[Ashley Brothwood]

Over the last few months I've slowly been working on my website on evenings / weekends.

http://www.vortexcleaning.co.uk

I think its coming along fine but have a look see what you think

Ashley

[chris scott]

I think it looks really good !! 

You need to compress the images and generally speed things up https://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.vortexcleaning.co.uk/jvrqzJeY

Its well built http://nibbler.silktide.com/en_US/reports/www.vortexcleaning.co.uk

[Ashley Brothwood]

thanks, yes i have tried compressing all the images to less than 200kb each but i think the odd one or two have slipped through.

It might be the layout with the slider at the top that's slowing it down but its something i need to look at

[Mike Halliday]

Why build your own website? Were you a website designer before becoming a cleaner?

From  £300 you can get Pro to do it

[Ashley Brothwood]

No just wanted to be able to update it constantly with new services, news or other information.
Its currently a 49 page website and when i had a look the average was around £250-£500 for a 10 page website. This usually then involves an on going payment for upkeep.

I've learnt along the way with building and once you know how it can be quite simple and straight forward to build the basics. The seoing part is a big more indepth but there is always more to learn

[chris scott]

Why build your own website?

Because he has done a fantastic job himself?

[Smurf]

Why build your own website?

Because he has done a fantastic job himself?

+ 1

[Mike Halliday]

Yep his website look great  but he is mentioning slow loading speed which Google looks badly on.  You don't know what problems are in the coding and background, websites  are just as much as what you can't see as much as you can.

This is  not meant to be critical of Ashleys website it does look on the face very professional  but we are cleaners not website designers, it's the same reason I would buy a new van rather than build one myself.

I have the skills to build a decent website but if I compare my hourly rate it's cheaper for me to clean drives and pay someone to do it for me, and they will do it right, for most of us building our own website is the same as buying a socket set and some spanners and thinking that qualifies us to service& repair our own cars

[chris scott]

His website is slow to load because of the images...that is a fact . He knows this and how to rectify it. 
See Here https://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.vortexcleaning.co.uk/jvrqzJeY
The coding and everything else is spot on ,the back end works correctly and IT looks good.

[Smurf]

Mike I get what you are saying but I know for a fact that for a professional website developer to build that size site including content etc would cost in the region of 3k.  Ashley on the other hand has saved himself a few bob learning how to build a Google friendly site himself and most importantly learnt a new skill set along the way in his spare time.

It's a bit like buying a wfp van mount system or learning how to build your own. Some would rather choose to build their own how they would like it designed and built. Then they also understand how it all works and can update/ fix it if need be themselves.



   

[Ashley Brothwood]

yes i understand what your saying Mike, I've learnt along the way and changed it where i can. The images and load speed is something that is going to be looked it, it simply means going through all the images and checking the size of them and changing where needed.

The professionals don't always get it right (they can do for the right price) using chris's website checker and the one i use mine and yours in comparison are about equal. Mine fails more so on the load speed but yours doesn't have Enable gzip compression. This just compresses the items where needed - yours may not need it if all your images are the right size but the load speed would be the same regardless of the phone / tablet / internet speed, mine does have it built in through wordpress / hosting but the images are currently too big so it doesn't work until the image side is fixed.
There are other smaller issues with yours such as the keywords metatag missing and the heading levels slightly off. Nothing too important just all those little bits in the back ground which makes it better for google and other search engines to rank higher / easier to find. All web designers will SEO your website but usually at a cost, it does take time and effort to backlink and properly SEO a website where your always at the top of google. By no means do i understand it all yet but hopefully over time i will do 

I used to have a company that built, maintained and SEO'd the website at a cost of a few hundred a year, since I've took it on myself and did it all the website traffic and increased about  five fold and slowly increasing.

The main thing i always think is we don't have to have the best website out there for SEO, but as long as its better than the competition we will always be at the top of google 

[Mike Halliday]

Did that make you feel better? ........sorry if I upset you I was only trying to be helpful

But you hit the nail on head with the last sentence ( did'nt really understand the lengthy paragraph proceeding ).   It's about being top of Google, as it can be the greatest website in the world but if no one ever sees it then it's  pointless..... if it's on top of Google organic listing then it does its job

[Ashley Brothwood]

ye you didn't upset me  i was just trying to say that even paying professionals doesn't always make a perfect product as they will only spend less than a day on it for £300ish. If you think of bigger companies they will usually have a dedicated web designer costing £10,000's per year. 

I don't know the in depths of your website so yours may always be at the top of google. They may have recognized this whilst making it and made it just good enough without charging you a fortune to do unnecessary additions to it that would have cost you money for no real outcome. This isn't a bad thing as they've not done what a few cowboy designers do and charge the earth for not a lot. In the same way currently i always appear on the front page and usually top for certain services but not all, so its something i need to invest the additional time and effort into adding into the website. For someone to do this for me would cost hundreds (If not thousands) depending what other websites i want to compete against.  For most website building it can be relatively easy and cheap to build if you either just want a website to send people to on leaflets or have not too a high of a ranking.

If anyone was thinking of building one i currently use One.com to host (£12ish for the year for domain name and hosting) and then installed WordPress on it. There are themes on wordpress for free or you can buy them relatively cheaply, then just add the information on it. There's a lot of youtube self help videos and blogs for anyone that's interested.

[John Higgins]

Yep his website look great  but he is mentioning slow loading speed which Google looks badly on.  You don't know what problems are in the coding and background, websites  are just as much as what you can't see as much as you can.

This is  not meant to be critical of Ashleys website it does look on the face very professional  but we are cleaners not website designers, it's the same reason I would buy a new van rather than build one myself.

I have the skills to build a decent website but if I compare my hourly rate it's cheaper for me to clean drives and pay someone to do it for me, and they will do it right, for most of us building our own website is the same as buying a socket set and some spanners and thinking that qualifies us to service& repair our own cars

Just a few stats on your website

That costs £99.00 for the build
and £10 a month hosting Fee which includes hosting email url renewel and any changes you may require throughout the year

First Speed

Home Page ps 1000 ms in a second
Loaad time 796 ms
https://tools.pingdom.com/#!/dugDuG/http://henryhalliday.co.uk/


All your pages load in less than a second even the ones with yourube videos

___________________________________________________________

Rankings Hull

Carpet cleaners Hull Front Page Google
Upholstery Cleaners Hull Front Page Google
Leather Cleaners Hull Front Page Google
Rug Cleaners Hull Front Page Google

Ranking for Beverley Which the site is meant for

Carpet cleaners Beverley No1 Google
Upholstery Cleaners Beverley No1 Page Google
Leather Cleaners Beverley No1 Page Google
Rug Cleaners Hull Beverley No1 Page Google

Kind regrds
mark
www.kireth.com

[Stoots]

As someone who dables in site building i will say its a bit of with regards paying someone vs doing it yourself.

You either invest time (lots) to learn and build your own along with associated onsite and offsite seo, analytics, social media integration, etc etc ..its a lot of work

Or you pay, and if you are paying for ongoing stuff such as link building, blogging, scial media management as well as the build etc it should cost a lot of money.

So you take your choice, imo if you can afford it or dont like doing it then you should pay someone to handle it all and concentrate on clenaing

If on the other hand you cannot afford it or enjoy learning then go ahead and buidl your own

Pay with time or pay with money its your choice

[Plankton]

 https://tools.pingdom.com/#!/cf3Pm3/http://burnbraecleaning.co.uk

I spent time a while ago putting my site together using a diy site builder and a few issues still exist months and months later.
How much would it cost to recreate my site with seo etc taken care of. Upfront and ongoing costs?
www.burnbraecleaning.co.uk

[Mike Halliday]

Alan, Mark  who posted above is doing a Special offer of £99 build plus £10 a month, I'm biased about him as he has done 4 websites for me but for the price (faults an' all) he takes some beating

One good thing about Mark is he does loads of work for cleaners so speaks the lingo and has a big stock of photos and he answers the phone

But other website designers do exist 

[Plankton]

At that price there's surely hidden/extra charges for seo and whatever else you need to be on the first page of searches.

[John Higgins]

At that price there's surely hidden/extra charges for seo and whatever else you need to be on the first page of searches.

The price is for an optimised build
the thing about cleaning is some areas need lots of seo to rank some don't,
it all depends on the quality of competition in the area you are going for.


about 400 of the carpet cleaning sites I have built have never paid for seo and rank front page
the other 200 hundered or so have had to have seo to rank

[John Higgins]

https://tools.pingdom.com/#!/cf3Pm3/http://burnbraecleaning.co.uk

I spent time a while ago putting my site together using a diy site builder and a few issues still exist months and months later.
How much would it cost to recreate my site with seo etc taken care of. Upfront and ongoing costs?
www.burnbraecleaning.co.uk

£99.00 + £10 per month

A few samples of the above type of site
http://www.patio-drive-cleaners-hull.co.uk/
http://www.patio-drive-cleaners-beverley.co.uk/
http://www.carpetcleaners-barnsley.co.uk/
http://www.carpetcleaners-horsham.co.uk/
http://www.carpetcleanersdarlington.co.uk/
http://gardenvillagecarpetcleaners.co.uk/