Some Lessons from Horticulture Wales Web Course

Posted by mdraycott on May 13, 2011 in Blog, Education, Social Media, Uncategorized, Web | 2 comments

Hi All

I’ve really enjoyed delivering the last half of the Horticulture Wales online marketing course, supporting horticulture businesses with practical advice about web design and optimisation.

I’ve made the slides for this course available online via slideshare; at the bottom of this blog, but I thought I would take up a few paragraphs with some of the key observations from the course so far.

1. Site Layout – The design of any site is crucial, but this should follow a few rules…consider the purpose of the site, optimise the design for this purpose with your customers in-mind and focus on the hierarchy of information and the order you need to deliver this in.
2. Meta Data – On almost all the websites we reviewed the Meta Data (Tags, Descriptions and Keywords) were either poorly structured or non-existent. These should be a central concern for any website and need to be reviewed, you can check them by right clicking on any page of your website in the browser and clicking view source or view page source.
3. Analytics – If you have a website you need to collect the analytics data using a service such as the one provided by Google. This will help you shape your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) to target the right customers.
4. Keywords – A lot of websites aren’t using the right Keywords, using a mixture of analytics and Google’s Keyword Tool you can identify the right Key Words to use for your site…a mixture of keywords along the long tail are what’s important, don’t forget that.
5. Page Speed – There are a lot of websites that need to be optimised to function more quickly, you can use Google’s free Page Speed Tool to review this and identify areas for improvement.

I hope these points help summarise our discussions, if you’ve been to the course and need more advice just get in touch!

Peace

Matt