Design certainly isn’t my forte and as you have probably noticed (if anyone has found my blog at all yet, or more likely you are reading this in the future sometime but reading an old post, if that makes sense) it still has the standard template which comes with a WordPress install. While it actually looks OK if you change the picture at the top it isn’t that exciting.
So my dilemma is if I should tackle this myself or just get someone else to do it for me. There are certain pro’s and con’s to doing it either way, namely, if I get someone else to design it for me, they will probably pay no notice whatsoever to the seo elements of a website, I’ve seen it numerous times before, a beautifully designed website which nobody will ever find as there are fundamental seo mistakes which will prevent it from ever ranking well without serious time spend in optimisation and doing redirects etc. On the other hand they would do it so much faster than I can do myself as design isn’t my strong point and there would probably be a lot of trial and error in getting it right.
Then again I probably already have a pretty clear idea what it should look like and I’ve never been very good at trusting other peoples judgement, ironic really as when people ask me to do optimisation on their sites they have to trust me as it could take a little while before the results start to show. It really depends on the state of their site when I get hold of it initially, some of them are really bad and I need some help, if I do I use a Swindon SEO company and I’ve known Steve the owner for a lot of years and trust his judgement on these things. He’s pretty good at spotting some strange thing such as an outdated sitemap, or old pages which have links pointing to them which we can redirect. Sometimes these things can make a difference in almost no time at all. He must be pretty good as if you do a search for SEO Swindon, there he is at the top of the page with 2 pages of his website! He’s not actually in Swindon though he lives in a village nearby but as I understand it, most of his customers are either there or at least in Wiltshire.
Anyway I’m still trying to decide if I should do this design myself, buy a template or have a complete bespoke design done, still undecided but I will have to do something, it looks a bit plain as it is.