[Website Designers] Thanks for your enquiry about a new website, firstly I am very impressed at the amount and ‘appropriateness’ of your questions, probably one of the more detailed enquires we have got for a while for a ‘standard’ website. Anyway, as to your questions, I will answer them but I feel there is one big part missing.
You have stated you are in the process of setting up a wedding planning company specialising in weddings abroad but my question are:
- What part does the website play in this?
- What do you want the website to do / achieve?
You have stated that you want couples to have a subdomain / directory page of their wedding on your site and you want to add more pages to your portfolio but from what I can make out you want the website to be featured highly in the search engine when people search for
‘weddings abroad’ but what exactly is the website to do? I am jumping to the assumption from your questions that you want it to offer information about weddings / wedding packages in different countries and then offer people wedding packages with the ‘goal’ of getting people to phone / email you to get more information / bookings.
Regardless of the answers to your questions we can take on your website project and produce and promote a website online for your new business exactly how you want it to operate and look.
Feel free to phone / email to make me clarify any point, you can meet at our office in Stanford-le-hope in Essex (where are you?) or we can do it all via email / telephone
I also have some concerns about your ideas about search engines rankings and should probably talk to you about this as it can tricky to describe how search rankings work. Needless to say we have real worldwide / national and local ranked websites that rank in the top 3 of their most competitive search terms in the top 3 search terms.
We normally give a questionnaire to clients to fill in, will send that once we have chatted.
Take a look below for my answers to your questions and feel free to ask more or ask me to explain more thoroughly about any point.
[Website Client] The main aim of the website is to make couples aware we exist, display our locations with essential location information and give couples the details required for them to decide to use our service. Essentially our website has to be designed to perfection as I have viewed many websites I don’t like, concluding that if their website is poor it doesn’t give me confidence in the company. Obviously being a wedding planning company confidence in our abilities is essential and hence why I plan to get the website completed professionally.
The website will also be a link for couples to access their personal wedding pages, I presume this would work from some login feature?
Overall the websites purpose is to provide the necessary information for people to contact us with enquiries, that we hope will turn into them using our wedding planning service. We do not want couples to be able to book hotels, wedding venues etc on our actual website (we don’t want it to be like a travel booking website) as we plan to provide a service, which includes making all the necessary bookings ourselves.
Regarding Domain Names I would appreciate more information regarding search features and rankings. Do you advise we use .com or .co.uk?
Regarding hosting, I am more than happy to change to the most effective one if the existing hosting company will cause a problem.
I know the type of logo I would like and I don’t feel the other website hosting company would provide me with what I am seeking. I would like one designed please as I am seeking a high calibre overall design, so I don’t want the logo to compromise this, happy for you to provide me with costings?
Website Images will be a key component, we have some of our own photography we plan to use, however we are checking with the hotels regarding using images from their own website to market their hotel/venue. Regarding flash and HTML5 would the website be able to have pictures that rotate or move off and a new one appears (hope you understand what I’m taking about) without having flash? I would also like under for example location 1 for there to be a picture gallery but when clients click on the picture is enlarges and then they can scroll through them as larger images, is this possible?
Happy to do as much work myself as possible to help with the costings, I have built my own basic website before using the other website hosting company templates but obviously am not an IT expert 🙂
We are based in Chafford Hundred. If you could let me know regarding the above and based on this provide us with a quote please? I am happy to speak with you if you require any additional information before providing us with costings.
I look forward to hearing back from you.
[Essex Website Designers]
Thanks for the reply, we understand what you want and need now, here are some more thoughts:
Personal Pages
You talked about couples having access to their personal wedding pages, and that this could work from some login feature. I would suggest that this could be achieved but this may end up being a high-intensity / low reward exercise for you and if anything you would want the couple to have all their details put in a ‘testimonial’ that benefits your site instead of being a hidden page. I quite like the idea of having an open page that they can view and their relatives can view but think this could be a drain on your time / resources in keeping this updated.
Domain Names
If you are UK based company that caters to UK clients then either domain is fine for your primary domain, we can utilise both but the .com will require us to tell the search engines its a UK based company. Domain is down to your personal choice. If you have big aspirations we can utilise the other domain as a ‘satellite’ site for advanced optimisation in future.
Website Images
Can answer ‘yes’ to everyone of your questions, we can do some very ‘clever’ and advanced things with images and image galleries. Can show you your choices when you visit.
Its still tricky to give a quote, as just the logo, if you insist on having a full illustrated logo could cost between £100 – £300+ (£150 is common).
Have a look at the attached questionnaire and please fill out any bit of info we haven’t discussed, we are especially interested in sites you like and ‘example websites’
[Website Client] I’m not sure if the couple would want an open page that everyone can view as I guess the exclusivity of having their own login that guests are given may suit our Clients better. Obviously once the wedding is over we can delete is all (if the client wants us to). Would need to have multiple logins for multiple clients though if this is possible? Can I ask why an open page would be more hard work then a login page, as won’t it be the same pages? Happy to consider both options but I would want their websites to have a few tabs each. Happy to have a testimony page with quotes from couples we have worked with but not initially, until we have built up our reputation.
What do you mean by satellite site please? Do you mean people would go to .com and then link off to .co.uk…?
I presume the graphic designer designs the logo from scratch on the computer and we can be used on other things besides the website i.e. stationary, business cards etc going forward? I do know what I want for the logo but I would want it to appear high quality.
For the results in google, how realistic is it to be in the top 10? Also I believe things have to be updated regularly for this to happen, is this something I could manage or would/does your company do this?
Based on everything we have discussed so far do you have an overall price in mind…obviously aware this is only an estimate? Happy to email the form back to you.
[Essex Website Designers] I think an open / closed page that you are responsible for is a good idea but it may be a drain on your time (just my thoughts) There is no difference on your time for an open / closed page in terms of your time / effort but an open page that is linked from your site would benefit your website (from a website SEO – promotion) perspective.
Satellite sites are advanced SEO ideas where you can have one or more related websites pointing to the ‘main’ site, we have used this technique previously.
Logo – Yes designed from scratch and after you give a idea of what you want then you get some choices of design that can be used for all media / marketing as well as it being used on the website.
Top 10 rankings is something we get asked every day, answers are the same for any business. Firstly you need to understand that top rankings for non-competitive / local search terms are easy but competitive national terms are more difficult. That is why its always better to begin by concentrating on local areas first. Therefore ‘Wedding Planning Service Essex’ would be less competitive than ‘Wedding Holidays’. Rankings are very visible and what people concentrate on mainly but total website visitors are more important and can demonstrate this to you during our meeting.
Email the form back giving example sites, website size, and if you want to create your own text (webcopy) or want us to do it then we can give an estimate or choice of options with different prices.
[Website Client] Thanks I’ll get the form back to you today and look forward to receiving your costings. Can I just ask how do websites get on the first page of Google? When I search weddings abroad or destination weddings some of the websites in my opinion are not great and I therefore wonder how they get there? Understand your point regarding specific search terms.
[Essex Website Designers] Thanks the million pound question, actually its probably a billion pound question.
In general there are over 200 factors that determine where sites rank, luckily we are good at making sites rank highly and can give you an idea of what’s involved when we meet. It’s such a big subject I could write about it all week but needless to say we can demonstrate that we can produce results with previous client’s websites being used as examples.
Get your website questionnaire sent and will review it. Do you have a budget or timescale for your project?
New Thurrock business?
Thinking of starting a new business and need a website? Get in touch and we can give you some great advice without any pressure or hard sales talk info@essex-web-designers.co.uk.