How did we improve an already good website so dramatically?
The story started when my wife was looking for a good value airport taxi service from Edinburgh airport to our home in Dunbar for a recent holiday. She found CJ Chauffeur drive to be the least expensive by a long way, and so it was when we were being wafted along in an immaculate Mercedes at three in the morning that our friendly driver Hamish (who was also one of the owners) told us about his website (prompted a little by me 😉
When Hamish told us they already had a website and were paying an SEO company to keep them on top, I thought, hey ho, another opportunity lost, however when I got back to the office I had a wee look at CJ’s website and ran a complete “Sitebeam” scan on it. I was surprised that what looked like a content rich clean site could have such a low score of only 2.1. After further investigation I could see how I could make improvements and contacted him with an offer to help. I offered some further SEO and analytics work and a meeting with the other directors was arranged.
I met with Hamish, Neil and Liz and was pleasantly surprised with the level of technical knowledge and understanding, especially from Liz who had done all the work on their existing website which had been built using a Vistaprint template service. This explained the sites low technical score. Liz had done an excellent job of creating lots of relevant content, well navigated pages and nice but oversized images which were slowing the site down. Liz already knew the main limitation of her site was the Vistaprint platform so we agreed that I would build a brand new WordPress site from scratch on our own servers.
Quite often when we start a new project the hardest part is getting information and content from the client, then training them to drive their new site can often be a challenge with non techie people but this site was a refreshing change. No having to wait a week for a reply to our emails or explaining everything three times. Liz quickly chose the theme for the new site and provided a disc with high res images, maybe it’s because the directors of this company all have Police experience that they just get things done, anyway a pleasure to work with.
Dealing with Vistaprint was fairly straightforward. Migrating the domain was easy but the emails were a bit of a pain however when the site was finished and run through “Sitebeam” once more I was very pleasantly surprised to see a fantastic score of 7.1 🙂 All we need to do now is some SEO and keyword research as well as improve the Twitter and Facebook fan page following to see it we can get it even better.
