One of my recent assignments was to redesign a website called Vera Paradise. The site had been designed using HTML with heavy use of tables, illogical names of pages and files and ludicrous use of CSS.

The first step then was to completely gut out the entire site, looking for any HTML tags which weren’t even needed. There were many of these. I also completely took out all text from the tables and deleted the tables completely. The sooner I got rid of those the better. Instead of using tables I set-up CSS using the float command and relative positioning to get everything into place.

The next step I took was to rename all the files and photos so that they were relevant. This including adding extra descriptive words into filenames. Instead of about.php, we now had about-vera-paradise.php. The more description the better. I also optimised all of the images used on the site. Some of them had huge file sizes despite being the size of postage stamps.

The last stage was going through each page, creating unique meta keywords, meta descriptions and page titles, and then also making sure that the words used in those recurred somewhere in the text. It’s very important to make sure that each page is optimised individually for the search engines.

And that was essentially it. A complete revamp that has already seen the site gain traffic.

After that I was asked to turn that site into a completely new site, with different branding, logos, design, a completely new experience basically. As a lot of the SEO had already been down this was a far easier job.

This is the first site, Vera Paradise. The second site, which was based on Vera Paradise, is Naturist Apartments.