Innerleithen Holiday Lets – New Website Design & Hosting

Innerleithen Holiday Lets Web site

Innerleithen Holiday Lets is an established local business who, having just moved to the High Street, wanted to update their website to coincide with the move to their new premises.

Providing high quality holiday cottages, houses and apartments in the Innerleithen, Walkerburn & Peebles area. Innerleithen Holiday Lets came to Digital Essence looking for a modern, mobile responsive redesign of their current web site.

Working with them over the last couple of weeks. We discussed what they wanted and expected from their new web site and set about making the magic happen.

Their old site was hosted on a custom built backend and we worked closely with their developers to ensure the smooth, hassle free transition over to our system.

Innerleithen Holiday Lets Web site DesignOne of the most important items on their wish list was the ability to edit the website themselves, we suggested the popular WordPress Content Management System (CMS) as it not only gives them total control over their site but also updates and improves stability and security.

On top of this we add our favourite Genesis Framework which gives us and our customers total security and fantastic Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) so they rank well in Search Engines like Google.

Working with a local Innerleithen based photographer to provide high quality interior shots of the holiday homes, we’ve produced what we think is a fantastic web site.

Mobile Responsive

With nearly 20% of all web traffic coming from mobile devices like Smartphones or Tablets, web sites have to work well on all devices from a Desktop computer to a Mobile Phone otherwise you risk losing business.

All of the websites we design are 100% Mobile Responsive. This means that whether you are sat at your desk, browsing on your iPad or on the move using your Mobile Phone. Our customers web sites will look just as good.

And needless to say, the Innerleithen Holiday Lets website works superbly whatever device you are using.

Blogging for Improved Search Engine Results

If there’s one Golden tip/nugget of information we want to pass on to our customers. It’s that Content is King. It doesn’t matter how fancy your website is, it is good quality, relevant content that will show in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS). One of the best ways to produce this is to Blog. Blogging allows a web site owner to write about events that are relvant to their locality or business.

Without original and desirable content, any media venture is likely to fail through lack of appealing content, regardless of other design factors.

 

One of the reasons why we use WordPress to power all of our websites is that, it’s an amazingly powerful blogging and news platform. WordPress allows our customers to quickly and most importantly, easily update their site. They can write news items that are relevant to them and post them to their website (eg: this is a Blog post). This means that they can keep their websites updated with local news and help drive traffic to their site.

Please have a look at the new Innerleithen Holiday Lets website at www.innerleithenholidaylets.co.uk and if you are interested in a new website or redesign of your existing site, please give us a call on 01896 888 235 and we will be more than happy to discuss your requirements.

Has Google penalised my site?

Google release a new tool to check if they have penalised your site

Until recently this has always been very difficult to tell. Google can penalise your site for various reasons including:

  • Buying links
  • Using hidden text ie with CSS positioning or Javascript,
  • Keyword Stuffing (that’s the process of inserting far too many keywords into your text in an effort to rank better)
  • Spam

If detected then your site would be penalised and drop in the rankings.

Now you can quickly and easily tell using Google Webmaster Tools which we assume you are using right?

To use this tool, sign into your Google Webmaster Tools account, go to the website you would like to check, click on ‘Search Traffic,’ then ‘Manual Actions.’ There you will either see nothing (meaning your website wasn’t manually penalised), or you will see a message telling you why your website was manually penalised.

For example:

How to tell if your site has been penalised by Google

Although this is very useful, Google don’t then go on to tell us how to reverse the penalty.

Free Google website speed analyser tool

Google’s PageSpeed Insights analyser tool is the perfect way to check your website page loading times and find out what is slowing it down.

As you are probably aware, slow loading websites not only put visitors off but are also penalised in Google Search Engine Results (SERPs).

According to a study by Gomez,

“Nearly one-third (32%) of consumers will start abandoning slow sites between 1 and 5 seconds”

So every second does literally count…

The Google PageSpeed Insights tool analyzes the content of a web page, then generates suggestions to make that page faster. Reducing page load times can reduce bounce rates and increase conversion rates.

What is PageSpeed?

PageSpeed is a browser tool & extension (for Google Chrome and Firefox). It runs a number of diagnostic tests against a web page, and analyses the page’s performance on a number of “rules” that are known to speed up page load time. The rules are based on general principles of web page performance, including resource caching, data upload and download size, and client-server round-trip times. For each rule, PageSpeed gives a general score, using a simple red-yellow-green grading scheme, and suggests specific techniques for correctly implementing each rule. It also provides some automatic optimisation of external resources included on a page, such as minifying JavaScript code and compressing images.

How does PageSpeed Insights work?

PageSpeed Insights fetches a site’s contents (HTML, JavaScript, CSS, images, etc) live, using a webkit-based renderer. It then runs the same PageSpeed analysis found in the PageSpeed browser extensions (for Chrome & Firefox browsers), and presents them online.

You can access the tool here.

Web Design and Hosting in Innerleithen

We’ve moved to Innerleithen!

We are delighted to announce that Digital Essence Web Design & Hosting have moved to Innerleithen near Walkerburn & Peebles in the Scottish Borders.

After many years down South in Surrey struggling in the rat race that the South East of England is, we decided to make the bold move back home up to Scotland.

Innerleithen, a thriving town in the Tweed Valley near Walkerburn and Peebles was high on our list due in no small part to the good work put in by the residents during the BT Race to Infinity, and the Fibre to the Cabinet available in the Town. High Speed Internet means that we can live and work in Innerleithen rather than having to travel to Edinburgh.

Web Design in Innerleithen

With over 18 years experience as a web designer creating eye catching websites for small to medium sized businesses, Digital Essence work with our customers to help get their site online. From the initial design, through to development on the popular CMS WordPress, hosting and Search Engine optimisation (SEO) we can ensure that your website not only looks good on all devices including mobiles and tablets but can also be found in the search engines.

Innerleithen comes from the Scottish Gaelic,  Inbhir Leitheann meaning confluence of the Leithen, because it is here that the river joins the river Tweed. The town is dominated by the surrounding hills,  Lee Pen, Pirn Craig and Plora Craig. Our office is off the High Street on Leithen road in Cauldhame near the beginning of the Mill Lade or Dam as it is called locally.

Over time we hope to meet the local businesses and hopefully help get some of them online with a spiffing new website or hosting package.

There is more information about Innerleithen on Wikipedia