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The Shine commercial kitchens website was originally produced in 2002, and since then, the web has moved on. With search engine optimisation being such an important tool to businesses, Shine approached VSI-thinking and asked how they could improve their ranking in google and other search engines, whilst maintaining the same look and feel to their website.

With the focus being on search engine optimisation, we set about our task by implementing the following points:

• Tables to divs
  Although this will not make an outstanding impact to the average user, this change makes a drastic improvement to your search engine rankings. When the site was originally built, the layout used tables, with each section of the table holding a certain amount of text. Many search engines have decided that tables should only hold information intended for tables, for example, pricing details at a hotel. Instead of using tables search engines have promoted the use of the div tag. Div elements are containers designed for text, tables and images, and can be placed wherever they are needed within the site, meaning that they are a lot more flexible.
• Page naming convention
  Search engines not only read the text in the page, but also the actual filename of the page. To improve their search engine rankings, we've renamed the actual filenames so that they contain the keywords commercial and kitchens. What we have done is taken the page name and appended commercial kitchens, and subsituted any spaces for a hyphen, so the news.asp page has become commercial-kitchens-news.asp.
• Title Tags
  Page title tags place the name of the page as the window name for the browser and are used to search engine optimise the page. What is placed in the title tags for the window is important. In addition to having title tags for the page, all links also have title tags. This not only improves search engine optimisation but also accessibility, as screen readers and other such software can pick up any purpose for the link. The title also display when you hover over the link. With the link title tags, we've placed commercial kitchens in each one to promote important keywords. We've also placed title tags on images so that they can also be read by search engines and by screen readers.
• Style Sheet Changes
  By making certain tweeks to the style sheet, we've improved the search engine optimisation of the site. The style sheet controls how the page looks when it is viewed through a web browser, and can have a great effect on how your site is perceived. VSI-thinking have changed all the attributes used for styling to use class instead of id. IDs are used by languages such as Javascript to control a certain element, whereas classes are intended to be used to control the styling.
• Accessibility Improvements
  VSI-thinking have also improved the accessibility of the site by making sure that all fonts scale in accordance with the accessibility guidelines. This means that if you are visually impaired, if you zoom in to read a piece of text, then the text will zoom accordingly. We've also placed alt tags on images so that they can be read by screen readers and improve the page ranking of the site.

We have also changed their gallery, with increasing the search engine optimisation on an important section of their website. Shine has provided us with a number of images of their high quality kitchens, and we have built a gallery to display all their master works.