Voodoochilli Design

It’s now just coming up to Christmas and we have recently been approved for another web project. This particular job is going to be part funded by Business Link. If you are a UK based design company or individual I strongly suggest you consider signing on to the Business Link Consultants Register as your clients may then be eligible for up to 50% funding. The main advantage of this is that your client generally has twice as much money to play with meaning that he or she will be able to get a bigger website or more designs etc. You will also be listed in their directory so you will often get proposals sent directly to you.

To be eligible, you first need to contact your local Business Link which is normally based at the same offices as the Chamber of Commerce. They will then need to assess you for professional qualities that are required to be listed. They will speak to previous clients about the success of projects you have undertaken for them and will ask you to fill in a report outlining your working methodology. Initially you will need to pay them a fee of around £300 to cover all of the research and assessing. You will also need Professional Indemnity insurance and Public Liability insurance to cover up to a certain amount. Mine covers up to a million pounds each and I also have Products Liability to cover for the same amount and Employers’ Liability to cover up to a whopping 10 million pounds. Basically you need these insurances so that if anything happens (i.e. you accidentally deleted a client’s hard drive) you would be able to compensate them. My insurances cost me a total of about £350 a year, but shop around.

So the initial expense is quite high at least £650 setup in total and £350 a year thereafter for insurance, but I think it is well worth it in the long run if your clients can afford to give you projects twice as big. The reason the government provide this type of funding is to encourage regional growth and to help those companies that work by abiding to high levels of professional practices. I think it’s a great initiative.

As mentioned in my first post I am going to use various techniques and tricks to boost traffic to this blog. I have already placed a few subtle links on a couple of my other websites that get visited by search engines regularly so some work is already being done. Next I really need to “keyword up” this site. Before simply loading the site full of keywords I need to identify what keywords are needed to be effective. What sort of person am I trying to get to visit this blog? Many people do this try to imagine the average visitor (if there is such a thing) and even name them. I won’t be going that far, but I think I have a pretty good idea of the average web person – they are a bit like me.

The sort of terms I am likely to type in a search engine such as google when looking for a site like this are as follows:

“web development discussion”
“web dev blog”
“php discussion board”
“html and css blog”

After writing this piece I will place similar keywords into the title tags, meta tags and alt tags of the site. I should also consider naming image files and directories to match. As content is king, simply by listing these words in this content I am increasing the potential of someone reading this.

After the site is key-worded I need to start researching and finding other sites to share links with. This is an ongoing process but we should start seeing some results soon.