About Us..

THE HISTORY OF

KEY WEB DESIGNS
 

Key Web Designs has been set up as a business by the brother and sister team of Mark Kiddell and Karen Bailey.

Mark has fully qualified at the University of Wales Swansea and has a Bsc Degree in Computer Science. After graduating, Mark was employed by the university to work as a researcher, this mostly involved the development and design of an advanced videoconferencing solution for the purpose of interviewing people in remote locations.

The research post included computer programming, web design, the study of human centred interfaces (how to make a successful design - one a user can understand and use) and custom software development for psychology/careers related studies. It also involved writing technical papers on his research to the standard that they have been published in international conference proceedings around the world.

In 1999 Mark started to look into how to make websites successful rather than just a page of text and graphics. He learnt how to design web pages so that they are fast loading, functional, and get their message across successfully. This includes adding hidden trackers that record visitor information and allow the website owners to see whether anyone has visited their site, where these people are from, and what pages within the site they have been looking at.

Many websites receive a large proportion of their traffic from large search engines such as Google & MSN, so Mark learnt how to tailor sites so that they often show up in the top 30 results for a search with the most appropriate keywords for the site, this alone can bring in 5-10 visitors a day for a small site, often more for larger sites. One of Mark's sites regularly receives over 200 hits a day from Google, Yahoo, and AltaVista.

Karen started her career in a Bank and in 1992 after 13½ years she took a maternity break from the Bank to concentrate on her family life, in time for the arrival of their first child in 1993. Whilst she had worked at the Bank she had also been helping out with her husband's business, along side her father-in-law, with invoicing and most of the bookwork, and mail order duties.

After 2 children, her husband's business had started taking up more of her time, and after her father-in-law semi-retired she was taking on more and more of the accounting duties and responsibilities within the company. It became apparent because of work load that she would have to resign from her former job and concentrate more on the family and her husbands business. Within the business as well as continuing with the book work and invoicing duties, she has had to teach herself to become very computer literate on several different software programs.

The Business has now been running since 1988, and has grown considerably over the years. In 1997 they moved the business to a combined business and private premises with their house situated next to a large business workshop (of 2500 square feet), where it has enabled more effective use of their business time allocation.

Her husbands Business has branched out in two directions now, and the arrival of the World Wide Web meant that Karen started to teach herself about the internet and setting up a web site. She used her brothers skills to put her on the right path and successfully set up 3 business Web Sites. Because of a lot of positive reaction to her first Web Sites, she realised that other people were also wanting to set up their own Web Sites on the Net, but didn't have the know how to do so.

She got together with her brother Mark and they put a business proposition together and by using their joint skills KEY WEB DESIGNS was set up in 2000.

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