We will not bog you down in the technical details but instead will listen to what you want and design solutions accordingly.

Browse the site to see examples of what we could provide for you.

Content management systems provide your business with the opportunity to update and build upon your site without having to pay a web designer to continually update it for you. These systems although easy to use once installed, can be difficult to set up and involve knowledge of mySQL and php.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) for content managed (CMS) sites can also be complex. We have the expertise to design your content managed (CMS) site from the ground up with search engine optimisation (SEO) in mind.

We also offer a custom template design service for your content management system (CMS) to make your business stand out from the crowd. This site has been built with wordpress and shows how it can be utilized to build an attractive website, with good search engine optimisation (SEO).

We also have experience of building and refining sites using,  joomla, silverstripe and drupal.

How do I improve my Google rating and what is SEO?

Mastery of search engine optimisation (SEO) can allow small businesses to punch well above their weight on the internet. We design your site from the ground up with search engine optimisation (SEO) in mind. Through discussion with you we can get a feel for your business, identify entrance paths of potential customers and design your site accordingly.
The key to good search engine optimisation (SEO) is constant refinement, this involves analysis of visitor trends and modifying a site accordingly.

With the current trend towards content management systems (CMS), search engine optimisation (SEO) becomes more  difficult. If you are using a wordpress blog or a site built with joomla, how do you optimize it for search engine optimisation (SEO)?

We know the answers to these complex questions and can advise you accordingly. What links should you seek for your site and which could be detrimental to your search engine optimisation (SEO)?  Again we can advise you.
How can you boost your site’s visibility and attract more customers? The key here is also good search engine optimisation (SEO). Getting the search engine optimisation (SEO) right at the start, will enable customers to find your site easier and generate more business for you.

To allow you to gain a more detailed understanding of this complex issue we have posted a number of case studies

CSS3 and wordpress for cms sites

Say goodbye to flash and photoshop for lots of your website effects, CSS3 is here. As part of our continuing commitment to stay abreast of the latest technologies and to pass their benefits onto our customers, we have been exploring using wordpress 3 as a content management system, and utilising CSS3 in our web builds.

These technologies offer many benefits when combined. CSS3 allows the browser to perform a lot of the effects such as shadows and animations without external images or flash files. This means that the page has a much smaller file size and so can load faster, which is becoming increasingly important for search engine optimisation. It is thought that page loading speed is now a google ranking factor.

WordPress has developed significantly form its origins as a blogging platfrom and can now genuinely be considered as a fully functional content management solution. It won the 2009 Open Source CMS Award which shows the esteem with which it is regarded within the community.

The key to good search engine optimisation and getting your site to perform well in the searches you wish to target is content. The more relevant content you have the better. WordPress allows the user to rapidly add new content to their site. We have been experimenting with is utilising php and CSS3 to enhance the power of wordpress when it comes to search engine optimisation. In our recent redesign of the Richard Price photography website we implemented this strategy to the full.

The brief was to keep the site image driven but to add a large amount of content in each page so as to be highly ranked by search engines. Also we wanted to avoid flash as it is not supported on the Apple ipad.

We used the excellent featured content gallery on the front page, which allows you a slideshow of images, but in contrast to a flash based gallery each image comes with selected text which can be trageted to search terms. For the galleries inside the site we used jalbum, which provides an excellent javascript based gallery solution.

In order to add more relevant content to each page we also used php to pull related posts onto each page. Thus if the user is in the wedding section, recent wedding posts are also shwon at the bottom of the page. Although these appear as images, when the user moves their mouse over them an excerpt of the post is revealed by the CSS. This content is also indexed by the search engines and because it changes all the time the search engines find new content each time they visit, which also helps the site’s ranking.

Other features of wordpress that we utilised are the new custom menu feature, which allows different custom menus to be shown depending upon the type of page the user is on. This can be very useful in large sites and helps to keep the navigation simple and uncluttered.

Take a look at the site to get a feel for all the features that we can offer to our clients by using a wordpress based content management system website.

E-commerce made easy

As part of our continuing commitment to our customers we often have to address new issues as technology changes. With the introduction of the ipad, our client had become worried that his existing flash-based galleries were not visible on this device and so would make his content unavailable to a large number of internet users.

We suggested using jalbum to create new javascript based galleries, which work on the ipad. This also had the advantage that we could integrate a paypal based custom shopping cart into the pages. This allows customers to order prints directly from the site, with different options for each image.

When an order is placed the retailer can identify what has been ordered by an unique code which identifies each product. Multiple orders are possible as well as many options for individual customisation.

Email newsletters to engage with customers

We are always keen to find new ways for our customers to engage with their customers and email newletters are proving increasingly popular. Using wordpress as a content manangement system allows clients to use this feature simply and conveniently by using feedburner.

Feedburner allows the design of custom email newsletters to be sent out automatically to selected clients, enabling them to be kept abreast of developments that concern them. This is an excellent way to engage with your customers.

Feedburner also allows you to add an animated headline banner to the front page of your website, which allows you to keep your website looking current.

feedburner box

Utilising the latest developments to promote your business need not be difficult if you engage Icepick Solutions, we are experts in utilising the latest technologies on the web for promoting your business in a simple and efficient way.

Ultimately what you want is to generate more business.

What we want to do is enable you go get new customers and engage with those you have in as simple a manner as possible.

Get a complete rebrand form the experts Icepick Solutions and move your business forward.

We designed and arranged the printing for new promotional flyers for Richard Price photography a manchester wedding photographer that we are now working with on our design projects. Richard also shoots headshots for actors, and is a highly regarded manchester portrait photographer and manchester commercial photographer. From his studio he will also be shooting product shots for us and can proivide custom imagery for your website to promote your brand.

From this information you can draw up an initial list of targeted keywords.  Building upon this initial list of keywords is where the process of search engine optimisation (SEO) begins. There are a variety of tools that enable the analysis of this initial keyword list.  These tools show how often these keywords are searched upon and other related terms people would use to perform similar searches.  Thus at the end of this step of the search engine optimisation (SEO) process we can draw up a refined keyword list.

Then it is necessary to write relevant text for the website incorporating your refined list of keywords at the correct density to be hit by the search engines.

This is where it becomes complicated. In order to ensure the correct density of your keywords in relevant pages it is best to design specific landing pages for each set of search terms. I am not saying that you have to stuff your pages with loads of repeats of your keywords.  What I am saying is that you have to write highly relevant copy specifically designed around your refined keyword list and that this is much easier to do if each page is clearly focused on a specific subject.

In the illustrations here for Richard Price Photography, the brief was to attract clients for commercial work, portraiture and weddings.  Clearly people looking for each of these different services would enter entirely different search terms into the search engines.  So it would appear logical that in order to perform as well as possible in each of these separate searches three separate pages needed to be designed.  So three refined lists of keywords were drawn up and then write highly targeted and relevant copy was specifically designed for each page.  The advantage of this strategy is that when people search on those terms they are taken to a page specifically tailored to their search terms. Hopefully they are then more inclined to engage with the content because they find it relevant and then explore the site further.

Your refined keyword list is also important for designing your description, title and keywords meta tags and each of these must be specifically targeted on each page.  The identifier for the page also needs to be specifically designed to include keyword in the html, so in this example  the three pages were saved as commercial_photographers_manchester.html, portrait_photographers_manchester.html and wedding_photographers_manchester.html.

Now we have three highly targeted pages for each area of the business, with relevant content, targeted meta tags, and addresses. The questions now are how do you go about getting the search engines to find them and how do you get them to rate highly?  These questions are highly complex and will require some time to explain so I think I will stop for now and return to these issues in the next part of this series.