The talk will be hosted by the designer Chris Bagot (Founder, Softroom) and Gavin Smith (Operations Director, Wahaca) and will be attended by the region's top architects, designers and restaurant / bar operators. It is one in a series of events which have been held around the world, with the aim to foster a shared communication of industry ideas and inspirations and is a must for those with a true passion for design.

Our role at Core is as sponsors of the event while we're also Digital Partner to the annual Restaurant & Bar Design Awards, which celebrates the very best in global design. In fact this event's setting, Wahaca, Cardiff was this year's winner of best Multiple Restaurant at the most recent awards ceremony in October.

Core have been involved in supporting the Restaurant and Bar Design Awards since its inception in 2008 and is something we're proud to see develop into the fantastic event it is today.

It has been our responsibility to oversee all aspects of digital for the awards; including the brand and identity work / design, build and ongoing support for the Awards website, the online application system and online discussion and adjudication process.

Over recent years, taking advantage of our growth into a rounded digital agency, we have also been charged with handling the digital marketing for the awards ceremony, including social media management on the night.

The talk is open to architects, designers and operators involved in the hospitality industry and is strictly RSVP with limited numbers - if you're interested in attending please email the names, roles and email addresses of all attendees to:rbdtalk@wearecore.co.uk

We are delighted to announce that Core are sponsoring a free to attend 'Restaurant & Bar Design Talk' being held at Wahaca, Cardiff on Wednesday the 2nd December 2015 at 6:30pm

We are delighted to announce that Core are sponsoring a free to attend 'Restaurant & Bar Design Talk' being held at Wahaca, Cardiff on Wednesday the 2nd December at 6:30pm

In our field it relates to good quality link building, that is gaining links from reputable sources pointing to your site, and it is the cornerstone of building a website’s reputation and its standing with search engines. However, in classic search double edge sword manner, poor link building is also very likely to hurt your reputation and rankings. i.e. when using the example of our friend Euripides, you're going to be judged by the crowd you associate yourself with.

Google has often attempted to warn sites off looking for quick fixes through such ‘spammy’ methods as content farms, with the lingering fear of manual actions and penalties always lurking in the background.

So it certainly pays to perform a link audit on your site once in a while to keep an eye on any potential opportunities/difficulties.

As the saying goes, there is more than one way to crack a nut and in cracking this particular nut there are many tools at your disposable.

One of the first items on the agenda when it comes to an all-inclusive link audit is a proper, in depth crawl of your site. Tools such as Screaming Frog’s SEO spider is a particular favourite of ours (free for the first 500 URIs and £149 a year above that), while there are others out there which do much the same job.

This will help you to immediately uncover any strange goings on with your site including odd and unnatural error codes.

Another tool which should be within the first port of call for any investigation into links is through Google Search Console. In your account you will find a ‘Manual Actions’ page which will warn you of any penalties inflicted by Google due to unnatural links and what you need to remove them. However, this post comes from the angle that you are just performing some good SEO housekeeping rather than reacting to a horrendous drop off in rankings/traffic. Indeed, hopefully, if you make a good link audit part of your practice, you should never need to react to a manual action!

Digging deeper could require the use of tools such as Moz's Linx Explorer and Ahrefs, with our personal preference heading for the former. However, the main crux of these tools are to find a list of URLs linking to you, their anchor text and their domain authority (Moz also has a 'spam score' functionality which is particularly helpful in this regard).

So now that you have got yourself a list of links, what actually constitutes a bad one? Well although you will probably find many links out there which seem spammy (e.g. random links from irrelevant sites), this is largely 'cruft' and Google claims they are pretty good at determining this as such (i.e. not your fault or malicious). What we are really looking for are links which obviously are a part of a wider campaign to farm links e.g. hidden text links, paid for links - take a look at Google's Webmaster Guidelines for more info. These types of links are the ones which may get you in trouble.

If you do find something that you know is out of place (not simply cruft), make sure you act on it. The problem will not just go away and unfortunately for you Google does not take ignorance as an excuse and you run the risk of being slapped with a manual action.

The first, and most mild, action you can take is to contact the site owner and ask for your link to be removed from the site. Obviously this is dependant on the site owner taking action and not simply ignoring you, which often can be the case. A more extreme step is to use Google’s Disavow tool which will ask you to upload a list of links you no longer want pointing to your site and Google itself will remove them. However, it is noted that you should use this tool with caution and only after you are sure that this is a link you definitely don’t want associated with your site.

As mentioned earlier, a good link audit will help prevent potential disasters in the future and keep you in Google’s good books. It will also allow you to keep track with how any link building campaigns are progressing and how your site in general is evolving.

Simply put, a thorough link audit is good SEO practice and something which is vital in maintaining and improving site health.

Unsure whether something you've found is 'cruft' or malicious? Get in touch with us and we'd be happy to help.

"Every man is like the company he wont to keep" - Euripides 438BC. Now you may be forgiven in thinking that good SEO in the 21st century and the words of a Greek playwright writing two and a half thousand years ago may not have had a lot in common...

Now you may be forgiven in thinking that good SEO in the 21st century and the words of a Greek playwright writing two and a half thousand years ago may not have had a lot in common. Indeed you would be right..

On 26th February 2015, Google made the announcement on its official Webmaster blog that it would be “expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal”. It also made the very unusual move to announce when this algorithm change would begin taking place; April 21st.

In terms of its direct implications, from what we can tell Google will be rewarding websites which have optimized for mobile usage, be that responsive or 'm.'. Now to anyone who's been listening to Google or recent features they have been pushing lately (including it’s mobile-friendly labels which have appeared on mobile Google SERPs), this will not have been a surprise.

From a Google POV, user experience is key and those sites which don’t cater for their mobile visitors don’t deserve the best rankings. In short, those which don’t have a site optimised for mobile usage may well see their organic mobile rankings drop.

In terms of what Google deems ‘mobile’, that may be a little harder to determine. Tablets may exist in the grey area of this update, but from recent trends it may be safer to presume tablets will be included as mobile in this update.

That really depends on the nature of your business. At a recent conference, a key trends analyst from Google stated that this update will be bigger than the much-feared Panda and Penguin updates. Although, he also importantly noted that the algorithm change will only affect your mobile rankings and not your desktop terms.

‘So if I don’t rely on mobile visitors to my site for conversions, I’m alright then?’ 

Well maybe in the very short term, but in the long term you're probably sticking your head in the sand. If you’re not providing for your mobile visitors then you're not providing a good user experience in general and if metrics like bounce rate and other user engagement signals take a plunge, this will affect your desktop rankings.

In the long term, there must be an ambition to optimize your site for mobile. This becomes a greater priority if you know from Google Analytics that you rely on your mobile visitors for sales or conversions.

If you want to check to see if your site is optimised for mobile in Google’s eyes, they have launched this easy-to-use Mobile Friendliness tool. Simply type in a URL from your site and Google will give you a binary response of yes or no (and an Americanised ‘Awesome’ to make you really feel good!)

In general, this update is a solidifying of Google’s increasing emphasis on mobile, but really you should be thinking of your visitors’ user experience anyway. Take the time to flick through your website on a mobile device and really think, would I use this website?

If you're concerned as to how a mobile view of your site might be letting the side down, get in touch and we'd be happy to chat through your options.

The SEO community has been all abuzz as of late, which usually means one thing; algorithm drama. This time it’s the turn of mobile which has the spotlight shining bright. So what’s really going on?

With Google’s mobile algorithm update on the horizon, we take a look at its real implications for you as a business.

We see some very beautiful, well laid out visuals: very detailed, grid based designs with precise typographic layout.

We often think of these ‘flat’ layouts as being the ‘breadth’. They are fully immersive snapshots - and are representative of how the website will look on a two dimensional plane. Often they are detailed and engaging. However, these designs, while often submitted as the finished article, are only the initial visual interface of the website; the projection of the identity and the brand values as visual design intended to create an emotional resonance with its audience in a matter of seconds.

Our issue with this is that graphic designers are mostly trained to achieve engaging results in two dimensional visual media. When working on a website layout, therefore, they often treat it the same way as designing a poster. Striving to achieve a fine balance with elements of interface design: moving the elements of the design two pixels to the right, two pixels to the left and, perhaps, back again. All carefully and thoughtfully crafted to achieve the best impact and balance possible.

Our clients and partners work hard on this aspect of a project and, once completed, the end client is usually fully on board and happy to sign it off. Then it’s over to us, and the fun begins.

As a front-end web designer I strongly feel that this is only one half of the (visual) puzzle. Although there has undoubtedly been a great deal of consideration given to the visual impact and emotional resonance of the flat design up to this point, they can often fail when marrying the user interface (UI) with the user experience (UX). A graphic designer is rarely asked to consider the whole user experience on a functional level and across different devices, and this is something that we, as web designers and developers, excel at.

Where experienced web teams can add value is in considering the ‘depth’ of a website. Web developers, as an intrinsic part of their role, have to consider how a user is going to follow a path through the website.

At Core we find that in situations where we are able to work in tandem with graphic designers at the visual design stage of a project, then a better solution can be presented to the client. If this can be done before they buy into a visual design that is not as practical or workable then it’s a better situation for all stakeholders in the project.

We have over 20 years experience in marrying the breadth and depth of a successful web design. We are always happy to discuss any potential issues with our design partners and offer reasonable and practical solutions throughout the process - often before the end client is involved. Presenting a design for sign-off with little or no assessment of the function of a website could result in lengthy re-design processes, failing to meet deadlines, and worst of all undermining the client’s confidence in the successful delivery of the project.

We can help to avoid these pitfalls - we champion breadth and depth in web design, as well as the true spirit of collaboration and working in partnership to deliver outstanding results.

Building a great website that performs well is a multi-faceted task. Graphic designers and developers working together as a team should be a rewarding and successful process, and will mean nothing is left out of the brief.

In this post, we give you an insight into how we go about designing our websites and the thought processes behind our decisions.

Restaurant & Bar Design Talk

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Keeping Good Company Online

Mobilegeddon?

Making Better Websites