Case Study: Web Standards Redesign with Proven Benefits!
Posted October 5th, 2008
Mike Wayne is an excellent independent driving instructor in Bolton. After knowing Mike for a while I would definitely recommend him to anybody considering learning to drive and I only wish i’d known him when I learnt myself. 
Amateur Web Designer
As well as being a great driving instructor, Mike is also a keen amateur web designer. Upon taking a look at Mikes original website I was very impressed with what I saw.
Mike obviously has a good understanding of how to put a website together and his content in-particular was excellent which for somebody with no training or professional experience is a credit to him.
Fast Moving Industry
Web design is such a fast moving industry that it’s almost impossible to keep up with all of the latest technologies and practices. Many experienced web design agencies are still using dated techniques so it’s no disrespect to Mike that the one major problem with his website was the way it is coded (constructed ‘under the hood’). The website was built using HTML tables, which were never intended to be used for laying out pages and should only be used for displaying tabular data.
Web Standards
Around 4 or 5 years ago a new and much improved method of building websites became possible. Web standards as they are called are now the only way websites should be created for several reasons including accessibility, search engine optimisation and speed. I won’t go into detail here but please read my blog post on The Benefits Of Web Standards for more information.
Search Engine Benefits
After discussing with Mike the importance of web standards and particularly the benefits he would receive in terms of much higher rankings in search engines (Mike had been having difficulty getting his site listed highly in Google due to the site being built with tables) it was agreed that I would rebuild the website from scratch using web standards.
As I mentioned earlier, I was genuinely impressed with much of Mikes website, particularly his content. I was also conscious of the fact that Mike had put a lot of time and effort into it and was rightly proud of his work.
For that reason we agreed that the redesign would closely match the existing site. Although it was a good opportunity to include some minor improvements and optimise the pages better for the search engines.
Some of these improvements include:-
- Switch the sidebar from left to right side. Improving the look of the page and more importantly, as people read from left to right making the content more prominent on the left.
- Remove repeated navigation from the bottom of the page. A common practice years ago before users were as comfortable scrolling up and down. These days there are much more benefits to be gained from including important information in the footer instead, such as..
- Contact information in footer. From experience and studying site stats I have found that phone numbers and particularly email addresses in footers are very popular with users. Saving them the need to access a separate Contact page.
- Retain the sidebar on every page. Mike only displayed the sidebar on the homepage, for design consistency I felt it was important that the other pages had a sidebar too.
- Creating a favicon. Favicons are the small logos which appear next to the website address in the bar at the top of your web browser and in the tab bar of browsers like Firefox.
Others included, removing the borders around the main content area to give the page a much cleaner feel, cleaning and simplifying the top navigation bar, moving the image of the L plates in the bin to the bottom of the sidebar and reordering the content to make it flow better and give the page more structure.
( VIEW NEW DESIGN ) or ( VIEW NEW WEBSITE )
Agree To Disagree
Thankfully Mike was happy to agree to all of these changes, unfortunately, the one area we disagreed on was the dotted background. Personally I feel it makes the site look dated and rather than add anything positive to the site, actually distracts attention away from the page itself. But as it’s a minor issue and I was grateful that Mike had accepted all of my other suggestions I was happy to give up on this one point.
Immediate Benefits – Proven Search Engine Results
The benefits of the redesign are already obvious. Less than 2 weeks after making the new website live Mike is already receiving much higher search engine rankings. When I first tried looking for Mikes old website I could only find it by searching for his own name and even then he was only just on page one of Google.
Now a search for ‘Mike Wayne’ returns a much more respectable second position on the front page and the site is already making page 2 for several important search phrases such as ‘driving lessons bolton’ and ‘driving instructor bolton’. This is incredibly fast as search engines work very slowly and it’s usually between 4 – 6 months that maximum benefit from search engine optimisation is seen,
I can confidently predict that Mike will be on the front page for our chosen search terms by early next year, though off current progress probably much sooner.
The Future – Blogs
When discussing web standards with Mike, I also explained how beneficial a blog can be, both for search engine rankings and for building a relationship between his customers and potential new customers. In the end the blog didn’t get finished but I designed the website so that it can (and hopefully will) be easily and cheaply added at a later date.
It was a pleasure to work on Mikes website with him. I’m pleased the the results are immediately obvious and expect them to continue improving. I’m hopeful that the idea of a blog will grow on him as I believe he has lots of great content to offer.
In the mean time, if you are considering learning to drive in the Bolton area you know where to go!
