Websites particularly designed for SEO and the SEO optimization of already established business webpages is booming.  This is especially so for businesses that are pushing to do greater volume and/or expand regionally or glogally.

I looked through the website of GSINC and saw an array of these services.  I contacted Gareth Davies, owner of GSINC, for an interview.

How did you get into web design?  “In my late teens and early twenties I was a songwriter/musician in a number of bands. Some of the music made its way to the music press and national radio stations, but alas the bands never made it ‘big’.  Through my time promoting the bands throughout the early – mid nineties I undertook the design duties for flyers, promo posters and CD covers. In around 1997 we set up our first website – which was really a web page.”

“I also studied design, helped out at the local college in the art department for a couple of years and had done some graphics training at college. I also loved photography too – so a combination of these skills was a pretty good foundation for web design.”

Do you remember the very first site you designed?  “Yeah – it would have been the band one – but it was really a montage of photos and bio info. In a way it was a bit like a crude MySpace page with no multi-media. Then the first site I can remember after that would have been for an artist and was a flash website. It had 5 minute animated sequences to get to each section – it was not very practical as it took about half an hour to navigate around the site but it was certainly an experience and quite different to a lot of other UK sites at the time.”

You now do a lot of SEO  - Is this a speciality for you?  “Yes – for the last 6 years where we have been involved in web design.  we also worked in promotion of the sites. Our priorities have moved more towards site promotion as technology has advanced and clients can now get better off the shelf products to build in house. It is not uncommon now for us to design flats, clients can integrate the designs and then we come on board again to promote the site. This works well for the client and ourselves.”

“The new site, www.gsinc.co.uk/ was designed by our team of designers. It was originally created as flat designs, then our CSS expert produced a coded version of the main homepage. The site contains a lot more multimedia than your average SEO firm site as it even includes SEO video tutorials!”

“The site is always changing and we do not stay with a static design – we track site activity and our pages will change every time we learn something new – so building a website and leaving it online for months, for years is no longer an option.”

What will be the next big development in Web Design?  “Difficult one to answer – but I suspect we will see a move away from static text driven pages and use more multimedia – however I don’t mean lots of animations that serve no purpose but more what we thought would happen in 2000 – 2001 (but the bandwidth was not there for users). Both technology and connection speed make interactive PC TV style browsing the likely next step for web design.”

“The other industry development we can see happening is that companies will become more niche and specialise more. The days of the ‘one stop shop’ little web firm that says it can do every design job under the sun will go. People want specialists and I think this is the way commercially things are going. Some firms will just code ECommerce templates, others will just do CSS, others will just do Flat designs and others just the Marketing. This will work better for clients as they get the best people for each part of the job.”

Have you worked with website Templates?  “No. Though we have had clients bring them to us where they have bought them and have then wanted to enhance the site. Some of the web templates out there these days are impressive. Our experience is that some clients will never be able to edit them as easily as they would like too and will probably need some professional assistance to get a site finished and looking great.”

What do you think about Flash Technology?  “Flash revolutionised web design really. It brought the web to life and opened up many possibilities. As it became more accessible and widely used it inevitably got overused by some folks and its here it got its reputation for being annoying animations – but the beauty of flash was its ability to allow great motion graphics and bring TV to the web. In 2007 Flash is very powerful and the flash player has allowed what we thought it could do and is the platform of choice on so many big sites now – including Youtube. . .Well from an SEO point of view flash is a bit of a non-starter. It is just not going to cut it. So if high rankings are part of the plan then Flash pages alone are not enough and you have to figure in some static HTML text. Another downside is poor use of the medium – there are so many newbies using flash and trying to make everything spin and move on a web page they lose site of functionality. If every copy of flash came with a usability guide written by Jacob Neilsen and you had to read it before you could start building in flash the web might be a better place. . . The advantages are that 95%+ of people can see it. Its fast to download most content and its probably the best streaming media content out there right now – so great for streaming websites, audio, video, games and interactive competitions.”

What are your sources of inspiration?  “In terms of great web designers I would say:
1. Hillman Curtis (probably my overall favourite - GD)
2. Hi Res! (agency in UK)
3. Joshua Davis
4. Eric Jordan

But design ideas and themes can come from art – I have had lots of ideas from artists, visiting galleries, TV/Film trailers,
photography, advertising billboards, product packaging,  flyers and sales letters – the list is pretty endless.”

Thankyou Gareth for your insights and experiences.

Arthur Browning