Around 4 years ago, we started up a blog for MDS Solutions and came up with quite a few posts on website design and SEO. We had a few issues with the installation and for one reason or another it fell to the back of the queue in terms of importance. We also had lots of new client projects and our own website and blog had to sit on the back burner for a while and it didn't really get the attention is deserved.
So, this month we've put a big effort into overhauling pretty much our entire infrastructure, the packages we offer, our own website and last but not least this blog. To give you a quick summary of the changes we have made I've broken it down as follows:
Infrastructure
We've moved our entire infrastructure into the Amazon Cloud instead of relying on just dedicated hosted servers, and now provide our websites using the software as a service (SAAS) model. This gives us the advantage of scaling up and down performance when it is needed, provides us with a more robust and reliable solution including backups spread over different continents and gives us the architecture that blows pretty much all of our competitors out of the water! And the best part of all of this (for both us and our customers) is that it is cheaper! Which leads me onto the next section very nicely...
Website Design and SEO Packages
To take advantage of our lower overheads and scalable setup, we've decided to follow the Amazon Cloud model of "you only pay for what you use". This means that we have ditched the traditional approach of a one-time design fee followed by a yearly hosting charge, and replaced it with a simple monthly subscription service. You can now choose from 4 different website design or SEO packages and all you pay is the monthly fee. There are no contracts, no setup fee, you simply subscribe for as long as you need to. We've even dropped the prices of our packages as we only have costs for the length of time that you have the subscription, so it's a win-win all around and hopefully this will help some small start-up businesses afford to make their website as professional and successful as the bigger boys they are up against.
Our Website
We've also revamped our entire website, both in terms of design and actual content. We've stripped out all of the bloated content and gone back to basics with a fresh new design. We've even moved off our old solution that was used to deliver our website and now our site (and this blog!) is built using exactly the same Content Management System (CMS) that we have built and use for our customers. It has been built from the ground up and we feel the automated setup, features and functionality, built-in SEO and overall performance gives us that edge we need over our competitors.
Revamping our Blog
Going back through our old blog, I found that even though the posts were 4 years old, there was still some good content in there. Yes, there's some that's outdated or been superseded, but generally I thought it would be a waste to just put it in the bin never to be seen again. Instead, we've imported it into our database, set the dates to be the original date of when it was written and tagged it as 'Archive' so that you can still read it if you want to!
Hopefully all of these changes will come together nicely and we are looking forward to helping our client's websites become successful on our new infrastructure and venture into the world of software as a service!
Mark Smith
MDS Solutions