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This is often the last item on most people’s check list when it comes to building a successful website.

If your website host isn’t up to scratch you could end up with the best looking website in the world, but still be plagued with slow loading times and error messages popping up for customers and visitors to the website.

Putting SEO aside for a second, an efficient hosting package for your target market can dramatically increase the speed for local customers offering them the best experience possible when browsing your website.

Adding items to the shopping cart and browsing the more technically demanding pages would be a much less painful experience for impatient customers who can be critical about such things when choosing to part with their money.

If you already have a locally hosted website (a UK customer base on a UK host), and are still having problems with speed, then there are a few things you could try.

For example, for websites using PHP you could deploy certain modules for Apache called accelerators, which will generally speed up the page loading times by caching pages that do not change regularly. This will also save on bandwidth in the long run and thus, will also save you money.

In summary, you should really try before you buy. You’d be surprised how many slow websites there are out there, not to mention frustrated visitors.

Chris Hutchison
SEO Programmer

When designing a website, most businesses do not really have a web content strategy in mind. This is because their aim, first and foremost, is to get the site up and running, offering their product range, providing contact details and finally, some information on the company. It is only later that businesses tend to turn towards content in boosting their web rankings. However, if you have a content strategy from the outset then this can save a lot of work later on.

When designing a website it is important to consider the information to be offered on the site and the style of web writing as well as the build process. You need to make sure you have planned and prepared at every stage and are working towards a specification.

The three main areas you need to bear in mind when preparing a content strategy for your website is firstly that it is well written and of a good grammatical standard. The website also needs to be well organised and easy to navigate. Making it easy for the site visitor to find the information they want quickly, while maintaining the visual appeal of the site is important. Finally, the content needs to be user focused and written with the customer/site visitor in mind.

Most of these points do sound obvious, but you’d be surprised how many businesses fall into the common trap of just saturating their website with useless and inappropriate content. This ultimately means that the website will not work well with search engines.

Planning the content strategy as early as possible will allow you to build a strong website from the start and this means you won’t have to fire fight any content issues later on.

Dan Higginbotham
Writer/editor