Urban Knit offer a fun (and in my opinion very gorgeous) range of knitwear including socks and leg warmers, suitable for any time of the year. The bright colours and patterns have incorporated perfectly into the website design creating a visually stunning site.

The ecommerce website was built using Magento so it includes lots of great functionality. Some of my favourite features are the sliding image zoom that allows you can see the items at exactly the right size, the hover over shopping basket that shows you the products you’re buying and how much you’re spending, and the previously viewed items, conveniently displayed at the bottom of the page so you can always find your way back to that awesome product you were so very tempted to buy…

Their parent company Buffalo Socks (http://www.buffalo-socks.co.uk/) has been providing socks and hosiery to many of the big name retailers for over 7 years. Great news for the retailers then, the Urban Knit website has a special trade section offering even more products with special trade prices!

Urban Knit proudly announces on their homepage that they love their product, and so does everyone else! Take a look at their Media page to see them featured in magazines, newspapers and website articles for top publications including Harpers Bazaar, Elle and Notion.

Urban Knit is Buffalo Socks’ new, innovative knitwear brand offering people individual, trend led products.

Studio 2 Online are proud to have worked with Buffalo Socks for over 5 years and have enjoyed watching them expand their product range and services to include Urban Knit and the Pantone range. In Autumn/Winter 2010, Urban Knit will be expanding their range to include hats, gloves and scarves, so make sure you check back regularly for more great products.

Dani
Client Services Officer
Studio 2 Online – Web Design Midlands

So as a leading web design agency, Leicester we are well aware of the importance of having your website listed highly in the Google rankings.

Achieving a listing on the first page of Google can be a challenge, especially for competitive keywords. Getting to the top involves important decisions at the initial website design stages, as well as a well planned search engine optimisation strategy.

The benefits of ranking well in Google are:

• Google controls a large percentage of the search engine market
• Google will send more traffic to your site than the other search engines, which means more customers and therefore more profit.
• A site performing well on Google will also generally do well on the other search engines.

Studio 2 Online offer both web design and search engine solutions for our clients. This may seem an obvious thing to say, but we get a lot of enquiries from people about optimising their website, where it’s obvious that the previous designer had little or no understanding of how to build a website that’s search engine friendly and ready for a SEO campaign.

So why not ‘kill two birds with one stone’ and let us design and build your website to a high search engine friendly specification and then run a successful SEO campaign for you? That way you can have the first page of Google as a goal right from the start.

Oh, and don’t forget the value of Google Adwords as a complimentary search engine marketing tool to boost your enquiries and sales even further. Needless to say, we can help you out with this as well!

To help your website on its way to the first page of Google, or to discuss any of the web design and search engine optimisation (SEO) services we offer, contact the Studio 2 Online team. Give us a call now on 0116 275 8456 to speak to one of our team members or arrange a no obligation meeting.

David Morris

Studio 2 Online – Web design Midlands

Twitter is a great site for meeting new people, swapping useful information and um… some not so helpful information (such as the daily pictures of one Twitter friends thumb!), anyway, even I was surprised the other day when I visited and noticed that ‘Ecommerce’ was a trending topic.

Clicking the link, I found that it was trending because people were retweeting an online article called 15 common mistakes in ecommerce design and how to avoid them.

Want to see how Studio 2 Online ecommerce websites check out against this list? Why not visit our latest design Pineapple Shoes to find out!

Studio 2 Online websites are built using Magento, so all of the features mentioned are available on all of our websites, please contact us on 0116 2758456 if you would like a demonstration of the Magento system or to discuss how ecommerce can help to boost your companies enquiries and sales.

Dani
Studio 2 Online
Ecommerce web design Midlands

If so then that website was lacking a very important aspect of good web design – a site map.

A site map is as useful to a website user as a road map is to a driver, and here are 5 useful tips:

• Your site map should include a link to every page within your website; from the homepage, to your contact details, to your deepest subpages.
• A link to your site map should be included on every page of your website. This means that every page within your site is only ever two clicks away, which is not only good web design, but also useful for getting your pages indexed by the search engines.
• Keep your site map under 100 links, and if more are needed then split into multiple site maps.
• An XML site map is important for search engine optimisation as it allows search engine crawlers easy access to index every page within your site.
• It’s important to understand the difference between a HTML sitemap and a XML sitemap. A HTML sitemap is useful to the visitors to your site, while a XML sitemap is designed to give information about your site directly to search engines.

If you’re lost and in need of some direction with anything to do with your website, or if you are after a brand new site, as a leading web design agency, Leicester we can provide excellent web designs and search engine friendly services to promote your business and increase your enquiries and sales.

Give us a call now on 0116 275 8456 to speak to one of our team members or arrange a no obligation meeting. If you need a map to find us, then there is one on the website…we wouldn’t want you getting lost after all!

David Morris

Studio 2 Online – Web design Midlands

• Don’t change URLs: indexed URLs are precious!! Don’t change them!! Search engines crawl a website and index pages on your website that they then return for relevant search terms. It is alright to change heading, images and other content on the webpage but avoid changing indexed URLs.
• Optimise Website: Apply search engine optimisation to the website before it is launched, not after it’s live and up and running on the internet. Basic SEO techniques can be applied to a website during the build. This also helps to strengthen the information architecture of the website so a user can be led through the website as you planned it. For example, a user may enter a product page and actually be guided through to the information on the product and ultimately the ‘buy now’ webpage, hence changing a visitor into a customer.
• Website Content: for the above to be possible it is important that your website copywriter understands your business and its target audience completely. A good copywriter will write copy for the target audience, speaking their language. Good web copy will also help lead the user to the right web page once a visitor has entered the website.

To find out more of such useful tips contact our web design midlands agency based in Leicester to have an informal chat and see how we can help redesign your website and promote it in Google and other key search engines through SEO.

Mariam Shariff

Studio 2 Online – Web designers Midlands, Leicester

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Some points to consider:

• Choose:

1. A professional Website Design Company who will spend time understanding your needs – very important!
2. A good copywriter who can appreciate your company ethos and your target audience to turn your website visitors into customers
3. A visually powerful website design that reflects your business
4. A website structure that is easy to navigate for a site visitor as well as a search engine robot, especially if you’re selling products/services online.
5. A website navigation system that is simple and easyto use, with information or products no more than three mouse clicks away. A copywriter specialising in websites will be able to help you with this.

• Make your website accessible in accordance to the W3C Standards
• Allow external links to open in a new tab or window, but avoid too many or it just becomes distracting
• Include a good user sitemap that is easy to navigate

Things to avoid:

• A website that is not accessible to everyone, including those with visual impairments. Indeed if a website is not accessible to everyone this could lead to legal action
• A completely Flash based website – it may look good, but it’s likely to take ages to load so people will lose interest before they even enter the site, and search engines don’t like Flash
• Too many back grounds – less is more when it comes to website design
• Too many external links – you want people to stay on your website, not wander off elsewhere!

For more advice on choosing the right web design for your business contact our Midlands based web design agency on 0116 275 8456 to have an informal discussion on our web design and other web services.

Mariam Shariff

Studio 2 Online – Web design Leicester, Midlands

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During the web design process of a new website or ecommerce website, one important design element to decide on is whether or not to use frames.

Using frames is displaying two or more HTML pages within a single browser window at one time.

If you are new to web design, you may think that there is no problem in doing this, but it can cause problems for both the visitors to your website, as well as search engine crawlers.

If the page is split into frames, this will cause web design issues that will affect your visitors who are using a browser that doesn’t support frames, and can also cause navigational problems. Also, search engine crawlers cannot index framed sites easily, so your search engine optimisation will suffer.

As a leading web design agency in the Midlands, we can help you acquire a fantastic website that will provide excellent web design standards as well as being search engine friendly to promote your business and increase your enquiries and sales. Give us a call now on 0116 275 8456 to speak to one of our team members or arrange a no obligation meeting.

David Morris

Studio 2 Online – Web design Midlands

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Remember that most people use the web to look for information before they make a purchase, and this is true whether they end up buying online or on the High Street. So a website is the best way of sharing information with potential customers about your products or services.

The key is to keep the website content customer focussed i.e. what does your target audience want.  By doing this you are marketing your product or service in the most cost effective and optimum way possible.

Remember the Internet is a world where perception is reality. It’s not the size of your business that matters online. Instead, to be successful the way you present your business online must be stronger than your competition.

That’s why you need to use a good, professional web design agency to create your website. A good web designer will be able to identify crucial aspects of your business and translate this into a web design that draws attention to the benefits, or USPs of your products or services, and also gives you a real return on your investment in terms of increased enquiries and sales.

Have a brochure website if you want to promote your business or an e commerce website if you want to sell online. Using a good e commerce system will really help make your website search engine friendly. With your website ranking well on search engines the potential for your market becomes as big as you want it to be.

As a leading web design agency in Leicester providing web services to  businesses across the Midlands we can help you acquire a fantastic website that will promote your business and increase your  enquiries and sales. Give us a call now on 0116 275 8456 to speak to one of our team members or arrange a no obligation meeting.

Mariam Shariff

SEO Engineer – Studio 2 Online
Web designers Leicestershire

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Like Hansel and Grethel, visitors need to be able to easily find their way through your website to get to the products or information they need.

Good navigation means that your visitors should never be more than three clicks away from the information they require. Make sure your website has clear navigation on all pages. 

Flash Intros: Flash intros can look very pretty but often have very little relevance to the website.

The majority of people actually find flash intros very annoying. When you remember that you only have 8 seconds to make an impression with your website and it often takes longer than this for the flash intro to load the chances are your visitors will have always clicked back before its even started playing!

Its not only humans that dislike flash intros either. Search Engines love content. Even if you have a relevant flash intro full of juicy information about your company and/or products, search engines are unable to read it so it will have no bearing on your rankings.

Music: You may love a certain songs but not everybody will share your taste in music! Most of my colleagues will tell you my taste in music could be better! Our marketing manager describes my music as sounding like ‘RAH RAH RAH angry angry angry’. Now imagine I add this music to my website, I may think it completes my website and shows my unique style but in reality how long would the average person stay on my website before clicking back to the search engine?!

Another thing to consider when adding music to your website is the growing number of SKYPE users. SKYPE is an application which allows you to make telephone calls over the internet. A Twitter user commented recently that they were using SKYPE whilst browsing the web. The first site they clicked on had quite unpleasant music on autoplay, obviously something you want to avoid whilst making a phone call! Without even looking at the website she clicked the back button and did not return to the site. 

Attractive Design: When you think of attractive design you probably think of a website with fancy artsy graphics and pretty colours, these are only part of what makes a well designed website.

You should also consider things like:

• Easy to read text: make sure the text is a reasonable size and in a colour that is easy to see. Obviously if you have a coloured background you will need to choose a colour that is clearly visible.
  Another thing you may wish to consider (depending on your product/company) is a text only version of your website with variable font sizes for visually impaired visitors – I saw this recently on a website and thought it was an awesome idea.
• Alt tags: when you hover over pictures, you should have a text description of what the picture is. Alt tags are good things to have for two reasons. Firstly, search engines will find these words and add them to search results. Secondly, if for any reason your images don’t load, your visitors will have a text description instead – much better than an empty space!
• Limit the amount of images: images take time to load, if you have lots of images on your page it can take a long time to load the page, remember the 8 second rule, would you wait for the page to load if you were visiting a website? 

Browser Compatibility:Different people use different browsers to view the internet, they also use different versions of these browsers. Make sure that your website is compatible with the main browsers, and that as new versions are released, the website is updated to include the new versions.

If the website is not compatible, your pages may appear ‘broken’ with missing images, missing functionality, format problems, etc.

Dani
Studio 2 Online
Web Design East Midlands 

By designing your website with your targeted audience in mind you can engage a visitor on the website and get them to follow deep links, keeping them on your website and allowing them to find the information they want. To do this you need to decide who your target audience is, what is the primary focus of the website, is your web page copy relevant to your audience and are your keywords all in the right places? These are just some of the questions to be answered even before a website is designed. Oh yes, it will really help your bounce rate if when directing people to your website, don’t just take them to your home page. Rather, take them straight to the page that provides them with the information they want.

When you’ve got all this in place you still need to test that this is working for your targeted audience. Don’t try to do this yourself. Be brave! Test your website by showing it to others interested in your product or service. You will be surprised to see how they pick on issues you wouldn’t have even considered. They may find that the webpage is too text heavy, failing to capture a visitor’s attention, in fact putting them off! Be prepared to amend your website content after monitoring your website stats. Of course having a Content Management system will help you do this. Making regular alterations will reduce your bounce rate, although be patient, it will take time.

Mariam Shariff

Search Engine Optimisation Engineer
Studio 2 Online – Web design Leicester