We all hate waiting and when it comes to the web, you have a limited window of opportunity to impress. If much of that window is spent waiting for a web page to load than navigating a site you’ve already blown it. Page load, page speed, download times – there are many names associated to this but it layman terms it means “how long does it take my website to load”. Page speed has become an important ranking factor and we’ve many reasons why you should care. Customer satisfaction and search engine optimisation. We’ve always been keen on website optimisation, which is why we try and save every kb we can. Earlier this year our youngest member of the team (software engineer Matt) started to develop our in-house framework and CMS RedPrism. The main reason for this was speed and security. ...
2015 has been a great year for NW Design and we would like to thank all our clients, new and old, for being a part of it. Over the past 12 months, we've seen the business grow tenfold in both the services we offer and the clients we've been working with. We've achieved a lot this year - our client base has grown substantially, and in the first quarter we were accredited by Google and given official partner status. We are the only creative marketing agency in Wigan & Leigh that has this status in PPC Adwords Marketing and Analytics. Last Christmas we were hand picked by entrepreneur and ex-Dragons Den star Theo Paphitis and won his small business award. In January, we met Theo and the team and on the back of this, we gained media coverage when the local press found out. At the 2nd quarter, we had expanded our full-service agency with our very own professional photographer, adding more value to the products and services that we offer. By the 3rd quarter, we were well underway with the creation of our very own bespoke framework and CMS, going by the name of RedPrism. The youngest member of the family has been working hard and putting his software engineering degree to good use. We did some security testing on various sites built by competitors and some of the results were pretty scary. These tests showed a lot more positivity when running against RedPrism! In the end, we've developed a fast, scalable framework that allows us to develop bespoke websites, and our templating engine lets us give you a pixel-perfect design! At the 4th quarter, PHP7 was released, and we've been developing our new web framework with this in mind. The main benefit is the noticeable increase in speed - it's up to twice as fast as PHP5.6! We've got the ball rolling and plan to move our websites over to a new fully dedicated and scalable cloud server in the new year. This step will benefit both ourselves and our clients and we feel that this is a worthwhile investment for NW Design as we head towards 2016 and beyond. If you'd like to work with us in 2016, please email us or call us on 0161 327 2131. ...
Brand consistency is important no matter how big or small your business is; you will benefit from developing and maintaining a recognisable brand. PoshPampaCampa VW Campervan Wedding hire specialists approached us to create them a Wedding Car Brochure, double sided leaflet and matching stationery that would tie in with their current brand identity. ...
Since moving our emails to Google Apps, we've always had intermittent issues with receiving emails from Hotmail, Live and Outlook email addresses. Google Apps is a fantastic tool with loads of additional features, but it's no good if you can't receive emails from their rivals over at Microsoft. ...
NW Design, a graphic design agency in Wigan with a passion for design and it’s this passion that has helped us provide creative solutions to companies, looking to expand their market share or develop their brand. ...
Google Shopping is a paid advertising service associated with Google Adwords that allows users to compare products between online retailers. In previous years, it was formally known as Google Product Search, Google Products & Froogle. Ironically froogle.com still exists but redirects to Google Shopping. This shopping service was initially marketed as free and allowed on-line retailers to list products free of charge and made revenue from Adwords-based adverts placed at the side of the SERP page. This changed when the entire product was re-branded in 2012 and became what is now Google Shopping, the paid service we now know and love! ...
Over the years Google Adwords (PPC Marketing) has become ever more popular and a necessity for many businesses, particularly those that sell online. But companies often forget the importance and benefit of creating the ideal "landing page experience" for those visiting the site. If the searcher isn't engaged, the dreaded high bounce rate which can be viewed in Google Analytics becomes inevitable. At NW Design we work closely with our PPC clients and help to improve their landing pages, making sure that when potential customers hit the site, they stay there. If you can imagine the person searching for your product/brand/service as a dog follows a scent. Once the dog loses that scent they begin to retrace their steps and start again. In this metaphor, if they don't find your product, they will start to look elsewhere. The web user is following a scent, a solution to a problem or a product so when they hit your landing page the scent will continue or come to a sudden end causing the searcher to go back and look elsewhere. When we customise landing pages, we do so for each Adwords, Adgroup and follow a few simple yet highly important rules. ...
We were recently asked to create a fully responsive website for a new business venture Provenance Food Hall & Restaurant in Westhoughton. Being local we have witnessed a fantastic transformation of what once was the old Toymaster store on Market Street into what is now Provenance Food Hall & Restaurant. ...
Understanding Citations
A citation is an online reference which refers to your business's name, address & phone number commonly known in the SEO world as (NAP). Like inbound links to your website, Google have started to use citations to evaluate the online authority of your business. Unlike links, citations don't need to be linked to your business's website in order for Google to credit you for them. So having you NAP listed in plain text on the likes of a free listing on SCOOT is just fine. What we call a partial citation is one which includes only part of your NAP; this could be maybe your name, contact number, or name & address. This is better than nothing at all but it isn't as beneficial as a full citation. A full citation should include your full business's NAP, it doesn't matter how it's listed horizontally or vertically but it "IS" important to be consistent. For your citation to help your business's local SEO it's important that it matches the exact details on your website and Google+ Local Business page. What format you decide to use is irrelevant but what is important is that you pick one format and stick with that. Your NAP needs to be 100% consistent in the name, (abbreviations? Plc?), address (suite number? floor?), and phone number (+44? spaces or no spaces?) used when building citations. ...
We create beautiful brands and marketing material affordable to Schools, FE and Colleges in and around the Northwest. These include a number of services from a simple leaflet, poster, popup stands to prospectus and student handbook design. At NW Design we are extremely proud of the highly creative and distinctive brochures that we produce for our clients. Not only will your school benefit from a professionally designed prospectus but we can also create branded student handbook like the 24 page handbook we recently designed for the Liverpool School of English. This new 24 page student handbook goes hand in hand with the schools prospectus keeping the brand inline between the two pieces of marketing literature. The student handbook consists of the schools curriculum, facilities, student welfare and code of conduct just to name a few. Your schools brand is important and to ensure our design for education remains consistent we can also provide you and your school a full set of brand guidelines outlining simple rules that will help to keep your brand consistent. ...
