11th May 2007

May 2007 Newsletter

April was a quiet month for new site launches, but we carried out significant work for existing customers, and undertook a number of freelanced CSS projects.

On the new site front, we launched Walk in the Park - a family run Windsor based florist, details of which can be found below.

For existing customers, we completely recoded the website for Melita Boutique in an attempt to make the site significantly more search engine friendly. In addition we reworked the navigation menu for Marathon School Supplies.

Walk in the Park went live on May 2nd. The site is built using XHTML 1.0 Strict and uses CSS throughout for layout and styling. This will ensure the pages are fast to load, the site is compliant with Priority Levels 1 and 2 of the Web Accessibility Guidelines and is as search engine friendly as possible. We have also incorporated a PHP image gallery.

For Melita Boutique, we undertook a complete recoding of the site, maintaining the original design. We have been very successful generating traffic to the site since launch, helped by an Adwords programme which has consistently generated a click through rate of 20% plus. However, the business now wants to shift the marketing focus to organic search. To assist in this process, we recoded using XHTML 1.0 Strict and used CSS throughout for layout and styling. As we have stressed on many occasions, such an approach will assist the correct indexing of many pages as possible. To further enhance the chances of success in this regard, we have also created an XML site map. On the programming front, we have ensured the URLs are search engine friendly - for example the Condici page now reads http://www.melitaboutique.co.uk/view-condici.php. With no query strings in the URL (a characteristic of many dynamic websites), there is no risk that all search engines will not crawl deep into the site.

Marathon School Supplies is a major supplier of bags, clothing and accessories to state and independent schools throughout the UK. We launched the website for the company in November last year. Originally, we created the drop down horizontal menu with the aid of JavaScript. In addition, the menu did not "stick" when for example the user was viewing a top level category with related sub levels. Therefore, we have recoded the menu - purely using CSS for accessibility reasons - and enhanced it such that the sub menu now stays in place when a user views a sub category. This is a definite plus for ease of use for any website.

Web Preference Limited

14 Oakdale Road, Weybridge, Surrey KT13 8EJ. Company No: 5426254. Vat No: 860 5011 58. Telephone: 01932 424242