Having taken over the management of Diamond Training Group’s web presence from an SEO company we have taken great measures to ensure that positions aren’t lost in transitioning to the use of WordPress as a CMS. As you probably already know WordPress is an extremely capable and search engine optimised CMS out of the box but there are a great number of plugins and tweaks you can make to improve it further.

Without doubt the most challenging aspect of the SEO has been the fact that the new web presence is represented on an entirely new domain. The old but powerful domain name was inconsistent with the logo and branding and after a very lengthy meeting the decision was made to focus strongly on the new brand and domain name. On top of this domain change, Diamond Training Group also had two separate sites for their Tiling Courses and Plastering Courses. In moving domains we also decided to combine the 3 sites into one, and losing the keyword-rich domains that powered those sites may still prove to cause additional work with the SEO. There comes a point where you need to decide whether the user’s experience is more important than easy SEO, and thankfully we have on board a savvy and bold enough client to make that decision.

Anyway let us know what you think of the site, and if you spot anything we’ve missed do give us a shout. We hope you enjoy the design as much as we enjoyed doing it.

With the previous version garnering so much interest and appreciation we were keen to retain as much of the creativity and quirkiness as possible but for plain and simple business reasons we needed to find a way to incorporate many, many more pages and a much more web-friendly way of navigating the web site.

Just in case you miss it – keep your eye on the headings on the homepage ;) Tutorial for how we built this site is in the pipeline.

For anyone that misses the old version, we’ve put it up at http://youlove.us/one just for you!

Let us know your thoughts in the comments, and do let us know if you notice any bugs (unless they’re IE6-related, as we have decided not to support that 8 year old browser for obvious PNG-related reasons).

At present, we are conducting a feasibility study on this subject, and would therefore love to hear from anyone who’d be interested in working with a vibrant, dynamic team of Web specialists as an intern. If you think this might be a direction you’d like to explore, then do get in touch and we’ll talk things through!

At this stage, we’d be very happy to hear from those with an interest in front-end design, LAMP development, Flash animation and 3D modelling. We really do feel this might provide successful applicants with experience of working with like-minded, established practitioners, and the opportunity to get an appreciation of life in a busy agency.