You just flick a switch and it’s live, right?

Not quite.

This article explains a little about what happens when we spring into action when a client gives us the go ahead to launch a website…

Keyword whatnots

In all likelihood, we will have done keyword research right at the beginning of the website build, in order to make sure all the page names and content already include the key terms. However, we will now go over to the Google keyword tool and feed in some data, to get a good idea of what search terms are hitting the big time and which are languishing. We also look at competitor data to see if there are any hidden gems that no one knows about that we can use to get some quick wins.

Armed with this information, we will then go through the site with a fine-toothed comb, sprinkling the keywords in all the right places, including: unique titles, meta descriptions, keyword metatags, internal links and footer links. All this encourages Google to rank your site highly for exactly the right searches.

Watermarked images replaced with finals

If there are any stock photos in the site, then we’ll go ahead and make the final purchases, and replace the fuzzy watermarked ones with shiny, sharp versions.

Links checked

We use an automated link checker to double check all the links in the site and ensure none of them are broken – a no-no for any site, old or new.

Cross browser check

We carry out a final cross browser check to make sure nothing squiffy happens to the design if users decide to view it in a browser that we haven’t been using during the development process. As standard we support Firefox, Internet Explorer 7 and up, Chrome and Safari.

Submit the new site to the search engines

Not strictly necessary, as the search engines do their own crawls and will find all new sites anyway, but we like to do this in any case. If it gets the site climbing a few days earlier, then that can’t be bad.

Test emails and forms

The vast majority of our websites will come equipped with a contact form, so we make sure we test that that’s working hunkey dorey, as well as any email addresses we’ve set up.

Site registered and verified with Google

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, if you want your website to have any success, you have to keep Google happy. To that end, we register all websites with Google webmaster tools and Google analytics and verify ownership so they can let us know if they think anything’s amiss.

Google site map created and verified

Another small step in the googleification of the site, we create a Google standard sitemap, which lists all the pages in the site, and verify that sitemap with Google.

Non-content pages blocked from indexing

We use a robots.txt form to let Google know that we don’t really want it to index the legal disclaimer pages of the site – otherwise, due to the density of their content, they can bounce up to the top and don’t really look right all the way up there.

Depending on the site, there may be more steps we carry out – but there you have the standard elements of our website launch procedure!

Click here to read full article about website launch procedure and why a website is better than an advert in a newspaper

We were proud to create the new website for Grow Well Gardens, a fantastic landscape gardener in Leeds.

Grow Well Gardens is run by Rob, a charming fellow who really knows his Rhododendrons from his Azaleas.

Rob had a basic Flash website that wasn’t doing anything useful – not getting any leads and not really impressing clients who went there directly.

We did a brand new web design, bringing the visuals up to date, including lots of trust-building logos that represent the company’s qualifications, experience and associations, links to social media and comprehensive details of the various services offered.

You can check out the website here: www.growwellgardens.co.uk

We realised that pictures really say it all when it comes to gardening, so the site includes a range of high quality interactive slideshows which allow visitors to browse through a wide variety of before and after pictures. This builds trust and proves the quality of work, and also offers inspiration to new customers.

The website also features ‘A Year in a Garden’ page which offers visitors advice and tips on the most important things to do in their gardens at each of the different seasons. Offering free information like this serves several useful purposes – it builds trusts with visitors, who can see that the company really does have expertise, and it helps from an SEO point of view. That’s because Google loves content, and is more inclined to highly rank a website that offers good quality relevant content than one which just lists services and prices.

We’re pleased to report that the website shot to the top of the Google rankings for a range of relevant searches, and at the time for writing for on the front page for the searches:

•  Gardeners leeds
•  Landscape gardeners leeds
• Garden services leeds

Rob employs a team of enthusiastic gardeners and invests in high quality equipment, which means the efficiency and quality of the work is second to none. They handle everything from garden clearances to regular garden maintenance to fencing, turfing, patios and driveways and basically everything garden related.

If you need a gardener in Leeds and the surrounding area, they come highly recommended!

And of course if you’d like us to work similar magic on your website, then visit our main web design website.

Here is what Rob said about working with us:

As a business owner I recognise the importance of providing a friendly and professional service to clients and therefore I have high expectations of any business professionals that I choose to trust and work with.

Grow Well Gardens website was well overdue a complete re design, after speaking with a few different web designers I choose to use Sentiva.

The whole process was made clear from the start and was explained in a way so that even I could understand. Communication was great throughout so that I felt part of the process from beginning to end.

Kat and her team came up with a fantastic design which met and exceeded my expectations which is just what I need to push Grow Well Gardens forward.

The whole experience with Sentiva was a pleasure from the beginning to end and I would have no hesitation in recommending them to my friends, family and work colleagues.

Robert Vickers, Grow Well Gardens

In the past, it has been evident that the words in your domain name had a huge effect on your Google rankings for those words. Therefore it made sense to try to include your keywords in your domain name where possible – although as with everything, balance is important. You also had to take into account your company name / brand and how big a presence and draw that was. Of course, it’s also no good making a nonsensical keywords stuffed domain name.

However, recently Google have been making a big deal about the fact they’re going to be adjusting their algorithm to change all that.

On Twitter, Matt Cutts announced: ‘Minor Weather Report: small upcoming Google algo change will reduce low-quality “exact-match” domains in search results.’

What that suggests, is that where people have bought a domain name solely for the keywords in includes, in order to rank highly for that search term, but not put a decent website up there (just leaving a single page or very sparse or duplicated content), the keywords in the domain name will no longer be enough to keep it afloat.

Of course, if as well as having keywords in the domain name, a website has a wealth of great content, then it shouldn’t be affected by the EMD (each match domain) change to the algorithm.

As is always the case, the way to achieve and maintain good quality listings is by having the best website, with the best quality, unique content. Every time Google makes a change like this, it benefits those of us who play by the rules and makes life a little harder for those gaming the system.

We offer web design in Leeds. If you found this post useful, you might want to check out our web design and SEO resource bank.

This really is like asking how long is a piece of string - it hugely depends on what sort of web design  you're looking for. But I'll try to give a few guidelines, explaining the process, to help give a rough idea.

Technically, you could make a website in a few hours, if it was a simple html page (or possibly two or three), you didn't care too much how it looked and weren't worried about fancy graphics. However, it would take at least 24 hours to sort out the domain name and configuration, so unless this is already set up, a day or two is your absolute minimum.

However, this process only works if there is one person responsible for building and approving the site.

Once you bring a client into the picture, everything changes, because you have to go through a feedback and approval process. Assuming the website is built directly as above, that the client gives feedback immediately and doesn't want too many changes, you're looking at about a week minimum, or up to four weeks of back and forth if the initial design is too far from the vision and the communication process is inefficient.

However, for more complicated design, fiddling around with the code in order to make interface changes is inefficient, and means you end up with ugly code at the end that's been hacked about. It's better to get the design signed off before the coding is started. This means that a client approves a concept first, again, this could take as little as a week if the design is spot on and the client is prompot in feedback. Or it could take weeks, or even months, if either party is a bad communicator or dawdles with updates. Once that's done the coding should be much swifter and the only thing left to do is adding in the content - which can be quick if it's all ready and in good shape, or delay things greatly if it's not.

We've found a comfortable time frame for website design for a fairly standard small business website without any fancy back end, from initiation to launch is about six to eight weeks, and breaks down like this:

Concept web design and approval - two weeks
Development build - one week
Content insertion and fine tuning - two to three weeks (assuming it's ready and in good shape)
Final sign off and launch - one week.

Obviously if extra services are needed, such as database development or logo design, that's going to take longer.

Find out more about our Leeds web design services.