Tuesday, June 20, 2006

EPCS Services

Fresh Web Services recently launched EPC Services website. Electrification and Plant Consultancy (EPC) Services, based in Kent, specialise in providing railway electrification and plant engineering services to the underground and over ground railway companies.

The EPC Services website was built using the Joomla content management system. Joomla is ideal for large and small websites and comes with a wealth of features for making your website a top notch marketing tool. There is a member registration module, a newsletter module, an 'Email this page', 'print this page', and 'convert to pdf' link on every page if you want. There is also a contact form with validation built in. All these features mean that you can use your website as a marketing channel from the off. All these come 'out of the box' with the standard installation.

For the larger site there is user management functionality (so that many people can edit your site if you want), and a large number of add-ons to really push the boat out. Indeed, it's learning what & how to turn things on and off that's sometimes a problem.

If this sounds interesting, and something that you would like to consider, then please get in touch so that we can make the web work for you.

Sitemaps Part 2

I've mentioned earlier that Google Sitemaps are recommended by Google as the way to submit your new website to their index. Well, using sitemaps can mean that your website is indexed within days.

Fresh Web Services recently designed a website for Gist Consulting of Leicester. Gist Consulting provide professional writing and researching services - proofreading, copywriting, press releases, website copy, report writing and summarising, etc. Well, we submitted their sitemap to Google last Friday & Gist's new website was in Google's index on the following Monday - essentially indexed in about 2 days. Pretty impressive.

However, that's not the end of the story, as far as getting Gist's website well placed in the search engines. The Gist Consulting website has been developed using the Joomla content management system. This means it uses dynamic urls, which can be a problem for search engines. However, we've used a 'url re-writing' package (OpenSEF) to turn these urls into search engine friendly (SEF) urls - meaning they have keywords in the url & appear as static urls to the search engines
Also, there's all the other SEO (search engine optimisation) thingies that we have to do to ensure top rankings.

However, getting indexed in Google within 2 days is still pretty impressive. If only MSN, etc, could also provide such a quickfire indexing method.