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Directline Holidays is recognised as one of the UK’s fastest growing online travel agents and was listed in the Sunday Times Fast Track 100 in 2009.

The new sites feature a streamlined booking process aimed at reducing ‘checkout friction’ – easing the customer through the buying process.

To see the sites in action visit www.directline-holidays.co.uk and www.directline-skiing.co.uk.

“The new Morphsuits website is a titanic improvement on their old site and will prove to be a great platform the company to grow the business.

We’ve worked hard to deliver a conversion driven design coupled with the powerful Magento platform.”

Chris Martin, Head of Development

The new site was designed with conversions at the heart of the product, coupled with a best practice Google Analytics installation and multivariate testing to identify the optimal designs and content.

To learn more visit www.morphsuits.co.uk

Eurotunnel's new website, designed by Webexpectations

The Webex team have been working furiously over the last ten months to launch a suite of new websites for Eurotunnel Le Shuttle.  Eurotunnel operates the car shuttle service via the Channel Tunnel between Folkestone and Calais allowing passengers to travel to France in just 35mins.

The website is Eurotunnel’s main sales channel, accounting for the majority of their passenger revenue.

“With the website being such an important e-commerce channel we worked hard with Eurotunnel’s marketing teams to redesign the site around the needs of their passengers.

Right from day one we wanted to ensure the new design was user centred and conversion driven – pulling together best practice in usability and conversion driven design.

A quick look at the old site shows the transformation that we delivered, not only in cosmetics but most importantly in usability and persuasiveness.”

Sheetal Masih, Head of Creative

Eurotunnel's old website

A combination of Google Analytics, usability testing, on-site surveys and conversion audits were used to plan the redesign and to ensure that real data and insight were at the heart of the decision making process.

To learn more visit www.eurotunnel.com.

Plus they help customers save money on their gas and electricity – all-round their just thoroughly nice people!

The launch sees a complete overhaul of the site’s design and backend with a new corporate CMS that allows Ebico’s marketing team to easily manage and update content.

“We used Joomla as a framework for the back-end as it offers a flexible platform for site management and for controlling their online gas and energy application system.  Customers can easily apply online and the back-end automatically manages the processing of the orders through to the back-office systems.”

Kit Kitson lead developer on the Ebico project

Visit www.ebico.org.uk to see the new site in action.

Russell Sutton
MD of Webexpectations

The site had to be delivered in record time for a  campaign that has received nationwide attention including coverage on the BBC News. So far we’ve had thousand’s of people vote on the site for Britain’s best and worst rivers.  To cast your vote visit www.ourrivers.org.uk.

At Webexpectations not only do we design user friendly websites that are built to convert visitors into customers we build web sites that are search engine friendly. As a Google Certified partner WE feel this is a factor of the up most importance.

Why is being search engine friendly important?

For any organisation looking to develop a new website ensuring its search engine (or Google) friendly is a big deal. No-one is going to thank you if 2 weeks after launch your website is incompatible with Google!

Search engine friendly means your website is:

• Accessible to search engine spiders
• Easy for Google, Yahoo! and Bing to index and understand
• Ready to go should you wish to pursue an aggressive search engine marketing campaign

The key point is what happens if your site isn’t search engine friendly? You’re invisible to Google, Yahoo! and Bing. Ouch! This hurts. It also means that if you want to market your website in search engines then organic or natural listings aren’t an option (although you can still use Pay Per Click advertising).

The difference between Search Engine Friendly and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

It so important we include if for FREE!

We passionately believe that being search engine friendly is so important we do it for free, as standard with all new build projects. We also have a dedicated specialist (that’s me!) who’s responsible for checking and vetting site’s before they’re launched to make sure they’re in top-tip Google friendliness.

What do we do?

In the rest of the article, we’re going to walk you through what we believe it means to be search engine friendly. Warning this gets a bit techy!

Title Tags

The single most important on-page SEO factor is the title tag. We ensure that all landing pages have unique titles that relate to the page content. By adding either, the keyword, page name, service or product at the start of the title tag it ensures weight is given to this phrase in the search engine results.

Meta Description Tag

To entice people to click on the site within the search engine results you need to have a good description. All landing pages that we launch within a site have a unique description that is compelling enough to entice users to click on it.

Meta Keywords Tag

Although it has been well documented like on the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog
(http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html that Google doesn’t read the Meta Keywords Tag anymore, we feel it is good etiquette that this tag is still used the correct way.

Separating Style and Behaviour From Page Logic

Separating the style and behaviour is an important step we take anyway for building maintainable web sites but it is also a logical step for creating search engine friendly sites. This means search engines don’t have to read meaningless content and the pages load faster for the user. All styles as well as scripts are included in the page from external files.

Navigation

A search engine friendly web site needs to have accessible navigation, which in essence is achieved by using text based navigation. Navigation that uses flash or images is not search engine friendly and is not accessible for users.

HTML Elements

H1 Tags are probably the most important on-page html element. There should only be one h1 tag per page and it should be filled with what is within the head title tag or something similar. The h1 tag appearing towards the top of the source code is very desirable to search engines, yet it should be located in the most logical position such as at the top of the content area.

Links

If you type “click here” into Google, you will see Abobe Reader as the top result. This is purely because of the amount of web sites that are linking to it with “click here” in the anchor. Links with keyword rich anchors will add weight to the page the link is pointing to. Try and avoid using “click here” as this is not only search engine un-friendly but also has a negative impact on accessibility.

Images

To ensure images are search egnine friendly as well as accessible we ensure alt’s within image tags are used correctly. This is also an important step to take with ensuring the sites HTML is W3 valid.

Search Engine Friendly URL’s

All the sites WE launch have search engine friendly URL’s. A search engine friendly URL is a URL that is easily read by search engines as well as humans such as http://www.mydomain.com/my-services as opposed a long query string full of meaningless values such as http://www.mydomain.com/page.html?id=313&a=57896das4454543dswd45343s.

Webmaster Tools

Adding a web site to Google web master tools is an important step to ensuring your web site is search egnine friendly. In Webmaster tools you guide Google to your XML sitemap which essentially helps the Google Bot spyder your web site more efficiently. Webmaster tools also provides you with the Google Bot crawl data including any errors and your top search queries.

Robots.txt Files

Robots.txt files are the first file a bot will request when spydering your site. This is where you disallow each bot from indexing the site content that you do not want to be accessible to search engines.

301 Redirects

When launching a new site which is replacing an old one WE ensure all old URL’s will have a 301 search engine friendly redirect added to the new one. This is a very important step as not only will it ensure no traffic is lost going to the old URL’s but it will tell the search engines that they need to index the new URL’s in place of the old.

301 WWW Redirects

We also add a www redirect just to make sure that the search engines know the correct address to index. It is possible for Google to read http://mydomain.com and http://www.mydomain.com as 2 separate pages, which could potentially trigger a duplicated content issue.

The project delivered a complete overhaul of the site with a new design, CMS and analytics service. As with all design projects we used user centred design techniques to ensure the site was focussed on the needs of the user:

“With an organisation of Interserve’s size there is always a pull to design the site around the needs of the company and not their clients.  We made a big effort with the design and information architecture to make sure we put the user first – simple terminology, intuitive navigation and information architecture and a really powerful site search powered by Google.  It’s these small things that make a big difference, helping users to quickly find the information they are looking for. ”
Amie Kabia, Lead Designer on the project

Interserve’s new site is powered by a new backend CMS that allows site managers to quickly and easily update the site in real-time with the minimum of effort.  As with any company listed on the London Stock Exchange financial information has to be released at precise times to comply with strict corporate governance rules.

To see the new site in action visit www.interserve.com