Build a Site Like This!BackgroundAt the start of January 2006, our company had a website that hadn't changed for many years, and that was basically an online copy of our rather dated brochure. The website contained little information, but had a lot of pictures and generally seemed to be popular with our clients. If you searched for 'marquee hire devon' then it ranked highly, but other than that it was difficult to find. We had obtained quotes for having a new website built by professionals but these quotes ran into thousands of pounds for anything of decent quality that would also rank well on the search engines. As January to March is generally a quiet time for our company, I made the bold decision to build our new website myself. The decision was bold as I had never done anything like it before! I had come across Site Build It! (SBI!) by accident when looking at a travel website and having researched it in more detail, I was impressed with the complete support package that seemed to be on offer. Considering that I was pretty clueless about what to do, this was going to be very important! The thinking behind SBI! is that if you produce a site that is very targetted on your specialist area and a site that is full of rich content, the search engines will rank you highly. The SBI! tools take you through the process of narrowing down your specialist area, examining the particular keywords that people are searching for on the internet and then helping you build a site around these keywords. Everything is explained through a comprehensive action guide that breaks the website development down into 10 stages. For more information on this, please click here and explore SBI! for yourself.
Building a content rich website takes some time so it's important that you are writing about something that you are passionate and knowledgeable about. After an intense spell of concentrating on the website, www.southwestmarqueehire.co.uk was born and I developed a core number of pages so that we had a fully workable website. I have continued to add content over the last few months and we now have a website with over 40 pages of strong content and pictures. We have received lots of very positive comments about how helpful the website is and the fact that I can continue to add content, update pictures and make other alterations without having to go back to a web designer is a real plus (and much cheaper)
The ResultsThe results have been staggering. We are now averaging over 80 unique visitors to our website EVERY DAY, which for a small company in Devon is amazing. The vast majority of our enquiries are coming from our website and at the start of November 2006 we already have FOUR times as many bookings for 2007 as we had at the same time in 2005 for 2006! The problem now is how quickly do we allow ourselves to grow, which is a nice problem to have!These results have come from our high rankings across the search engines for many of the keywords that our clients are searching for. We are also earning an income from adverts on our site which covers the annual cost of SBI! every 3 months!
SummarySBI! is transforming our already growing and successful company. Our story is not unique and on the SBI! website you will find many, many success stories. Lots of these stories are based on people who have built very succesful on-line businesses based on their hobbies, rather than developing corporate sites.With no web designing experience I have built a website that is proving to be very successful for our company, and with SBI!, you could do the same. The final, really remarkable thing? All of this only costs approximately £160 per year! Please click below to have a look at the SBI! website as it is full of additional information. Alternatively, if you would like to discuss this further with me, please do not hesitate to contact me Steve Milham
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