Stewart Clark approached us with an idea of offering guided fishing trips in and around the sea, rivers and lochs of Ayrshire via a new website, this was a completely new venture for him and seen as an opportunity to turn his hobby into a method of earning extra money. Fishing is the most popular sporting activity in the UK with an estimated 3.3 million people participating in the sport on a regular basis.

The Brief

Stewart didn't really have much input in the overall design of the website and pretty much allowed us to get on with it in any way we saw fit.

The Development

Overall, the website was given a CSI look and feel by selecting a nice font to use for page / section headings etc with a gradient effect but instead of "watering down" the effectiveness with heavy graphic usage we use a technique that downloads a font from the website when a visitor looks at the page and dynamically replaces the font in the browser when the page is viewed. In other words what looks like a "graphical heading" to a website visitor is actually nothing more than standard HTML that Google understands and is central to how a page is ranked i.e google reads headings and bases its results on the density of heading to the rest of the text on the page among other things.

We also stayed away from long pages and creating numerous pages with very little content in them, much preferring to use a sliding technique so users can read individual sections - we tied it all together with text links, graphical links and contextual links throughout the site. In effect you should never be more than 2 clicks away from absolutely any content in the whole site.

The Result

The final result of all this was that the site relies heavily on internal linking of pages to suitably optimised sections and given the competition "highly targetted links" to target specific terms and keywords central to the business he carries out. Here is a sample of the position in Google at the time of writing.

The list goes on and given the high level of competition for all things fishing - for a new website, we believe that this site will only rank higher in future as he adds himself to other releted websites and online directories.