By Tim Lees 21st March 2018
The front page of a website is more often than not the single most important page when it comes to your website. The homepage has a difficult job as it needs to do many different jobs; it often draws the most traffic of any single page on your website and to a first time visitor it is usually the first page that is seen so the homepage has to act as a shop window to your service or products, inviting users to convert in the guise of either sign...
By Tim Lees 5th February 2018
The shopping checkout process is arguably the most important part of an eCommerce website. Get the process wrong and you'll potentially be left with frustrated users who may abandon your website and go elsewhere. Get the process right and the customer should have the confidence and reassurance about the purchase they have just made. Here's our top 10 tips to reduce basket and checkout abandonment on your eCommerce website: 1. Simple checkout...
By Tim Lees 16th October 2017
Figma is a vector based design tool that allows the user to rapidly design and deploy concepts for applications and websites. Listed below are some features that make Figma an indispensible tool. Browser based A really great thing about Figma is that the software is designed to be used in the browser allowing multiple users to work collaboratively on a design. This means that editing is instant and can be reviewed in real time. Whereas with tradi...
By Tim Lees 8th August 2017
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a new EU regulation that strengthens the rights of individuals regarding their personal data and unifies a single set of rules for this purpose across all EU states. Each state will have a Supervisory Authority (SA) to ensure that compliance is being met. The GDPR will come into effect on the 25th May 2018. The regulation looks to ensure that users (termed as Data Subjects) have as much informatio...
By Tim Lees 6th July 2017
WordPress is by far and away the most popular content management system. However, due to it’s popularity it also attracts huge numbers of attacks. Thankfully, it’s popularity and versatility also means that it’s core system is always worked on in the way of regular updates. Many of these updates continually improve the security of WordPress. However, regularly updating WordPress with core updates doesn’t mean that you should ignore other ...
By Tim Lees 31st March 2017
In this article we will look at what HTTPS means and why your website should be secured using the protocol. What is HTTPS? HTTPS stands for ‘HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure’. You may have noticed that when navigating websites you will see this protocol (https) and its non-secure variant (http) at the beginning of the website address bar in your browser window. The HTTPS version is identified (in most browsers) by a green padlock. HTTP...
By Tim Lees 20th April 2016
Local award winning, soft fruit growers, Littywood Farm approached Rapid Web Services to re-design their website to bring it up to date. Using their existing logo the brief was to give the website a more modern look, easy to navigate and to serve as a reference point for prospective employees and buyers alike. The client requested the website to be responsive across all devices and specified that they wanted to update the content on the websi...
By Tim Lees 8th March 2016
The maturity and flexibility that WordPress has grown in to in the last two to three years means that the platform is now is a primary option when we look at development and deployment of websites. With each WordPress development we undertake there a number of core WP plugins that we look to install as a matter of course that not only aides’ site development but also our work flow on the project. 1) WPCore Plugin Manager https://wpcore....
By Tim Lees 28th November 2014
Within Google Analytics, Goals are designed for you to quantify how well your website is performing in terms of specific objectives. You can set up individual Goals to track an action on your website. These actions are defined as an activity that has a completion. Commonly known as conversions, examples of these activities include the following: A customer on an e-commerce website that completes the checkout process resulting in a purchase A u...
By Tim Lees 30th September 2014
In this second part of a series designed to examine the basics of Google Analytics, we look at Custom Alerts (the first article was on Understanding Audience Overview). Custom Alerts in Google Analytics allow you to keep track of extensive fluctuations in your analytics data so if something unexpected happens then you can act upon it sooner rather than later. This could be amongst others a rise or dip in visitor numbers, bounce rate or if you h...
By Tim Lees 29th July 2014
Understanding Google Analytics can be quite a daunting prospect if you are not familiar with the service. This series of guides aims to provide a simple introduction to help an owner of a website get the most out of their account. This guide is based on Google's Universal Analytics rather than the Classic Google Analytics. If you want to know more about the differences and whether you are using one or the other please click here. The a...