Competitor Research

All of our Sheffield website redesigns and initial designs begin with a thorough analysis of the industry you are in and what your competition is doing well. This then allows us to create a clear, concise plan showing how our SEO-centric approach can increase your search engine rankings. We can highlight the kind of content that is performing well and which elements of their online presence are bringing in the most traffic and sales.

A complete picture of their SEO successes allows us to provide you with a no-nonsense, easily understandable plan so you can grow and thrive in the years to come!

Understanding your Brand

Understanding your brand is incredibly important when it comes to creating your website. Your brand is not just your logo and your colour choices. It is the very basis of your business. Your brand should create an immediate perception in your customer's mind about who you are, what you do and how you do it.

We spend as long as it takes until we are fully confident we understand the perception of your business that you want. We then take that information and use it to create an attractive, persistent identity that gives your potential customers a strong sense of your reliability, professionalism and expertise.

SEO Copywriting

Content isn't just there to fill the spaces in your design! It's a strategic asset that greatly affects how your brand / business is perceived. It can either drive large amounts of online web traffic to you, or it can hinder your potential if done incorrectly.

As search engines and their algorithms become more complex, exactly what Google values and "dislikes" changes. Whilst Google has stated that it does not penalise AI generated content as long as it is "good" content that is useful and informs the reader, they have started to say things like they will be promoting content that is "from the heart". We feel that this is a very telling phrase for them to use.

Whilst it is perfectly possible to give AI a prompt and receive a long piece of content filled with SEO keywords, it is important to consider how the AI works in generating this output. AI is unfortunately many years away from being able to give a unique perspective and will simply work by effectively Googling the topic, pulling the first few results found, pooling the information it has found together and then regurgitating it in a new structure.

This is therefore an ineffective way to create content that drives results and is something that we strictly avoid in our no-nonsense web design approach. This is not to say that AI cannot be a very useful tool in content writing but only in the sense that the content should be written without it, then the finished content can be fed into an AI in order for it to highlight any areas that could be covered but are not. To summarise, AI should only be used as a research tool and should never be used for the actual creation of the content itself. We create content that:

1. Improves search engine performance: Boosts your visibility with well-researched keywords.
   
   
2. Connects with your audience: Engages them through compelling narratives that hold their attention.
   
   
3. Reinforces your brand identity: Ensures a consistent voice across all areas.

Sheffield Web Design

We love web design! It's what Steel City Digital does, and over a long career, we've become very good at it! We produce no-nonsense designs that resonate with your customers and provide a great User Experience. Websites should not just look great but also be a pleasure to use.

We make very sure that making something look great doesn't inadvertently impact the customer's journey, and this is something we feel is often lacking in the work done by other Sheffield Web Design agencies.

Below, we'll go into a few things we do that separate us from our competition and make us the best choice for creating visually appealing designs that boost your business!

We always offer:

A Great Price - Quality web design does not have to be expensive! These days, there are so many useful tools available, which make creating attractive websites a relatively simple prospect.

The bread and butter of our business is centered around creating attractive websites for local Sheffield businesses. These are usually around ten pages in total, which serve to list the services the business provides in a visually appealing and professional way.

We offer this package for only 999 GBP, and you can have us maintain and host your website for 50 GBP a month. Alternatively, we are perfectly happy for you to host the website yourself, and we will never claim that this ongoing payment is a complete necessity!

We also take the risk out of the equation by only asking for 10% of the total fee initially. We will then understand your brand and business and provide unlimited design revisions until we're sure that we're giving you something you'll truly love.

Solid and Consistent Branding - Our expert designers and colour palette enthusiasts will work with you to first understand your brand and then encapsulate it.

We'll start with the logo and a colour scheme that screams you and your business, and then we'll extend this design across the rest of the homepage.

Quite quickly, we'll have a homepage you can be proud of, and then we'll push this design across the rest of the pages we build for you.

Consistency is important when it comes to branding, so we can also help to make sure everything—from your business cards to your work vehicle—carries the same brand colours and design ethos.

Mobile First Design - Roughly two-thirds of all web traffic comes from mobile phones, and Google switched to mobile-first web indexing and crawling in 2016. Whilst 2016 may seem like it was only a couple of years ago, that's now nine years! Every year, mobile dominance continues, and it becomes more and more important to design websites from a mobile-first perspective.

Our no-nonsense Sheffield Web Design always starts by considering how the finished product will look on mobile and then extends that design to look great on desktop too. There are far too many web designers and developers who treat the mobile view as an afterthought to the desktop. We find this antiquated approach often leaves the user experience on mobile devices sorely lacking.

SEO-friendly Websites - We'll talk about this a bit more in the Web Development section, but we think it's important to keep SEO in mind when the design is being created.

It's not only things like header tags and meta titles that Google takes into account when judging how to rank a website, but also other elements such as text size and colour in relation to the surrounding elements.

Accessibility considerations are also important when it comes to rankings, and you can rest assured that Steel City Digital websites will not only look great on all devices but also when being viewed by all people.

A Website that Converts - As you're here, it's most likely that you want a website built, and you want that website to do something specific.

Here at Steel City Digital, we like to think of websites as machines. By that, we mean that a machine has an input and an output, and a website has traffic coming in, which should be converted to a particular purpose.

If it's an eCommerce website, then the website is aiming to convert this traffic to sales. If it's a business service website, then the aim is to convert this traffic to leads or contacts. Our no-nonsense approach is to create the best machines possible.

There are many useful free tools that can help with this, and one that we really recommend is Microsoft Clarity. It's easily installed and provides you with a way to watch exactly what your visitors are doing.

Could elements of the machine be improved to increase conversions? That's a question that gets us very excited and something we love digging into.

Choose Steel City to build your website. Choose a machine that works.

Quick Work Done Well - We don't hang about here in Steel City. If we've got a job to do, then we get it done!

We find that many designers and developers tend to take on too many jobs at once, leaving some unlucky person twiddling their thumbs. We will always provide you with a short expected timeline before you hire us, and we don't take on more than we can handle.

The majority of our websites are completed within one month. There are exceptions when we get into more complex eCommerce stores, but we make sure that the timelines we provide are always extremely accurate.

To do otherwise would be nonsense, and that's not our way.

Sheffield Web Development

At Steel City, we build reliable, secure, easy to manage websites that load like lightning! We have a small team of highly experienced Sheffield web developers ready to build you a website on any platform of your choosing.

Web development is something we are always very excited about. It's a constantly evolving game of problem-solving that brings the opportunity to learn so many ways with which to achieve the best solution.

With so much we could cover, we'll concentrate on a few of the most important. Along the way, we'll bust some myths and malpractices that a lot of web design agencies and freelancers are most definitely guilty of and show you how our no-nonsense approach strips all that away!

When using us for your web development you can always be sure you'll get:

A Website Tailored to Your Needs

We talk to you to fully understand what it is you're wanting to do through the creation of your new website and what you need to be able to do yourself going forwards.

There are far too many web developers who will create a great-looking website built on some custom CMS and leave you to get on with it. It's no surprise that this approach rarely leaves the client with a website they can feel confident in running without outside assistance.

Here in Steel City Digital, we find it odd that so many Sheffield web developers feel the need to advertise that they only create websites on completely custom frameworks. Yes, it is true that clients want and deserve a great-looking original website, but building that on top of some proprietary system that no one else knows how it works or how to fix the regularly occurring bugs is not the best solution for the client.

These days, there are so many great pre-existing solutions to work with. Why try recreating WordPress when it already exists, has hundreds of thousands of qualified developers, is constantly updated to ensure security, and has been built specifically to be intuitively used by people with no or little experience?

We can only imagine that building upon a completely custom CMS allows them to charge a high rate for later necessary fixes and upgrades and makes them seem like more competent developers than they really are.

We always recommend using an existing CMS for the creation of your website, and the most often used choice is WordPress for service websites. If an eCommerce side is needed, then WooCommerce can be added on top for no extra costs or recurring fees.

A Fully Responsive Design

A fully responsive design simply means that no matter what device or screen size you view the website on, it'll look great and provide a positive impression of your product, service, or brand.

It's a little crazy to us that a large portion of other web developers concentrate so heavily on the desktop view, whilst the mobile view, which is most likely to be seen around 2/3 more, is a secondary afterthought. Your website should look beautiful no matter what the customer is using to view it.

Steel City Digital makes it a very high priority to fully test all different possible devices and make sure it looks just as professional there as it does on desktop.

The Best User Experience

There's no point in creating a fantastic-looking website if it doesn't do the job you want it to!

This is really where User Experience comes in, and this aspect of web development is of particular interest to us. We have a fascination for learning what works and what doesn't. This can vary quite a bit when it comes to particular markets or industries.

In creating an effective eCommerce site, this is extremely important. It should be highly intuitive to use, with no wandering eyes necessary to find where the basket is, how to add a product to the cart, or how to finish your purchase.

The developers at Steel City Digital have run their own eCommerce websites and know the value in trial and error when it comes to picking the right interface elements and locations in order to boost conversions.

It can be quite a surprise that just small changes can pump up your revenue and significantly reduce cart abandonment.

We really recommend something called Microsoft Clarity for examining this. Using this free, easily installable tool, you can record user sessions and watch exactly how they interact with your website.

You can log every instance where a customer has clicked multiple times in frustration or quickly clicked the back button. By examining these logs, you can quickly identify where improvements can be made that are very likely to boost your bottom line.

We could go on for some time about User Experience, but we should leave it there and just summarise by saying that we know what we're doing in this aspect, and we'll do it for you too!

Constant Support and Low-Cost Hosting

We want you to be happy with the website we create for you, and we want you to be happy with it for a long time to come.

That's why Steel City Digital offers constant support and low-cost hosting. For only 50 GBP per month, we'll host your website and make sure it's safe and sound from any internet nasties that are out there.

Even if you choose not to opt for our hosting and support package, we will still provide six months of support for no charge at all, and then support after that is at a low price per hour.

We are the complete opposite of some web developers who provide you with a good-looking website that hardly works and no one else knows how to use—then charge you an arm and a leg for showing you how to use it.

That is unfortunately quite a common scenario in this industry and something that, as no-nonsense Sheffield Web Developers, we have no interest in at all. 

A Website that is Both Fast and Secure

All the websites we build are lightweight and fast as can be.

We should point out that, whilst it is correct that Google does take speed into account as a ranking factor, it is far too regularly stated that speed is one of Google's "primary ranking factors."

This is somewhat true in that if a website is so slow as to be barely usable, then Google will take that into account and most likely rank the website reasonably poorly.

Where this statement is not true is when it is stated that taking a website from a PageSpeed score of 60 to 90 will result in greatly improved search rankings. The speed of the website is only really a ranking factor where it is too poor.

If you are running your own eCommerce store, for example, and you are spending hours trying to get your PageSpeed score a few points higher, you would be much better served using that time to create useful, relevant content.

When it comes to security, you are safe with Steel City Digital.

We make sure that all of the websites we create are regularly updated and any security vulnerabilities are quickly patched. In case of any unforeseen issues or vulnerabilities that have not yet been discovered, we also make sure that your website is regularly backed up.

We also have a few tricks up our sleeves when it comes to security and will do small things that make it much less likely you'll have a problem.

One example of this is simply changing the administrator log-in pages—a quick fix that makes it 99% less likely that someone would be able to attempt a brute force login.

Having operated our own websites and others for decades, we are fully capable of protecting your important online assets.

SEO-Optimized Development

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, can seem a lot like magic to most people.

There are things you can do to your website to make it rank higher on search engines and therefore receive more traffic, but what are those things, and why are they either hidden or so confusing to understand? Why does one person say one approach is best, and another says the complete opposite?

Don't worry, that kind of annoys us too!

Essentially, the issue is that search engines like Google don't want people to fully understand how they rank websites. If they tell everyone exactly how it works, that just leads to people abusing that information to get poor content ranked highly. They have to be quite vague and talk about how good-quality content that resonates with the user is the key to high rankings, and this is mostly true.

Google can see how long someone visited your content for and how many people instantly went away. They have a vast cornucopia of metrics available to them with which to judge how well your website answers a particular search query.

There's really too much we can say about SEO, and there's quite a lot you're unlikely to really need to know, so we'll just stick with a brief overview of what's important for you to understand.

SEO really comes in two distinct flavours; you have your on-page SEO and your off-page SEO.

On-page SEO is everything that is actually on your website and encompasses everything from making sure you have the right number of headings, that your content includes keywords and phrases that you're hoping to rank for, all the way to schema and meta information within your source code.

This is something that should be a big priority in the construction of your website and something that we do not charge extra for, unlike a lot of our competitors!

Then you've got your off-page SEO, which is just the opposite—everything outside of your website.

By this, we mostly mean who links to you and how authoritative Google sees them.

To compete successfully in a competitive market, both areas must be worked on as an ongoing process.

On-page requires new content that is up to date and answers your potential customer's query, while off-page requires acquiring new authoritative links to your website that persuade Google that you know what you're talking about and deserve more traffic.

No web developer is going to provide ongoing efforts in either of these areas for free. Some will make sure the on-page SEO is on point before they make the website live, but if they do provide ongoing work, it will be expensive and most likely lacklustre.

It is greatly annoying to us that some large web development agencies will take advantage of the client's lack of experience with SEO and just promote themselves as the choice that will make sure your website ranks really well forever.

This is simply not possible and complete nonsense.

The truth is that it takes time for a website to rank well. No matter how great your initial on-page SEO is, it will take Google at least two months to really start showing your pages in any sort of decent position, no matter what the developer may say.

Here in Steel City Digital, we take great pleasure in being entirely open and honest with our clients about what is achievable and what isn't.

One thing we can and do make sure of is that the website that we make live for you will be as SEO-optimised as it is possible to be.

Absolutely No-Nonsense!

What it all boils down to is that we're reliable, honest, and hate the nonsense so prevalent in web development that you hate too.

Web development isn't magic, and it doesn't have to be explained in a way that makes it seem like rocket science. We're not going to make something sound twice as confusing as it really is just to seem like we're pulling rabbits out of hats and charge you an arm and a leg.

We're from Sheffield and know that's just not right! We're going to tell you exactly how it is, how we can help you, and we're going to do it for a very competitive price!

Just to highlight how harmful a lot of dishonest or lazy web developers can be, we'll tell you a short recent example of something we saw with a client running a successful eCommerce store.

The client approached us because they'd launched their new website three months ago and had seen a staggering drop in orders since then.

For them, it made no sense. The new website had a better user experience, looked a lot more professional, and they could find no issues with the add-to-cart functionality or the checkout.

It took us very little time to discover that when their expensive web developers launched their new website, they'd failed to redirect the foreign language pages to their new counterparts.

As the client's website had around 50 different foreign language versions and sold around 250 products, this meant that 12,250 out of 12,500 pages were going to a Page Not Found page (i.e., 404).

All of their rankings for all of their products in any language other than English had therefore been decimated.

Thankfully, we were able to redirect the traffic to where it should go in less than an hour, and the client's rankings recovered to their prior levels in around a month.

This is not something you'd expect from professional web developers, especially when the total price for their website was 13,500 GBP and this particular web developer has a 15-year-old business and ranks very high up on Google.

Steel City Digital doesn't do nonsense like that—we do great websites for a great price, and that's all there is to it!