I am first in Google...
20 August 2004
Site: www.creative-camera.co.uk
Rod Wheelans, creative-camera:
... my previous website was pure Flash and, although it looked good, the search engines did not like it at all! I was not even amongst the first 100 search results. After CreatWeb have done their magic, I am now amongst the first search entries in Google and many other search engines with my most important search terms - and that only a few months after going live with my new website!
With my previous website, my site statistics showed that I had about 200 visitors per month. The new site went live in June 2004 and by August, this had increased to well over a thousand unique visitors per month. That means that five to six times as many people actually visit my website and it's still increasing.
CreatWeb have built me a site where customers can look for their own photographs by entering their surname, or their wedding date whilst new visitors can browse my galleries, or look at a random selection of recent studio pictures.
I have contact forms for different enquiries (weddings, portraits, etc.). I got 2-3 enquiries per week on my old site, but now I receive about 60 good enquiries per month. I also have "hidden" price lists on the site which customers can access when I e-mail them the appropriate link.
I can update roughly 95% of the site content AND pictures myself and, if I don't like some text I have written yesterday, I just change it. When I take photographs of a wedding, the pictures can be online as soon as the film is processed - same day if it is digital! I don't need to contact my web developer for that.
The content management system is really easy to use and I needed no training at all. It's all self-explanatory.
Since creative-camera is based in Dumfries, the whole consultation was done by e-mail and telephone and CreatWeb were quick to implement any design changes I requested. I avoided travel cost and could keep development cost low - the final cost was much less than you might think!