website I had – I was very much mistaken.  They were great, worked round the clock and the outcome was I have a fantastic website and I have been given great marketing help and expert advice and most importantly advice that I felt I could trust.  I would like to say thank you to you and your team for all your hard work and the help you gave to the Children’s Playhouse Company. I love the

website makeover

”

We are delighted to have helped. We love to work with companies who make quality British products.
We enjoy a good

website makeover!

There is no point in simply having a good looking website. We at Surrey Local Website SEO strive to build great looking business websites, with built in SEO and can also offer traffic generation methods and techniques. We like to show what we can do so here is an example of our success. Our site is now around 38 days old and already we are No1 in Yahoo.co.uk. We would love to build or promote your website so you get to No1 on Yahoo also.

View the image below or simply go to Yahoo.co.uk and type in Local Business Surrey Website Design and you will see us right at the very top of the organic search engine listings. We have actually been there for around 10 days but wanted to give it some time to show you that the high ranking that we are able to achieve sticks. What could we do for your business website when we are No1 on Yahoo?

Contact Us to find out.

It’s the 28th of April 2010 and although we have been in business for some time, less than 28 days ago, we finally got around to putting our own web site online! In under 28 days, we are No1 on Google UK and Google worldwide search also.

You can view the screen shots below or simply type ‘local website SEO’ into Google UK and/or Google worldwide. Just think about what we could do for your business and web site? Would you like your business website to be No1 on Google UK for your main keyword?

No1 in Google UK Search Engine.

No1 In Google Worldwide Search Engine.

We have managed to speed up clients sites by more than 75% by simply disabling and unistalling there ‘cache plugins’ using this method. Most people ‘think’ that cache plugins are a great idea- I disagree. Before you start, test you site speed at www.iwebtool.com/speed_test or similar so you can check your results afterwards. You may also like to install Firebug and Y-slow Mozilla Firefox Addons to test your Y-Slow score before and after to speed up your website.

Warning: Back up your site and files and store somewhere safe before attempting any site improvements!

After much testing and tweaking I can report to you that this method of speeding up WordPress and improving Y-Slow score works and works very well to speed up your website!

It is the only method suitable for the novice and the only easy method to apply that I have ever found that is also safe to use on highly dynamic WordPress sites also. Sites that are used more as a CMS with full media, slide shows, multiple plugins and lots of Java script.

I can report that I am yet to find any plugin that this method conflict with either.

Now follow these steps exactly and in order to

speed up your website

!

1. Start by doing a little site maintenance!
Delete any drafts that you don’t want, clean up your tags. Make sure that everything in your WordPress is fully up to date to and that you are using the most up to date version of all your plugins and that you have the latest WP installed. Consider crunching all your images with http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/imageoptimizer/index.php or similar also.

2. Deactivate, uninstall, delete and remove all traces of ANY/EVERY cache plugins that you are using! Refers to plugin authors sites to ensure that you have deleted ever trace of them and their code from your site.

For C-panel Users (and similar)

3. MySQL has a built-in optimize function to clean up wasted space in your tables. It’s particularly effective when you’ve deleted a lot of data (E.G. comments). Don’t be afraid, this is really easy to do! Go into your control panel and look for PHPMyAdmin. Click on it and choose your WP data base. In phpMyAdmin, just select the table, E.G. Comments. Then go to the “Operations” tab, and then click “Optimize Table”. That’s it your done!

4. Now login to your WordPress and Install the following plugins (but do not activate) via your admin:

• WP Database Cache Reloaded
• Optimize Scripts (Yes-I know it says it has not been tested up to the latest version of WP but it works so don’t worry)
• Really Static

5. Activate WP Database Cache Reloaded. Go to the settings page, tick activate and leave it on pre configured settings.
Activate Optimize Scripts and leave it on default settings.
Activate ‘Really Static’ and again, leave it on pre-configured settings. You will need to go to the settings page and add your FTP info and save it. Then, go to settings tab “manual refresh” and choose the option to write all files. This will start to write all your WordPress pages into a folder as static, fast loading pages that will be served up instead of your actual blog pages. If you have a large site, the plugin may timeout before your whole site is copied over. Don’t worry, just select “write all files” again until you get a message saying the plugin has finished copying.

6. Recheck your site to satisfy yourself that everything is working!

7. Ask your host if they have mode_Gzip enabled. (if they don’t – come over to us for hosting as we do!)
If they say yes, ftp into your site and locate your .htaccess file and add this and underneath anything that is already in there:

[<ifModule mod_gzip.c>
mod_gzip_on Yes
mod_gzip_dechunk Yes
mod_gzip_item_include file \.(html?|txt|css|js|php|pl)$
mod_gzip_item_include handler ^cgi-script$
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^text/.*
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^application/x-javascript.*
mod_gzip_item_exclude mime ^image/.*
mod_gzip_item_exclude rspheader ^Content-Encoding:.*gzip.*
</ifModule>]

Save file.

If your host says that ‘no’ they don’t, add the following code instead:

[php_value output_handler ob_gzhandler] (remove[] from code)

Save file.

This forces php to compress your php files. (can be resources intensive on the CPU so use with caution)

Your done! Now wait an hour or two (or even until the next day) and go back and test your site speed and Y-Slow score again. The last site I applied this to for a client had a cache installed and the sites scores were:

Page loading time: 17.90
Y-Slow score: ‘F’

After we had finished applying the above;

Page loading time: 0.64
Y-Slow score: ‘B’

Of course there is much more that can be done to improve speed and Y-Slow score but you have to agree that is a dramatic change without even touching so much as a line of the sites code! If this tutorial makes no sense to you at all but you would like to speed up your WordPress site, Contact Us to find out about our services.

Why worry?

Google is now using a site’s speed as part of the algorithm that ranks the order of pages in its search results. Fast sites will rank higher, while slower-loading sites might suffer.

Speed up your website today!

Overview: A client in a hurry contacted us asking if we could produce a simple yet classic authoritative themed web site in just two day as an extremely rush job!

Details: We spoke to the clients and found that although in a hurry, they really needed a CMS system to enable them to apply regular content on the fly themselves. They also need a prime ad spot on-site to promote their new product.

Solution: We spent two days getting a very simple back-end CMS up for them and due to their lack of time, emailed them their instructions for use! We chose a no frills sensible newspaper style theme that looked very good indeed, The site was built for them by our team in 48 hours flat! The clients was pleased and has engaged us to build several more web sites since.

You Can View Our Portfolio Here