April 2018 sees the start of the 5th year for Light Bulb Web Design in Carlisle!  Hitting the ground running, our first news of the year was becoming a Limited Company, paving the way for another venture which we are proud to be part of and are hoping to provide more details on later in 2018.

Each new year brings the chance for reflection on how things have been in the past and how we want things to be in the future.

When we launched in 2014, we had no idea that we stood any chance of denting the website design market in the Carlisle area, mainly because of how many web designers and web design companies are out there.

However, never being shy of a challenge, we have continuously kept on top of SEO and web design trends, making sure we kept not only ourselves ahead of the game, but also the websites of our clients.  When a critical change is required to keep our websites on the cutting edge, we do our best to implement the change for not just new clients, but all of our previous ones.

From day one we focused on mobile friendly, responsive websites.  Our first website launched non-responsive, but was quickly changed and set the way we would work from that day onwards.  When we took the important decision of having our own dedicated server, we made sure it supported PHP7 which brought a significant website page load time improvement even without any changes to the hosted websites.

In 2018, Google Chrome and the Google search engine began to highlight SSL/HTTPS secured websites and mark non-SSL/HTTPS websites as 'NOT SECURE'.  It was great to have one client get in touch and ask if we could implement HTTPS on their website, for us to be able to reply that we had already done this a number of months earlier.  Now, all of our existing clients are running on encrypted HTTPS hosting, whether we created their website in 2014 or 2018.

Looking forward to 2018 and beyond, we're keeping an eye on AMP (accelerated mobile pages - which our blog platform already supports!), and are starting to add Facebook OpenGraph data to all home pages of new websites.  Supporting Twitter Cards is also on the way, and will be a standard feature of all new websites once we have decided on the best route to support the feature.

Aside from the technical part of our work, we're also continuing to build strong links with other local businesses so that we can continue to offer our clients the services they need from trusted and experienced local providers, whether this is graphic design and printing, search engine optimisation, marketing support or social media management.

So, here's to 2018 - another exciting year for Light Bulb Web Design Ltd., and our clients!