Akira Studio blog - Web Design London Ontario

How old is your family car?

• Do you change it regularly to get all the new features and fuel savings?

• Or do you hold onto it until the fender is hanging off and the repair costs outstrip the value of the car?

Now, how old is your website?

• Is it fast and responsive, or a little slow off the mark?

• It it attractive and shiny, or a bit tired and rusty?

The good news is that with websites, unlike cars, you don’t have to rush out and buy a whole new one to get the latest features and styles. You can update the one you already have from Akira!

At Akira, we build our website using two systems, Joomla and Wordpress. We love Joomla for its power and stability, but WordPress takes the crown for ease of use and sheer flexibility.

Wordpress has come a very long way from it’s origins as a blogging platform. Now, some of the world’s biggest websites are built using Wordpress, and they couldn’t look and feel more different.

Here are some of the stand-out websites created in WordPress, including one of our own, so you can see for yourself just how flexible WP is….

Ever wondered how online shops seem to know what you want before you do?

Each time you browse, Amazon (for example) will pop in that scrolling bar of items at the bottom of each product page called “Customers who bought this item also bought”. It’s (usually) full of relevant products like the one you’re looking at.

Now flip back to the Amazon home page and you’ll be presented with “Related to Items You’ve Viewed”. This is where things get interesting, because the choices it shows you are not necessarily directly linked to what you have just been looking at.

As Akira's SEO guru, I'm fascinated by this kind of search results. I just looked on Amazon at the DVD box set of the kids animated films “Hotel Transylvania 1 & 2.” As I’d expect, the “Customers also bought” section shows me other light-hearted children’s animated films, such as ‘Minions’ and ‘The Good Dinosaur’.

Flip back to my home page, and the choice gets more eclectic: “The Lady in the Van’, “Bridge of Spies”, “Spectre’. These mix what I’ve looked at previously with my current viewing, but all within the same category - DVDs.

What has this to do with website SEO and a wet dog? Read on and find out....

There has been a bit of a panic over the recent changes Google has been making to SERPs (search engine results page), with more ads appearing at the top than before.

Panic ye not. This is not the end of organic (non-paid) search as we know it. It’s just Google rearranging elements to better suit mobile users.

Here’s what’s happening, how it affects SERPs and three good reasons not to worry!

It’s one of those questions everybody seems to ask when the subject of websites comes up - “How fast is your broadband? Mine’s only….”

Slow business internet connections are not only irritating, they can also affect how you view the internet as a whole. If your internet is slow, then it must be the same for everyone, right?

Not at all. Figures from TestMy.net show that your broadband speed really does depend on where you live. That in itself isn’t surprising, but the locations with the fastest average speed did surprise us…