Articles

Web Design & Development

Writing on the design decisions that determine whether a website earns trust, converts visitors and serves its business purpose effectively.

Topic All articles Coaching & Strategy Graphic Design SEO & GEO Web Design & Development WordPress

Are WordPress Websites Secure?

Are WordPress websites secure? It is one of the most frequently asked questions about the platform, and one of the most frequently misunderstood. The short answer is yes: a properly maintained WordPress website is secure. But the full answer requires understanding what makes WordPress vulnerable when things go wrong, what protects it when they do […]

22 July 2026 · 9 min read

markexcell.co.uk Has Achieved an A+ Website Carbon Rating. Here Is What That Means.

markexcell.co.uk has been independently assessed by the Website Carbon Calculator and awarded an A+ rating, the highest possible grade, with a measured carbon output of 0.02g of CO2 per page visit. The site is also confirmed as running on sustainable energy. I am sharing this not simply as a credibility note but because the result […]

17 July 2026 · 8 min read

Colour Theory for the Web: What Works, What Does Not and Why

An earlier article on this blog covered how colour shapes whether visitors trust a website, examining colour temperature, contrast, and consistency from a practical business perspective. This article goes a layer deeper, into the underlying principles that explain why certain colour combinations work well, and others do not, and how those principles translate into practical […]

10 July 2026 · 13 min read

How to Use White Space Well (and Why Most Websites Do Not)

White space is one of the most misunderstood concepts in web design. The name itself is part of the problem. It implies emptiness, absence, something left over when the real content has been set in place. In reality, white space is an active design decision with measurable consequences for how a page is understood, how […]

9 July 2026 · 11 min read

Choosing the Right Font for Your Website: A Practical Guide

Font choice is one of the most consequential design decisions a website makes, and one of the least discussed in practical terms. Most guidance on the subject either stays at the level of abstract categories or jumps straight to lists of trending fonts without explaining why any particular choice would or would not be appropriate […]

7 July 2026 · 12 min read

Should Your SEO Title and H1 Match?

It is a question that comes up regularly among business owners and developers working on SEO: should the title tag and the H1 heading on a page be the same, or should they differ? The answer is more nuanced than a simple yes or no, and understanding the reasoning behind it will help you make […]

6 July 2026 · 10 min read

Image Optimisation Explained: Why Your Photos Could Be Slowing You Down

Images are almost always the largest files on a webpage. A single unoptimised photograph uploaded straight from a camera or phone can be several megabytes in size, which means it takes far longer to download than everything else on the page combined. Most visitors never notice this consciously. They simply experience the page as slow, […]

6 July 2026 · 10 min read

What Makes a Website Actually Convert? Moving Visitors from Browsing to Buying

There is a version of a website that ticks every box. It loads quickly, scores well in Lighthouse, has clean semantic HTML, a clear colour palette and proper schema markup. And yet visitors arrive, look around and leave without getting in touch, making a purchase or taking any meaningful action. Traffic without conversion is a […]

3 July 2026 · 10 min read

How to Create and Publish Your Own WordPress Plugin

WordPress powers a significant proportion of websites on the internet, and one reason it has remained widely used for so long is its plugin architecture. Plugins allow functionality to be added to a WordPress site without touching the core code, in a way that is modular, updatable and, when done correctly, straightforward to maintain. Creating […]

2 July 2026 · 14 min read

Google Lighthouse Explained: What It Is, What It Measures and How to Use It

If you have worked through the audit checklist on this blog, you will have come across references to Google PageSpeed Insights and performance scores throughout. Both are built on the same underlying tool: Google Lighthouse. Lighthouse is one of the most useful, freely available tools for understanding how well a website is genuinely performing, not […]

1 July 2026 · 9 min read

Is Your Website Doing Enough? A Plain-English Audit Checklist for Small Businesses

Most small business websites do some things well and others not at all. The difficulty is that the gaps are rarely obvious from a simple look at the site. A website can appear perfectly reasonable, load without errors and contain accurate information, while quietly underperforming in ways that are costing the business real enquiries and […]

30 June 2026 · 8 min read

What Does a Good Website Brief Look Like? A Guide for Business Owners

Most website projects that go wrong do not go wrong because of the design. They do not go wrong because of the development. They go wrong because of what happened, or rather what did not happen, before any design or development work began. A weak brief results in a website that looks fine but does […]

29 June 2026 · 9 min read

CSS That Works: How Clean Stylesheets Make Your Website Faster and Easier to Maintain

Every website has a stylesheet. It is the file, or collection of files, that tells the browser how everything should look: the colours, fonts, spacing, and layout. Without CSS, a webpage is nothing more than plain, unstyled text. But CSS is also one of the places where websites accumulate technical debt most quietly and most […]

26 June 2026 · 9 min read

What Is Semantic HTML and Why Does It Matter More Than You Think?

If you have ever had a website built or briefed a developer, there is a reasonable chance the phrase semantic HTML came up at some point and was either glossed over or explained in a way that did not quite land. It sounds technical. It sounds like something you can leave to the people who […]

25 June 2026 · 9 min read

How Colour, Typography and Spacing Shape Whether People Trust Your Website

People decide whether to trust a website within a few seconds of arriving on it. Not a few minutes. A few seconds. And in that window, they have not read a word of your copy, checked your credentials or reviewed your portfolio. They have simply looked at it. This is not a superficial response. It […]

23 June 2026 · 10 min read

What a Perfect 100/100 Core Web Vitals Score Actually Means (and How I Achieved It on My Own Site)

I recently achieved a 100/100 Google Core Web Vitals score on markexcell.co.uk on both mobile and desktop. I am sharing this not simply as a boast, but because a perfect score across both is genuinely uncommon, and because the process of getting there illustrates exactly the kind of technical and design thinking covered in the […]

22 June 2026 · 7 min read

Does Good Web Design Actually Help Your SEO and GEO? The Technical Foundations That Matter

It is easy to think of design and search strategy as two separate jobs handled by two separate people. One makes the website look good, the other makes it findable. In practice, that division does not really hold up, because a large part of what makes a website findable, both to traditional search engines and […]

19 June 2026 · 7 min read