The aim is to give an idea of what is possible combining video and a web site to add interest, generate authority and engender trust. As with the other two demos, the sites are built on existing templates that are fast and video friendly, and in particular mobile, SEO and video SEO friendly. In truth, without audio and a transcript, and at the very least closed captions, the video SEO benefits are limited but on anything we shoot, we produce the transcripts and code for Google to ‘read’ so that every word spoken in the video is fed to the search engines as code to enable them connect the video to any queries it answers, which is where the research comes in to connect everything together.
We’ve not build new websites for a couple of years as an awful lot of time has gone into continuing to manage large custom ones built for clients a few years back that remained from the programming firm I ran with two good friends and quite amazing programmers. I tried to slow that down before the pandemic and move back into filming which worked very well for a while, but the pandemic meant managing a handful of remaining sites but without my programmers as both took highly paid roles in their home countries.
This week sees the final two hybrid, Magneto and WordPress combined websites, moving away to other developers better geared to managing high maintenance sites.
A hybrid containing code from two systems, we concentrated on pairing Magento with WordPress, had all sorts of advantages in terms of cost and SEO benefits but each site was really designed with a two year lifespan in mind as the two systems, both under constant development, were always going to diverge further.
Our sites however have had on average a lifespan of over seven years, the pandemic didn’t help with these but over the last 15 years of programming, that has been pretty consistent. Post pandemic, without other programmers, the job of maintaining them and keeping the two systems working smoothly, plus ensuring third party integrations and SAAS (software as a service) keeps working has been quite a process, something of a full time job in itself.
I can concentrate again on filming and also producing a cohesive package of website, social media and video driven by sound market research and good editing and content.
I’ve again got spare capacity on my fast secure server within the WP-Engine network, mine is in London and as not shared, and as specced to run video fast on mobile, probably gives my sites a 50% speed increase over sites on well hosted shared servers, as mine don’t have to share data speed with ‘noisy’ i.e busy sites on the same network, I control everything going through mine. And in the UK at least we don’t appear to properly optimise video for search, and frankly it is hard to sell a service that consumers and ad agencies haven’t heard of. But if I combine with a site that is well built and fast, the advantages will become very clear, very quickly for new customers.
