Areoff

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"Our website from Areoff makes us £millions"read more
Simon Burgess, Managing Director, British Insurance

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Content, Diary

Taking a closer look at FAQ’s

We are currently redesigning an insurance website for our client and as part of this process, the content is being carefully considered and reworded.

We are now looking at the content on the FAQ’s page. This is one of the most important pages on an insurance website because you can be held liable for what information you provide here since you are providing specific answers to real and/or likely questions posed by customers.

Not only do you need to ensure that the FAQ’s are factually correct but it is also worth the time and investment in crafting wording that is easy to understand and engaging – an approach that is largely absent in policy documents. After all, it is the FAQ page that is an popular ‘bolt-hole’ for visitors to your website when they cannot make sense of the insurance policy documents. So if this page doesn’t make things clear, then you could have lost a golden opportunity to provide information to users in a more straightforward, bite-sized way and assist them make a decision about whether your insurance is right for them.

We provide a professional website copywriting service to our insurance clients to enable them to communicate effectively to visitors in order to sell more policies, while at the same time being sensitive towards FSA compliancy.

November 13, 2009 |
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Diary, SEO

Good natural SEO by default

I have just been speaking to a prospective client who sells insurance for nursery fees and childminding. They have had their website designed at quite considerable expense by a web development agency who have government bodies and the NHS amongst their clients.

Our prospect described them as “experienced” and a “professional outfit” and explained that their supplier designs websites for the NHS and other government bodies.

However, the website that this web design company has put together is completely lacking in even the basic page structure and information vital for Search Engines including meta data and header tags. For example the title tag for the home page of the site is simply “Home”. Another example is the home page of the ‘nursery’ section which is entitled ‘Nursery’.

Not only is this disregard for proper meta data inadequate from a SEO perspective but also presents a poor user experience. If a user has several web-pages minimised on their computer, and this particular site displays a generic title such as “Home”, little is done to remind the user what this particular site was about - this can only be negative and possible lead to a lost interest, enquiries and possibly sales.

While it would be fair to expect a web development company specialising in public sector web design to include relevant and informative meta-data for every page of a website they develop, it is probably true that they are not considering the wider SEO benefits of good page structure since. Why? Because, natural SEO may well be a low priority for a public health campaign website in favour of paid (PPC) and offline advertising.

When we undertake website design for insurance clients or companies operating in any other sector we deliver natural SEO friendly web-pages by default. It is true that things like meta-data are changed because marketing messages and target audiences are refined but the basics have to be present on the site from day one, not just for SEO but for your users as well.

November 3, 2009 |
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Diary, SEO

The launch is just the start

We have just launched http://www.british.co.uk which we built using a CMS to enable our clients to easily publish news and features on a regular basis. Our client said “I have used a number of CMS’s throughout my career in journalism but the one you recommended and used is by far the simplest and most powerful I have come across”.

Areoff have put all the SEO and marketing infrasctructure in place while building the site and this includes:

  • Semantic URL’s - web addresses that make sense to search engines and users
  • Correct header tag structure - each page is structured effectively so search engines can easily detect the relevance of it’s content
  • Inclusion of social media sharing tools
  • Implementation of automatic site-map submissions to all major search engines

These are just a small number of things we have put in place to ensure that the websites we produce are naturally friendly and visible to search engines from the very outset.

But now the work really starts as our client obviously wants to promote their site on the internet to achieve a regular stream of visitors who will sign up to their news service as well as advertisers buying space on their pages.

So we held a training day with them to go through all the things they can do to improve the visibility of their content on the internet as they publish each news story and feature article. We don’t just instruct our clients to do certain things because “it’s good for SEO” but we explain why these things are beneficial to the visibility of their websites on search engines. All of these practices are simple to implement with the CMS we used to build our clients site. They include:

  • Creating relevant and unique title, description and keyword tags for each post/article published
  • Adding new categories for particular posts to increase relevance
  • Sharing each post/article to social networking sites as they are published
  • Add keyword links to other relevant stories on the site

There were many other strategies and practices discussed and the nature of these changes from client to client depending on their goals and needs. W get together with our clients on a regular basis to discuss other methods of increasing the quality of their website over and above simply publishing more and more content.

The cliche is ‘quality rather than quantity’. This is very true of content on the internet. It is increasingly important to publish, index, categorise, link and present content in a way that is relevant to users and therefore to search engines as well if you want your site to be visible and successful in Google and other search engines.

October 30, 2009 |
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Design and Build, Diary, Website design

Imagery for insurance websites

We have just purchased a set of images for a general insurance website design we are working on currently for our client.

We recommended royalty free (RF) images since these are affordable and come without the restrictions on usage that are common with rights-managed images.

Royalty free-images have these benefits:

  • Unlimited usage - when you purchase aRF image, it can be used virtually anywhere for as long as our client wishes and across different projects. This means that for a relatively low cost our client has access to high-quality images that they are a re-usable asset for an indefinite amount of time.
  • Creative flexibility - we are licensed to crop and manipulate RF images as we see fit. For example we might decide  the character that monochrome images have would work well for a particular project - with RF images we are free to manipulate the images we have purchased in this way.
  • Affordability - the cost of RF images is based on the file size and resolution, not on the usage. We always advise our clients to spend a bit more and go for larger images than might be needed for small thumbnails on an insurance website. This then enables these same images can be reused elsewhere on paper-based advertising for example, where a bigger higher resolution/larger image is required.

It is true that because RF images are not licensed exclusively to the purchaser there is the risk that an identical image is being used by a competitor and we always stress this scenario to our clients when advising on types of image licensing. If budget and usage is less of a consideration than exclusivity, then of course rights-managed images win-hands down as they are only used by one client in any particular time period.

So to reduce the risk purchasing RF images that have been seen on insurance websites, brohures and other advertising spaces many times before we use image libraries like Getty Images. Their RF images are more expensive than micro-stock providers such as istockphoto.com but for this reason they tend not to over-purchased and used in 100’s if not 1000’s of designs.  In this way we balance cost against non-exclusivity when selecting and purchasing imagery for our client’s websites.

October 2, 2009 |
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Diary, website redesign

Solving issues with a website redesign

We are currently redesigning a website for a Jewellers based in the City of London.

They came to us with 3 specific problems facing their existing website that was developed for them several years ag. All of the issues are based around the fact the website was built using Flash at a time when issues which have subsequently become important were not a major consideration:

  • the site doesn’t load or display properly in several browsers/platforms
  • it is hard to update since the website designers are no longer in business and there is no access to original source files for the flash animations.
  • There is almost no SEO evident on the site due to the site being entirely built in flash.

So our brief is to redesign the website so that not only is it visually brought up to date (although this was also a consideration) but also so it is easier to update and is optimised for search engines to take advantage of the bespoke nature of their products and services within their geographic area.

We will rebuild the website using non-flash technology so that the website displays properly in all browsers and on all platforms. We are integrating a CMS into the website so that our client can easily amend, add and delete products and content themselves from their premises, allowing them to promote the one-off nature of their products as they come into stock. And at the same time our redesign will be naturally search engine friendly from the outset with each product in their stock being displayed on individual and semantically named pages, automatically linked across the site and promoted to search engines via a site-map.

Our redesign will provide the reassurance of a future-proofed website since we are using a well known CMS that is widely supported amongst website development companies and provides a wealth of features as our client requires them. This means that going forward our client can be assured that their investment in a website redesign will be realised for years to come.

September 30, 2009 |
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Diary, Website design

The divergent costs for IFA website design

Areoff recently provide a quote to an IFA for redesigning their website.

After studying our quotation to provide website redesign, usability, SEO as well as an option for putting a CMS for editing pages and publishing new content, they commented that our costs were ‘considerably divergent’ from a quotation they received from a leading telecommunications company.

Their alternative quote was 50% cheaper than ours.

However, when I studied their quotation which our prospective client was kind enough to share with us I immediately noticed that there was also a considerable divergence in the website design service being offered. These were the main features of their quotation:

  • We will create a maximum of 6 pages including a contact form.
  • We offer a choice of colour schemes, and 6 different site and navigation layouts.
  • We offer the option of one Image Rotator, scrolling up to 5 images.
  • You may supply up to 2 images per page in your page content.
  • The contact form will collect name, e-mail address and a message from anyone wishing to contact you.

This suggest that they would receive a very rigidly structured template based website instead of the bespoke build Areoff provides to all it’s clients. And what happens if you want more than 6 pages in your website, which is more than conceivable, if not immediately, then maybe in a few months.

Their quotation also made absolutely no reference to SEO friendly features like the inclusion of proper and complete meta-data, header tags, DIV/XHTML page structure and semantic URL’s amongst other things that Areoff always provide as part of a website design service - our believe is that a website should be search engine ‘ready’ from day-one.

Lastly, the telecommunication provider’s proposal made no mention of a CMS which is crucial if a client wants to be able to edit existing wording and add new content to their website. The benefit of a CMS such as the packages Areoff offers is that it goes a long way towards future-proofing a website since it enables the client to add on a whole host of additional features as they need them like blog posts/news, calendars, additional forms, galleries, polls. And a CMS allows you to have as many pages as you like for no extra charge, which has to be a better deal than the ‘pay-as-you-add-pages’ approach that was proposed to our client in the alternative quote.

So our message to all IFA’s looking to have a new website designed or an existing one redesigned: look at the value that is being provided to you by a design/development company rather than just the bottom line cost. More often than not the cheaper of the two proposals can end up working out more expensive - less visibility on search engines due to a poor build, fewer conversions from your website due to poor usability and inferior levels of interaction with visitors, and the ongoing hidden costs of adding and amending content on your website.

September 29, 2009 |
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