I'm excited that my new website has gone live (www.chameleongardens.co.uk)! Hopefully SEO will be much better, though I'm a bit dismayed to see that today when googling the usual "garden designer gloucestershire" or similar searches, the site seems to have dropped off the radar, except for my Google places listing for Cheltenham. No doubt this is just due to Google having a brief drop in 'trust', which the old site had built up by being around since 2003 (!). Even though the new site has been developed by professionals. I've had to learn a fair bit about the process just to understand what they were doing, and to make sure that I populated the site in the best way.

My main brief for the web designers was to give me a site that gave much more emphasis to the images, as I reckon most busy potential clients don't have time to read through chunks of text. The words are there if people want to read them, but if they just want to look at the pictures, hopefully they will find the buttons that allow them to hide the text either partially or fully.

I've also split large and small garden design up under garden and landscape headings. Although I am aiming more at the larger gardens or higher budgets, I don't want to put off others - apart from anything, I find designing smaller gardens very enjoyable: you see quick results, and can make a huge difference to your client's enjoyment of their home. But there's always the danger of trying to be all things to all people, and not convincing either end of the market. I signed up for Google Analytics a while ago, so will be keeping an eye on the website traffic and trying to interpret behaviour on the site to see if it's working as I want it to.

If anyone gets a chance to have a look, I'd be interested in your feedback!

www.chameleongardens.co.uk