High Forest Web Works - A brief history

The development of a website design company in Northumberland

In the beginning .....

When I wrote my first website, it was brilliant! Well - I thought so at the time!

And it did work! All the coding was done by hand, tag by tag, and I learnt the importance of understanding how to write the HTML coding correctly; what all the tags did; how to make sure links worked and how to make images load efficiently.

It was a challenge, but there was always SKS around who helped me out when I got stuck, and, as it was a personal website, I could do exactly what I wanted to do!

I discovered then that having a website was fun!

My personal website was for my family history: a hobby that can easily become an obsession. I tweaked my first website again and again. I added new families and sections; then photographs of local churches and chapels, gravestones and villages.

I had been a member of several Family History Societies and far too many mailing lists: I left notes on internet message boards and surname interest lists.

But this website was in a different league!

I knew nothing about promoting my website and I'd never heard of "Search Engine Optimisation" (SEO) and getting well placed on Yahoo, Google or any other search engine.

I just concentrated on making my website easy to use and full of information that other family historians would find useful.

Where would you go to see if anyone else was looking for Smith families from a very small village in the North Riding of Yorkshire? Or a photograph of a disused Church in Northumberland?

~ Google, Yahoo, MSN or any other search engine ~

and my website was full of words that search engines were happily indexing. I kept adding more and more information and the search engines kept coming back for more! They seemed to like websites that were being updated on a regular basis.

Once my website became reasonably well established I started being contacted by people who were specifically interested in the families and villages I was interest in. And so my family tree grew and grew!

And then other websites started linking to mine, which increased the number of family historians who found me.

I was being contacted by more and more fellow family historians ~ far more people than I had ever done before through the more traditional routes.

My website made contacting others looking for the same thing, easy!

My family history website is a continuous "work in progress" ~ currently in its 3rd incarnation. I am still tweaking my site when I have time, and, if there were more hours in a day, I would have hundreds of more pages, notes, distant ancestors, images and photos added!

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Then came "Ingleside".....

My brother runs a lovely guest house in Devon, and when he took it over, I had a good look at the website that came with it.

It was dull, with small pictures, little text and pages and pages of links to other websites: most of which had nothing to do with his business. There were also pages of text that had been copied directly from other websites - an easy way to get penalised by Google - and a very poor way to persuade visitors to stay and do business with him.

It really irritated me when I saw it ~ I knew I could do much better, and for a great deal less than the annual fee he was paying.

So I did!

And that is how High Forest Web Works began

I offer small business owners workable websites at a reasonable cost; websites that work and that will be found by the search engines again and again; that will load quickly; that will be viewable on small screens as well as large ones; that can be read by the oldest browsers and that can be accessible to everyone.

We offer additional support for those who are embarking on their first website, and are not quite sure where to start and we will work with you through all the stages, from your initial ideas, to your completed, fully functioning website on the World Wide Web.

I can build websites that work!

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If you have more questions or you need more help or advice, please contact us and we will endeavour to help you ~ without any obligation.