Category Archives: Website Design Wexford

Website Specification

Category: News Website Design Website Design Wexford

When you are deciding on a new website, it’s important to take into consideration a number of factors. As you can see on the graphic below, we’ve created a simple process to assist with this. This planning process is critical to ensure you have a clear picture in mind for a new website. Failing to cover these steps before a website is created can lead to items or processes to be overlooked and cause problems down the line.

At 2Cubed, we want to ensure you have a clear picture in mind when considering a new website and we can assist you fully with this process to ensure success.

What to consider?

Planning and building a new website is a complicated matter. Items can be overlooked and when a specification is not clear. A good starting point is to look at some websites you admire and list why you think so.

Design or Redesign?

Are you looking for a completely new design or a refresh of what you currently have?

Expectations

It’s crucial to consider your expectations when planning on a new website build. What is it that you are looking to achieve with the new site? Do you have any goals or ambitions for what you’re looking to achieve?

Information

What is your company all about? By documenting this, you can make it clear to your web design agency what you are all about and by using tag-lines, slogans, mottos etc to allow end users understand your ethos.

Budget

A new website is a huge investment and you’ll need to ensure you consider this carefully when developing a website specification. Defining a budget allows your agency to consider the expectations vs budget and help you plan accordingly.

Timeline / Deadline

Deadlines are a crucial are of the website specification. Setting a deadline firstly allows the entire project to be split into separate deliverables to keep all parties on the same page and to also ensure your expectations are met.

Functionality

Will your website users need to register? Are you selling products? At this point it’s beneficial to consider each and every element.

UI / UX

After you decide on budgets, timelines and functionality, how will this all transition into front end user interface and user experience? Many times, consideration of these factors is left aside and may become an issue in future as the website is out the to the world.

Further Information

Thinking about any extra information or off topic items considered outside the above ensures clarity when moving forward with your web design project.

At 2Cubed Web Design & Development, we are on hand to assist you with developing your website specification, helping you to understand in detail what’s involved in a new website project. We also offer a number of services to help you grow your online presence. Check out our list of services – https://2cubed.ie/services/

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Google’s Mobile Search Update

Category: News SEO Website Design Website Design Wexford

You may have noticed a new layout while searching Google recently on your mobile device. Around the end of May, Google released an updated visual layout for the mobile search results page. This refresh was released to introduce a more modern and user friendly layout. Google say “we’re unveiling a visual refresh of the mobile search results page to better guide you through the information available on the web.” This was referenced on the Google blog here.

The familiar green font on the ads has now been changed to a black label with a simple ‘Ad’ reference. See below for reference:

As you’ll see from the above image, what Google have implemented is an opportunity for companies online to introduce their branding to users on the web before even landing on your site. This is done by using the favicon image which is uploaded on most websites. You’ll generally see this small icon on your browser tab while searching from a desktop or laptop.

What does this mean for me?

In order to take advantage of this update, you’ll need to make sure your website has an active favicon set and specified. There are some rules behind this:

Your website and the favicon need to be crawlable to Google (meaning you need to ensure your site is fully accessible to Google’s Spider). This can be a complicated issue, but we can help you with this if required – Contact Us
The favicon should be similar to your overall branding on your website. This will allow users to identify and recognise your brand online with ease.
Google will resize your favicon to 16px x 16px. They recommend uploading your file in multiples of 48px square to ensure clarity. For example, 48×48 or 96×96 etc.
Any favicon that Google see to be inappropriate will be removed and replaced with a default icon image.

At 2Cubed Web Design & Development, we can assist you with any of the needs above, allowing you to take advantage of this latest Google update. We offer a number of services to help you grow your online presence. Check out our list of services – https://2cubed.ie/services/

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5 Great Reasons Why You Should Develop Your Website on WordPress

Category: SEO Tips and Tricks Website Design Website Design Wexford

WordPress is a content management system (CMS), which means it’s designed to help you organize and display the content on your website. The most popular CMS chosen by people to develop their website on is WordPress.

Here’s 5 great reasons why WordPress is the CMS platform of choice for many:

Free to use

WordPress is a free to use platform which means it’s perfect for those on a small budget especially for start up businesses. If you want to buy a specific theme to give your website a unique design there can be a small cost but to use and download the WordPress tool is absolutely free.

Easy to use interface

WordPress are renowned for their easy to use interface. It’s actually a very simple and fast process to get a WordPress website created and up running. While doing the more complex customisations may require some research beforehand most people will be able to get their website from beginning to live in a matter of minutes.

Secure and Safe

WordPress is a cms that is very secure and safe. This is because WordPress makes it very simple to update your software and ensure it is all up to date. Ensuring your software is up to date will help to keep hackers away from your website. Updating your software couldn’t be easier as all you have to do to update plugins and themes is to click the checkboxes next to them and click the update button. There is also an option to enable auto updates so you won’t have to remember to manually check.

SEO Friendly

WordPress websites rank higher than other types of websites in search engines. Google and other search engines love WordPress and treat it favourably because as WordPress is very SEO friendly. WordPress also allows you the ability to use SEO plugins to further optimise and enhance your website’s SEO.

Easy to Customise

WordPress makes the process of customising your website easy regardless of whether you are tech savvy or not. To effectively use WordPress it is not a requirement to have prior knowledge of designing websites. WordPress offers users the choice of thousands of free templates and themes from which to choose from. WordPress themes are easy to customise and allow you to manually add custom functionality to your website through the use of plugins. This customisation allows you to put your own unique spin on your website.

WordPress is without a doubt the best CMS system to use. To inquire about using the WordPress CMS for your website get in touch with 2Cubed today.

For advice and information on having a successful website contact 2Cubed today!

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3 Common Google Ads Mistakes to Avoid Making

Category: SEO Tips and Tricks Website Design Website Design Wexford

Recently we discussed how to evaluate whether your PPC campaign is worth it? In this post we will discuss 3 common Google Ads mistakes that people make all too often in their PPC Campaigns.

Not enough ads per group

Less is certainly not more when it comes to ads in your ad group. Google recommends that it is best practice to have at least three ads per ad group. If you only have one ad then you aren’t giving Google’s machine learning technology the proper chance to analyze and prioritize the ads that are expected to perform better.

Bad Landing Page

While getting a lot of traffic from Google Ads is a good thing, if you aren’t getting conversions out of these hits then it’s simply a waste of money. One big reason why you may be failing to get conversions is if your landing page is poor, if your landing page is poor people will land on your page, be unimpressed and leave without you converting them which means they cost you money and you got nothing in return. To ensure that your landing page is good you should ensure the following:

It loads fast
It has a clear Call to Action
It’s easy to read and navigate
It speaks to the audience who your ad is targeted at

Not taking advantage of Location Settings

To ensure that the right people, your target market see your ad you need to configure the location settings. If you only wish for your ad to be seen in a specific county, province or country you can do so through here. For instance, if your ad is aimed at businesses in Wexford then it shouldn’t be appearing in Dublin, Cork etc.. By taking advantage of location settings you can ensure that your budget will be spent on the right places.

By ensuring that you avoid these 3 common Google Ads mistakes you will minimise the risk of wasting your ads budget and greatly increase your chances of getting your target market to see and click on your ads and most importantly get conversions to your website from your successful PPC campaign.

For advice and information on having a successful website contact 2Cubed today!

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Importance of Google Reviews for SEO

Category: SEO Tips and Tricks Website Design Website Design Wexford

Whether it’s from word of mouth or testimonials reviews have always been an integral part of a business’s success. The positive impact of great reviews for a business cannot be underestimated nor can the negative impact of bad reviews.

Reviews help potential new customers to decide whether they should choose your business over another, having positive reviews from past clients will instill confidence in them that they will experience the same satisfaction as those before them who left the positive reviews. If your website for instance had no reviews then a customer may feel unsure whether they will receive a good service as they have no past precedent or frame of reference to base their decision off. Having reviews can provide this much needed clarity.

While getting reviews from customers has always been an exercise that is beneficial to businesses, the importance of Google Reviews for SEO has never been greater. By having Google reviews you can actively improve the visibility of your business on Google so this means that Google reviews are good for your SEO.

The reason Google reviews have become so important for SEO is that when people use the Google search engine Google will aim to generate the most relevant and beneficial results for local web searches as the quality and quantity of reviews on Google is one of the most important ranking factors for local SEO. Google looks to see how many reviews your business has and what your current average rating is and from here they will determine where exactly in the listings of the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) you should appear. Google themselves have even stated in the past that the “highest-rated” businesses near you will be returned when you search with local intent. By having your listing appear high with a great rating and a lot of reviews potential customers will be a lot more likely to click on to your website over your competitors and you will be a lot more likely to get conversions from these people.

A great part of any SEO strategy is to ensure that you can regularly get customers to give your business a review.

The best way to encourage people to give your business a review is to ensure the following:

Great Customer Service

By offering all customers a great customer service they will be happy and happy customers are a lot more susceptible to give you a positive review and share their good experience.

Simple Review Process

As well as ensuring that the customer service you offer is great, the second thing you should do to encourage reviews is to make the actual process of leaving you a review simple, straightforward and easy. The easier the process is the more likely people will be to take a second and give you a review. Don’t make the customer work for it!

2Cubed provide award-winning web design and mobile app development services. If you would like to give 2Cubed Web Design a review please click the link below:

CLICK HERE TO GIVE REVIEW

For advice and information on having a successful website contact 2Cubed today!

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Is my PPC Campaign worth it?

Category: Tips and Tricks Website Design Wexford

Pay-per-click, commonly known as PPC, is a paid advertising strategy which is used to get your ad in front of your target demographic. When your PPC campaign is effective it can become a brilliant source of lead generation to your website. However conversely if your campaign is ineffective and is costing you money without giving you the leads and results you envisioned it can quickly become a very dear misadventure.

If you find yourself spending a lot of money on ads and PPC but still aren’t seeing good results then you need to take a step back and ask yourself the question “Is my PPC Campaign worth it?”. By taking a step back and evaluating the effectiveness or lack thereof of your campaign you can determine whether you need to tweak your campaign for better and improved results or whether you need to pause your campaign entirely and go back to the drawing board.

You need to be sure before you delete a PPC campaign because when you do you will lose all of its data and will be unable to retrieve any of it back. Before you delete an underperforming campaign you should first evaluate it and see if you can apply some tweaks to fix it and turn it into a strong performing campaign. To ensure your PPC campaign can perform as strongly as possible ensure that you have considered and took the following into account:

Evaluate Your Chosen Keywords:

For any PPC campaign to be successful it needs to incorporate the right keywords. These keywords need to be relevant to your target demographic. By undergoing proper keyword research before you start your campaign you can minimise the risk that you will incorporate irrelevant keywords in your campaign.

Landing Page Optimisation:

Your landing page will be the first impression for the users who you will get through your PPC campaign. Thus it is vital that your homepage gives a good first impression, by ensuring that the page is correctly optimised to give a good user experience you will increase your chances of getting conversions from your paid traffic. There is no point getting people to your website just for them to have a bad user experience and bounce, that will simply cost you money and give you nothing in return.

Created Ads:

Lastly you need to ensure that the ads themselves that you create need to be appealing and enticing enough to get people to click on them. To ensure that your ad speaks to your target audience incorporate the main keywords (which you will have discovered from your keyword research) into them and include a snippet that will act as a powerful and intriguing call to action.

Before you give up on your PPC campaign make the tweaks. By making these tweaks you should see an improvement in your PPC campaign and generate better results. For advice and information on having a successful website get in touch with 2Cubed today!

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Mobile-First Indexing and SEO

Category: Tips and Tricks Website Design Wexford

Mobile-First indexing was introduced by Google as an effort to make websites on the internet more mobile friendly. According to trends more users use mobile than desktop when browsing, so in accordance with this user behaviour trend Google have placed a higher emphasis on how a website is designed and works on mobile than on desktop. At its core mobile-first indexing means that when Google index websites and determine their ranking on a wide range of factors that they are basing their judgement firstly on how the website looks and performs on mobile rather than desktop. Since Google now actually indexes sites on a mobile first approach it means that they are first ranking your site on how responsive and how well designed it is for mobile.

If you are unsure whether your website is being negatively impacted it’s important to remember not to panic. According to Google themselves if your website is already responsive on mobile or if both versions on mobile and desktop are the same already then your rankings may not be affected at all.

However, it should be noted that even if your website is a very responsive site to rank well with mobile-first indexing in practice you need to ensure that both your website’s mobile page speed and it’s load time are fast and efficient and that all images are optimised correctly so that the user experience on mobile is not compromised or hindered in any way. By ensuring that your website looks great on a mobile device firstly you can be safe in the knowledge that it will then translate brilliant to other devices. That’s because if you design for the smallest screen first it will be a lot easier to successfully replicate on a big screen rather than if you were to take the opposite approach.

Designing for mobile first means that you have to design within it’s tighter limitations, while initially this may sound like a negative, it is actually a good thing because it will force you to really prioritize the content you display as you will have no room for extra fluff or fat. This helps to ensure that the all important user experience you deliver will be the best possible. When Google looks at your website as part of mobile-first indexing and determines that you are delivering an optimal user experience as well as having a website that looks and works well on mobile they will look favourably upon you and you will rank well so obviously it is great for your SEO.

For advice and information on having a successful website get in touch with 2Cubed today!

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3 Questions You Need to Ask When Getting a Web Design Quote

Category: Tips and Tricks Website Design Wexford

When you have made the decision to embark on the journey of getting your very own website for your business you may start to feel overwhelmed with where do you actually begin in this entire Web Development process. Well unless you are a web developer yourself the first step is to seek out a web design agency and get a quote from them to develop a website that you have envisioned.

Getting a web design quote is easy, what’s hard is wading through the plethora of quotes and finding the right web design agency who offers you a web design quote that is not only suitable for your budget but also that you can entrust to make your vision of the perfect website a reality.

Whilst money and cost is obviously a big deciding factor when choosing a web design quote there are also some other very important factors that shouldn’t be ignored when choosing which web design quote is the right one for you. In fact, ignoring these factors in favour of a “cheaper” quote might well cost you more in the long term when it comes to fixing website issues and problems that could have been easily prevented by going with the right web design agency for you. The following are questions one should always ask themselves:

- Will the Website be bespoke?
  
  This is a very important question to ask as this well ensure that you weed out any web design agencies who simply just use templates when developing websites. By ensuring that the web design agency you choose creates bespoke websites ensures that your website will have it’s very own unique web design and style which will make it stand out from the competition.

- - What Platform will be used?
    
    It’s important to know what cms (Content Management System) your website will be developed on such as WordPress, Drupal etc… It’s important to know what platform your website will be designed and developed on because at the end of the project when you take control of the website you will need to be familiar with the CMS to actively be able to make changes and run the website yourself from a content management point of view.
- What projects has the company worked on before, portfolio?
  
  Does the company have a portfolio of their previous work? If so make sure to check out some of these websites. By looking at how they are designed and working you will get a good insight into what your website will end up being like when fully designed and developed. If your website is focusing on a certain industry such as beauty or pharmaceuticals make sure to check if the web design agency has past experience with creating websites for other businesses in the same industry as yours.

Choosing a web design quote from a web design agency is a huge decision and one that shouldn’t be made lightly. By asking yourself the above questions you can minimise the risk that you make a bad choice.

2Cubed are an Award Winning Website Design company in Ireland with offices based in Wexford & Dublin. 2Cubed provide a range of online services for small and medium enterprises including Web Design, Web Development, and eCommerce Website Design. We offer well-designed and appointed websites for all levels of business. 2Cubed Web Design Wexford and Dublin also helps monitor and assist your progress post-launch, so that you’re given every chance of growing your website or application into a booming online business.

Please click on the link below to get a web design quote.

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The importance of an SSL Cert & HTTPS for your Website

Category: Tips and Tricks Website Design Wexford

If your website does not have an SSL cert then you are severely limiting the chances of your website being successful. In August 2018 Google began to flag websites who had not gotten an SSL Certificate for their website. This means that Google will mark all websites that have not already migrated to HTTPS as being “not secure”.

An SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is the standard security technology for establishing an encrypted link between a web server and a browser. This link ensures that all data passed between the web server and browsers remain private and integral. If you don’t have the SSL certificate, a secure connection cannot be established, that means, your company information will not be digitally connected to a cryptographic key.

When you wish to ensure that your website ranks consistently well on search engines you need to make it clear not only to Google but also potential new users that your website is safe to use and to browse on. By having an SSL Certificate your website will display as HTTPS and will not have the “Not Secure” message which will instill confidence in all users on the website that it is safe to browse and to use their credit card details to purchase any products/services that you may offer. Having HTTPS also instills confidence in Google who will reward you by pushing your website up the rankings higher than it would if your website was still HTTP.

Switching to HTTPS is simply the logical move, not only does it give your site more security, but it will also improve your rankings. To get your site to switch to HTTPS you will need to have an SSL Certificate. To inquire about getting an SSL certificate for your site get in touch with us today!

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The Importance of Great Web Design for Great User Experience

Category: Tips and Tricks Website Design Wexford

In the world of Web Design & Web Development the goal of User Experience (UX) is to ensure that all users who visit your website have a positive experience whilst browsing on it. To ensure they have a positive User Experience the Web Design of the website should be done in a way which means the user can easily interact with the website and all of its respective functions and that none of their time is wasted and they are not frustrated in any way. Basically at its core the goal of delivering a great User Experience is to get your website successful conversions and repeat traffic because the users who visited the website had a good experience.

To ensure your website has a web design that will deliver a great user experience the web and graphic designers working on it need to put themselves in the mindframe of the target demographic of users who will be visiting the website. User Experience is so important as it is what bridges the gap between users and the website and when done well it will hold their attention and keep them on the website.

To ensure that your Web Design will create a website with a great User Experience one should do the following:

Take on board fully all user feedback when testing the website and all information about user behaviour from tools such as Google Analytics
Ensure that your web design is consistent throughout the entire website which will give the website a natural flow
Ensure that your website page speed is very fast and that the page load times are good so that users will not get frustrated/bored/leave the website.
Tailor your web design always with the user experience in mind

By having a website that has a Web Design that delivers a great user experience you will actively increase your chances of gaining followers to your website and making it a success. The best way to achieve this is to have consistent web design that is easy to navigate, easy to use with great functionality all developed always with the user in mind.

If you would like to inquire about improving your website’s design and user experience please contact 2Cubed and get your business the traffic and success it deserves. You can call us on 01-9058114 or 051-440425, email hello@2cubed.ie or else get in touch using the live chat on our website!

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