Welcome To Ellis Web Design
Hi, I'm Steve. If you're looking for a unique custom website design, a lower cost alternative built from a website template (coming soon) or if you are looking for advice and help with developing your existing website, I am very flexible and always happy to discuss your requirements.
Being self employed and working from my design studio at home, I am able to offer you a personal and prompt service without the overheads of a large agency.
Graphics designers, rental property portals, holiday cottages, fishing tackle shops, housing developers, sci-fi costuming and even a brewery! Over the years I have produced a wide variety of websites covering a broad section of client industries...
Search Engine Optimization
I don't flog Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as a extra service, all my designs optimize keywords through H1 and H2 header tags, image alt tags and link title tags along with meta description and keyword tags.
Website Usability
I am happy to consider less than conventional design requests however it is important to remember that over the last 10 years or so the internet has generated an expected usability factor. This revolves around web design and layout from the visitors point of view for things visitors subconsciously expect when they visit a website.
These certain expectations when missed or moved around can cause them to become disorientated or even annoyed and leave.
Search Engine Submission, Sitemaps & Analytics
Finally, I don't promote the pointless service of submitting your website to 100's of search engines (there's only a handful that people use anyway) like some designers do. There's no need, one submission to Google does it, all the others come sniffing along soon after.
I do include an .xml sitemap file with each design that is readily visited by search engine spiders and makes it a lot easier for them to index the most important pages of the site.
I also include Google analytics that you can access by creating a free Google account of your own to monitor your websites performance, visitors, keywords and even visitor geographic locations! It's all clever stuff and vital for modern day market research and monitoring.
About Ellis87 Web Design
I first began designing websites purely for fun, for myself back in 1999. After a couple of years messing around with Frontpage and other off the shelf design software, I began to see limitations and complications starting to arise from the use of such things. My biggest turn offs were the huge amount of junk code they stuff into each page and awful cross browser compatibility.
As the years passed word of a wonderful thing called CSS became known to me and I started looking into hand coding websites using just a basic text editor program (notepad, then wordpad and now notepad++) to create clutter free, tidy and of course functional, optimized websites.
In 2005 I took the plunge and moved from my hometown in the UK to rural France namely department 87 (the 87 from ellis87webdesign), the Haute Vienne in the peaceful and definately stunning Limousin.
The first couple of years were taken up with extensive property renovation but by 2007 I had gained enough spare time to begin working on a website to fill a niche for rental properties in France. I realised that the web design skills I had learned from a lot of reading and research could be put to good use for the rental property market, a market not well served by other websites.
LetsRentPropertyInFrance.com (LRPIF) was born and due to careful optimization (a practice I carry on into all my web designs), it quickly began to outrank competing websites in search engine results - not just for a couple of vague search terms either! By the end of the first year it was ranked number 1 in Google, Yahoo and all the major search engines for rental properties in France and welcomes 25-45,000+ page views a month.
Although LRPIF requires a lot of my time I am finally able to put time into my primary passion, the design of great looking, clean and functional websites.
I do also like to help other people who have built their own website discover ways to improve their own design skills and as such offer a FREE website appraisal service to look over a site and suggest ways it might be further improved.
In my spare time I enjoy cooking and entertaining, good wine and fine beers (a little too much at times) and playing the drums.
Thanks for reading,
Steve.