Website evolution, not revolution

The current iteration of our web-site has gone through a number of small revisions since it was launched. Today, however, we launch the biggest iteration change since January 2013. Based on 15 months of learning, endless testing and visitor feedback.

Interesting Content

The amount and quality of content on the site has climbed dramatically over the last year, measured both in terms of depth-of-visitor view (how many pages, how long they stay) and external re-use (measured by re-tweets, comments, shares, requests to use etc).

The traffic to the site has approximately doubled in the last year and the interactions have quadrupled. All of this growth have been centred around opinion and informational articles.

We now rank inside the top 1% as measured by Alexa in terms of influence, traffic and reach. We are now also one of the top-ranked WordPress Agencies in the UK.

We publish over 250 articles a year and the previous version of the site really only allowed us to showcase 10 articles. We now showcase over 30 articles on the home-page alone!

We have also provided a much larger number of internal links to encourage visitors to easily find our quite substantial library of content. Nearly 500 articles are kept online and up to date, stretching back to 2008.

Twitter and the B2B world

Twitter very much came of age last year for B2B businesses and we saw our followers double across the year to around 8,000.

The weekly reach we have with Twitter and Facebook has, occasionally, passed 50k – which we think it pretty impressive for a WordPress agency, regardless of the general growth in the WordPress market.

The WordPress Agency Market

Back in 2008, we were one of the very first web development agencies to embrace WordPress.

We were so committed to the WordPress platform that we invested heavily to migrate our business from a traditional web agency to an agile, delivery-based WordPress agency focussed on delivering the best service, support and marketing – we stopped fretting too much about hand-cut design and build, that market was dying anyway.

The latest revision of our site makes more of the WordPress work and also pushes home the message that we focussed 100% on WordPress. That is our specialism.

Google and our search positions

During the latter part of 2013, Google dramatically changed it’s ranking method and that nicely intersected our drive to publish quality content.

They seemed to reward this content marketing approach and we’ve shot-up the natural listings.

A WordPress agency to be reckoned with!

At the start of 2013 we had fairly average rankings for most of our key terms and a combination of hard work and diligence to best practices has seen us figure pretty high for WordPress-related terms.

A cleaner, more useful look

Simply throwing new features and 500 pages at a website has the potential to create a mess so we’ve cleaned up the interface so it renders better across different devices, loads faster (top 25% now) and reduced the loading page weight by 30%.

We’re adding some content to help clients, we’ve added a simple elevator pitch and also a mobile/responsive-checker – we’ll listen to our clients and visitors and develop applications in line with their needs.

Welcome to our new(ish) web-site

By Martin Dower