JamesMio

If you're still looking, it's what I do nowadays... Web Design & Development Scotland | Creatomatic Happy to help if I can.

As above, depends heavily on what you're wanting it to 'do' for you really. if it's just an invoicing & estimates system, you could do far worse than to look at something like FreshBooks - it's pretty much the admin backbone of our little web design company and it's served us really well indeed.

First job - get it hosted on a UK based server. It's currently on an American host which is doing you no favours whatsoever if you're trying to pick up search traffic from UK people. Next up - the Contact Us link at the bottom of (Tree surgeon Services in Pembrokeshire west wales - West Wales Woodland Services) points to a duff Google Sites link, you might wanna get that tweaked.

Free tool to check whether your site passes Google's mobile-friendly tests: https://www.google.co.uk/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/ It's certainly worth a quick check - we're getting a lot of retrofit requests in at the moment, i.e. converting non-mobile friendly sites onto something responsive.

Two very simple tips: #1 - Name your image what you want it to be found for, e.g. rather than DSC01234.jpg, call it something like arbtalk-logo.jpg #2 - Write a proper image ALT tag, and include what you want to be found for here too. I've got literally thousands of product images into Google images by doing the above. All you're doing is making it easy for Google to suss out what the image is about, they'll do the rest.

Did you get something sorted in the end..? Just spotted this now and would be more than happy to help. Give us a nod if you need anything.

We're huge fans of Freshbooks, takes care of all our estimates/invoices/expenses etc and is a doddle to use. £20 ish a month for the full blown, unlimited version - can't fault it.

Load of photos from the day up on their Facebook page now if anyone's interested.

No worries - hope it was of at least some help!? I did mean what I said about the designs - if that was done by someone who's not a web designer by trade, I'm very impressed.

Unless it's for a specific use - i.e. to animate something that you can't do in static images or video, flash is a hateful technology that is finally on it's way out and really should be avoided. NONE of the big players on the web use Flash for their main site content these days, and for good reason. With your site - if you check out the source code (view-source:Tree Surgeons in Cheshire - TreeWorks UK) there is at least SOME text in there for the likes of Google to get it's teeth into and decipher. That probably explains your rankings (I bet you'll see an improvement once you shift to HTML though). With OP's - (view-source:Home - hunterandsonstreeservices.co.uk), there's just lines and lines of flash code and nothing about the company. For what it's worth - I think the design and layout is great, but the technology behind it is holding it back. As always, just my tuppence worth - this advice is worth exactly what you've paid for it but kicking sites into shape is what I do for a living.

Ho'kaay... I might be able to give you a few pointers on this one (fair-play disclaimer:- I do web stuff for a living but not trying to sell you anything. Ok? Great - let's go!) Bad news, sorry to be the one that breaks this to you but your current site appears to be built almost entirely in Flash. Flash is bad for search engines, and most mobile users (although I do see you've got a mobile stylesheet in place that does work on iPhones etc - nice job for that). The problem with flash is search engines really struggle to read it, and rely heavily on good old, simple text to decipher what a page or site is all about. My advice (and yes, I know this may not be the news you want to hear) is to get your site converted into something that search engines can actually read properly. There's a load of very good open source (normally free) content management systems out there that would do this, Joomla and Drupal are both good, my personal choice (and the one we use a lot at work) would be Wordpress. So, before you waste (and I use that word deliberately) any money with Yell etc, the first thing you should be looking at doing is sorting out your existing site and making it search engine friendly. To give you an idea of what that might/should cost - we do retrofitting - i.e converting your existing site's style, design and layout etc into Wordpress for anything between £400-£1000 - depending on the amount of content, layouts etc needing done. That's not me pitching (honest - although obviously we'd be more than happy to give you a hand), just trying to give you something to compare to. Regardless who you use, that would be money well spent - it'll set your site up far better long-term than relying on an old and outgoing (thankfully - because it's a pain in the ass) technology. You COULD throw money at SEO (which typically means someone will spend time building up links to point at your site), which - IF DONE PROPERLY - can help your rankings. You could also look at buying some traffic (PPC) with Google AdWords, but again - until your site's sorted I really wouldn't. Hope this helps - sorry it's not perhaps the good news you were hoping for, but better to be blunt and honest?!

You know those little, funny looking square bar-code things you see everywhere. Does anyone here have any experience with them - good or bad? I'm looking at making use of them for a couple of client's we're working on and would value any feedback - have any of your customers ever actually used them to get in touch with you? I notice there's a couple of sponsors on here that are using them in their banner ads, (which seems to be missing the point of them rather spectacularly - to be looking at this site, you're already ON the internet... Why not just add a normal link?), but what about the rest of you?

No probs - If I may be so bold as to offer you a wee tip - go into the admin dashboard of your site, then into Settings and look for the bit called Permalinks. In there, change it to... (let me just double check exactly which one it is...) either 'Post Name' or 'Month & Name'. Either of these should give you much nicer, search engine friendly URL's - e.g. http://www.wolvestrees.co.uk/contact instead of: http://www.wolvestrees.co.uk/?page_id=52 Takes 2 mins to do, and helps a lot with your SEO efforts.

I use an online one called Freshbooks which is great, but Im not 100% sure how it would work for arb type work. Might be worth a look?

My iZettle arrived through the post this week and I must say I'm rather impressed. It's still in Beta testing at the moment, probably hence why they've not got Visa sorted yet, but it'll be a super handy wee system once it's running. I can 'totally' see the value for you guys out n about doing jobs at customers places. No more chasing invoices or waiting to get paid - card, iPad/iPhone, done. Thanks very much.

Afternoon folks, Just having a wee nosey browse on here to keep my hand in and thought I'd chip in with a few tuppence worth - hope it's of some help to somebody. Not true I'm afraid - LINKS from different websites, and subsequently IP's, around the web - ideally within your theme or topic definitely do help, but traffic alone doesn't. Again, this is a bit of a myth - Google does class a single page view as a 'bounce', however it doesn't make any difference in terms of where a page is ranked. They don't use any analytics data to influence search rankings - from the mouth of their own Matt Cutts [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgBw9tbAQhU]from the mouth of their own Matt Cutts[/ame] Where a high bounce rate is (or should be) used however is as a signal that something on your page isn't perhaps right. People are arriving, not seeing what they expected, and then leaving. It's a great tool for looking at ways to improve your website. Hmmm, as a general rule of thumb - 'probably' but Google is only looking to discredit links that it deems to be 'unnatural'. Let me give you a couple of scenarios where reciprical links are both natural and perfectly fine. Joe Bloggs owns a tree surgery site and a firewood site. Why would he not want to include a link to each from the other site he owns? Andy Bloggs owns the web design company that built Joe's sites - he's included a wee link in the footer of each saying 'Website Designed by Andy Bloggs'. Because he's so happy with them, Joe then adds a small blog post on each of his sites along the lines of 'Thanks to Andy Bloggs for my new sites - I think they're great'. All perfectly natural, and something that people actually would do. Nothing to worry about. Where people run into problems is by swapping links with all & sundry, just to get the link. Think about it - why would say, a Mexican restaurant in Brisbane legitimately link to an Arb site in Dundee? That's the sort of linking that Google might punish a site for, and should be avoided. Not true - clicks won't do you any harm whatsoever. This I can confirm to be true. He's advising you well, to a point - see above. It all depends on the link scheme. Links are good, used properly they count as votes from one site to another - don't be afraid of asking for and getting links to your site. See above - it's all about relevance and whether it's something that would actually, naturally happen if people weren't trying to scam the search engines. Your web guy knows what he's talking about - this is the single best bit of advice I've seen on this thread. By providing something that is of real value, use or interest to people on your website it will naturally gather links as people share it with others. This in turn will naturally bring in more traffic as the word spreads, and subsequently attract more links. The more links you gather, the higher up the rankings your site will go, thus attracting even more traffic. That's the way to do it! Depends what you class as 'nearly always top'. Anyone can be 'top' by paying for AdWords - but it can turn into an expensive game. A lot of the time, the big sites (like the ones Mark's mentioned - Yell etc) rank well is because they: A) Are old - old sites tend to be more trustworthy in Google's eyes B) Are big - look at Wikipedia - they're not paying anyone yet how many times does a Wikipedia page top the rankings? Big sites are more likely to have an answer to something, and thus tend to get served up quite often by search engines C) Have a 'lot' of backlinks pointing to them. I've just done a very quick check, and Yell.com alone has in the region of 750,000 other webpages linking back to it. Happy to help if anyone wants any other pointers on this.

One of the best courier services I ever used (on a regular basis) was a company called CCL, based up in Ayrshire. They've got accounts with pretty much every courier/pallet carriers and act like a broker. Home | Parcels, Pallets, Freight, Haulage in UK | CCL Logistics They'd be worth a call at the very least. If he's still there, Declan is the best one to speak to.

Probably either here, and/or here if you've not got a presence there already?

Good advice that, I'm not sure what the deal is for you guys over the border, but Business Gateway here offer free workshops in a lot of the above. Although I'm not an Arb guy the ones I've attended were all a lot more beneficial than I'd expected them to be, so it'd be well worth a bit of investigation.