Writings

What a good website takes these days.

Less than you fear, more than a template. Most business websites fail quietly: nobody complains, the phone just does not ring as often as it should. Here is what a good one takes now, without the jargon.

It has to be clear in a few seconds.

A visitor should know what you do, who it is for and what to do next before they scroll. Most sites bury that under a slideshow and a welcome message. Say the thing. Put the phone number, the enquiry form or the shop where a thumb can reach it.

It has to work on a phone first.

Most of your visitors are on a phone, often standing somewhere, often in a hurry. A site that looks lovely on a designer's monitor and clumsy on a phone is a clumsy site. We design for the phone and let the desktop version follow.

It has to be fast and findable.

Speed is a courtesy and a ranking factor. So is structure: proper page titles, headings that say what the page is about, images with real descriptions, and a few pages written for the things people actually search for. None of this is magic. It is tidy work done properly, which is rarer than it should be.

• Pages that load in a blink, on an ordinary connection.
• Titles and descriptions written for people, which is what search engines reward now.
• A Google Business Profile that matches the website and is kept up to date.

It has to be looked after.

This is the part that gets skipped. A website is not a thing you buy once. Products change, prices change, the people change. A site that nobody owns goes stale in a year and starts to cost you quietly. Someone has to be in charge of it, and it should not have to be you at eleven at night.

It helps to have people like us.

You can do a lot of this yourself, and some businesses do. But if you would rather spend your time on the business, hire people who do this every day. We design and build websites for businesses in Dublin and across Ireland, we connect them to the catalogue, the orders and the admin behind them, and we look after them afterwards. We take on a small number of clients at a time, so the work gets done properly.