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Making our PCB website uncomplicated​

Once upon a time the website was a mysterious beast. To create one meant learning HTML code, programming with text only before viewing what had been created. You then had to fix all the issue’s. Just like any programming language I guess. Hopefully in making our PCB website uncomplicated you’ll reap the benefits!

I entered the world of website creation as I enjoyed all things PC and it was just natural progression I guess. Luckily I started with Dreamweaver so could skip the HTML (and you can argue that without that knowledge I was bound to struggle) and create a few website’s for friends and family.

Now my boss got wind of this and I was “volunteered” to update the company site. This is going back 11 years now (I know this because of the “Wayback Machine” website that stores snap shots, it’s worth a look). My boss wanted a spinning globe to add a bit of movement to our site. That’s pretty much as complicated as it got. OK, so we had to add some SEO bits, but that was just adding lots of words to the meta tags in the header of the pages. Yes, your right once again, it could have been far more complicated than that but I didn’t know any better back then.

Since then I’ve transformed the website twice more, the latest re-incarnation being launched a few weeks ago using WordPress, instructional videos on YouTube, and attending a few lectures about website marketing. But things have got a lot more complicated since my early days.

How have we improved our UK PCB website?

I must admit that with WordPress, all the mobile compatibility issues Google Search Console was screaming at me have now disappeared. I’ve managed to get all the redirections from the old webpages pointing to the equivalent new pages to keep the existing search engine links happy. I’ve got Call to Actions on my site (one asking you to sign up to our mail shot list. I have a Cookie warning popping up and GDPR tick boxes for the dynamic online form / online chat. I’ve utilized the blog section as Google likes new content. Our contact page has got lovely photo’s of some of the staff so you can connect with us.  We have plans to keep content fresh by creating help video’s staring yours truly.

So, as you can imagine, I was pretty smug with myself. For a guy that knows enough but is nowhere near an expert in the field of web sites. I thought I’d done a half decent job (so far). That was until my teenage son points out that my website only scores a 3 (out of 100) on Google’s PageSpeed Insights. What??!! Google measures my site speed and can rank it on that too?!! I had to have a lie down!

So no matter what TV adverts tell you, building a non complicated website is impossible and is it now too complicated? Hopefully in making our PCB website uncomplicated you’ll reap the benefits!

(I’ve got the speed rating up to 46 now, depending on when you refresh the score page, and I’m watching more YouTube video’s on “Eliminating render-blocking resources” (I’m sure it’s the video running on the home page, but I really like that feature!). One thing is for sure, we’ve got a contact us page.

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