Category: Blogs

It’s no secret – 2020 wasn’t a great year. But for those businesses who have survived the madness, 2021 is a year of promise. We are chuffed to announce we have started on the right foot, with Freestyle winning a Gold Award at Ad World Masters ‘Agency of the Year’.

From an initial review of over 11,000 agencies, we made it into the final 500. This is a good achievement in itself, but it gets better, nail-biting, right? We placed within the top 25 agencies in the whole of the UK – achieving a 9.2 rating based on customer reviews, social, SEO and other criteria. There was a selection of fantastic agencies in the pool for judging, so to come out as one of only 23 with a Gold Award is certainly worth shouting about. A bottle of vino may be in order, we think.

One score we are incredibly pleased with was 8.78/10 for our speciality, web design and SEO services. We have worked hard to build long-lasting relationships with our clients and continue to service businesses from all different industries with professionalism, experience and sincerity. To achieve recognition for our hard work during such a difficult time is something we are proud of, as Jack explains.

“We were delighted to see how highly we scored in this award and want to say thank you to Ad World Masters for placing us within the top 0.5% of UK agencies. Winning this award was the perfect entry to 2021, and we are already getting stuck into the new year helping businesses all over Hampshire rejuvenate their websites and SEO rankings.” – Jack Manley, Founder of Freestyle.

In a world slowly returning to normal, we can’t wait to catch up with our clients face to face and show off everything new we’ve been learning in the last year. In the meantime, we are always keen to chat with businesses looking to rebuild their websites, improve functionality, or need some help busting the algorithms and finding their way to the top of Google. You can book a chat with our award-winning (yeah – we’re boasting already) team easily online to discuss your project.

We sent our resident designer Sam back to school! Well, not quite, but he has recently attended the School of UX in London where he learnt about the entire process of User Experience & User Interface Design – starting from the research stage and progressing all the way through to producing user-friendly, beautiful websites.

Here’s what Sam had to say:

“I learnt about all aspects of the UX design process including researching, wire-framing, prototyping and user testing. I also learnt about UX design philosophy and the 4 fundamental concepts to create a well-executed experience.”

“On the last day, I got the chance to put everything I had learnt to the test. Initially, we focused on creating an interactive prototype. This was a really useful exercise, but the highlight of my day has to be the end of course test. We all took part in a knockout-style quiz, putting everything we had learnt to the test, with the winner being the ‘Last Man Standing.’ I’m proud to say that out of the 20 participants I came out on top! And in doing so I won access to professional user research and testing facilities, including contributions from the likes of BBC, McLaren, DropBox and Google.”

But how has it helped?

“Overall, the UX course was so informative & applicable to my work here at Freestyle. I have genuinely learnt so much about User Experience Design and I really feel like it’s brought my designer ability to new heights. The course was run by industry expert Sergei Golubev. With 15+ years’ experience working as a UX & UI designer, with the likes of British Gas & Microsoft, the exclusive techniques & industry secrets he taught are simply invaluable. They’re going to make a real difference to my design process and methodology. It’s given me a refreshed approach to my design work as I’m now able to build beautiful design concepts that will also offer users the best possible experience – I can’t wait to show off what I learnt!”

If you are in need of a beautiful, responsive website that looks as good as it performs, give Freestyle a shout on 023 8000 0212.

What is the most expensive keyword in the UK on Google Ads? Well, it’s a good question. Back in 2018, the guys over at Wordstream got a report together of what they believed to be the most expensive keywords around, in terms of cost per click, in the UK.

We think they missed a trick.

The article here, states that Casino keywords, on average, have the highest cost-per-click in the UK, coming in at just under £60. Since they only had an ‘average’ cost for a broad keyword term, we delved a little deeper to see which casino keywords really break the bank!

1. Slotgames – £82.73
2. Online slots – £80.74
3. Online Casino – £72.06

Paying £80 to get somebody to click on your slots advert is pretty crazy right? We agree.
But there is one industry which everybody seems to be overlooking which has an even more obscene cost-per-click then online casinos/slots…

Where Freestyle work with a wide variety of different clients to build responsive websites and develop marketing campaigns, we really have seen it all in terms of keywords. Recently, we have been working with a client from the IT support industry, which is how we discovered these ultra-high-costing keyword terms…

Enter ‘Help-Desk Support.’

The cost of a single click on Google Ads for the keyword ‘Help desk software’ will set you back a staggering sum of £102. And if that’s not enough ‘best help desk software’ will set you back £110.

Here are the 3 most costly keywords we could find, for the service desk industry:

1. Best help desk software – £110
2. Help desk software – £103
3. Service desk software – £77.42

Instances like this show that you really need to take care when choosing your target keywords for pay-per-click campaigns, otherwise your advertising budget could be looking rather extortionate before long…

If you are confused by keywords or worried you aren’t maximising your ad-spend give Freestyle a shout on 023 8000 0212 and we can get the ball rolling on a highly effective & transparent advert campaign. Optimal keywords are always well researched & carefully selected in order to create the perfect, fully tailored campaign for your business.

Google now displays all unencrypted websites (with no SSL certificate) as “not secure”, in Google Chrome, their web browser. This is their latest effort in an attempt to stop hackers from getting their hands on your personal information. Score one to the good guys!

When a website is not secure (HTTP), the user will be prompted by an alert the address bar, which looks like this:

Not only does this sound a bit scary, but it also risks making your company look less credible.  A “not secure” website is enough to make anyone scarper, so make sure your website is secure, by encrypting it with an SSL certificate.

What on earth is a HTTP/HTTPS site?

HTTP sites are unencrypted, which makes it much easier for prying eyes to see sensitive information being passed over the internet. HTTPS websites are encrypted (the letter S stands for “Secure”), meaning the information you type is protected.

You can see whether a site is HTTP or HTTPS by looking at the search bar at the top of the page:

But don’t panic! At Freestyle, we encrypt all of our websites, making them safe for your customers to use.

Need a new website? Get in touch for a quote. Call 02380 000 212 or email [email protected], we’d love to hear from you!

Get compliant – GDPR launches 25th May 2018

The countdown starts here…

Sort it

The deadline’s fast approaching and if you haven’t already updated your privacy policy and made sure you’re fully compliant with the new regs, now’s the time to sort it.

The easy bit

Just send us your updated privacy policy, we’ll pop a link to it on your website so it’s easy for customers to find.  It’s got to be crystal clear to visitors what their data’s being used for, so easy to find ‘opt-in’ boxes for collecting data are a must!

We just add a tick box, so they can acknowledge acceptance of your privacy policy before they even get to your contact form.

The legal bit is for legal experts

Here at Freestyle we don’t hold third party data and we don’t write privacy policies, but we do recommend our clients speak to one of those clever chaps over at www.hybridlegal.co.uk.

They really know their onions, helping clients get GDPR compliant (in plain English!) and offer a Data Protection Health Check to make sure you and your business are ready come 25th May 2018.

The fines for non-compliance are whopping too so don’t leave it ‘til the last minute.

Give us a call on 023 80 000212 and we’ll get your website GDPR ready!

Do you have a slow loading website? One of the main culprits we come up against, time and time again, are big image files causing a bit of a weight problem.

The ‘heavier’ the page is, the longer it takes to load, the more likely it is people will get bored and go elsewhere, particularly when you’re not connected to wifi.

Here are our 3 rules to avoiding a bad case of image bloat:

1. Resize
2. Compress
3. Keep trim

Resize

If there’s one thing you should do, it’s this. Resize photos down from their original size when you use them on the web. We recommend no bigger than 2000px wide, which is still pretty huge, but with some smartphone’s nowadays sporting cameras big enough to produce pictures the size of a  bus, let’s not get carried away. Easiest way to do this? There are a few sites online to do this, just Google “resize pictures”.

Compress

You can shave off up to 80% of the size of a photo by compressing it, with no change in quality, or size. We recommend using kraken.io to do this, free and effective.

Keep trim

We all to often see web pages with over 50 pictures in a Gallery. We’d suggest a ‘showcase of your best’ approach, rather than ‘the complete works of’…  Another thing to remember, people buy results not problems, so we generally don’t recommend ‘before and after’ photos – just show the final result of your work.

One of our customers?

No need to worry, every time you upload a photo to your website, we automatically resize and compress it for you, using the best tool on the market – Kraken Premium. Winner.

Not one of our customers?

Give us a call today to see if images might be causing you a problem.