Our Web Design Services
- What your website wants!
- We create a website that YOU own
- Domain Name of your choice
- Multiple Email Addresses
- Free Hosting
- Search Engine Optimisation
- W3C compliance
- Contact Us form
- No Spam
- Advanced functionality
What your website wants!
Before we look at what you get from our web design services - let's just talk about what is important!
What do you want a website for?
- Because most businesses have to have a web presence? Yes
- To gain more customers? Yes
- To showcase your products/services? Yes
- To support your business? Yes
- To appeal to a wider potential market/audience? Yes
- To give potential customers a reference point and a way of contacting you? Yes
- To give people a reason to come to you rather than a competitor? Yes
How does this happen?
- Visitors
- Visitors
- Visitors
What your website wants... needs... is... visitors
It's no good having the most brilliant looking website in the world if no-one ever finds it... apart from your friends and family - people you tell "Go and look at our new website"... yawn!
What your website needs is visitors, people, strangers to you, who find your website through (usually!) Google or another search engine.
Your website needs:
- People to find it through a search
- Those people who do find it need to be sufficiently interested/curious/impressed to linger and look at many/all of your pages
- Those people who have found it need to come back again and again and again
That way, you build up a steadily increasing volume of visitors, "traffic", potential customers: the more visitors your website has - the more chance you have of turning some of them into real paying customers!
This is one of the most fundamentally important points of any website!
We create a website that YOU own
The website that we will create for you is... YOUR website. YOU own it. Many web design services will create you a website but they will retain the rights to it. If you fall out with them, they have the right to do what they want with (your) website and they can easily convert it into a website that will make THEM money!
Websites are valuable if they have a lot of visitors - see below. YOU will own the website that we create for you and if (in the unlikely event) you ever fall out with us, you are free to take the website elsewhere to have it hosted/maintained - we will supply you with the "source code" for all your webpages (which is what your new web designer will need).
Domain Name
The domain name is the address of your website - like www.yourwebsite.co uk or www.yourwebsite.com
In our pricing, we include a .co.uk domain name of your choice. The name will belong to you. You will own it. We will just register it on your behalf. Be careful, some web designers will register a domain name for you but... THEY own it and can do what they want with it!
You can have anything you want - as long as no-one has thought of it (and more importantly, registered it) before you!
The actual domain name you choose is very important to search engines like Google. It is one of the many factors which determines how high your website will appear in search results.
We will advise/guide you on this.
In the UK, domain names are controlled by an organisation called Nominet. Once you have registered a domain name no-one can ever have that name as long as you keep renewing it. A .co.uk domain name is usually registered for an initial 2 year period. After that, you usually renew it each 2 years at a cost of £30 plus VAT. You pay this direct to Nominet.
Registration of your .co.uk domain name is included in our pricing.
Multiple Email Addresses
With us you can have several email addresses associated with your domain. This look very professional... maybe you would want:
- enquiries@yourdomain.co.uk
- sales@yourdomain.co.uk
- accounts@yourdomain.co.uk
- whatever@yourdomain.co.uk
We can set up as many of these as you want and each one can be made to automatically forward emails to different email addresses (if you want).
Free Hosting
To be available/findable, your website need to be "hosted" on a webserver. A website is loaded onto a webserver and is therefore "on the Internet".
The important thing here, is that the webserver is reliable - always on and never fails: so that your website is always available.
There are many commercial web hosting companies to choose from - with varying charges. Our web design service includes FREE webhosting for the first year. We usually charge £5-10 per month to host a website (depending on how often you want it updating) but we include the first year's hosting FREE.
Our webserver is very fast and very reliable and gives your website the speed and stability that will impress your customers.
After this first year, we can agree a monthly budget for continued hosting (never more than £10 per month) or you are free to take your whole website and have it hosted/maintained elsewhere.
Search Engine Optimisation
Referring back to what your website wants/needs: visitors! Let's assume your business is to do with "underwater basketweaving" (!).
Someone searches Google for "underwater basketweaving". Where do you want your website to appear in the search results?
- On the first page? - "findable"
- On page 6? - not findable in a month of Sundays!
The higher up in the search results your website appears: the more visitors your website will get - the more visitors your website gets: the more chance you have of growing your business.
We will create your website with this in mind.
The most important content in your website is... the content... the words! Not the colour scheme, not how brilliant it looks, not how gorgeous the images are - it's the actual words that appear on each page. More than that - it's how those words are structured, positioned, combined together and used in the domain name, the page file names, the image filenames, the headings and sub-headings, the text that is used for the links within the website and other (geeky!) stuff such as the meta tags and the image's alt text and more, much more.
With our web design service we take care of all that for you.
You will provide the content - the text/words that appear on each page - but we will guide you (maybe even change some of the text) and "weave" the words/phrases that people are actually searching for, within each page, so that the pages of your website are structured (targeted) for the phrases that people are actually searching for.
Whilst the results can't be guaranteed, it is a matter of professional pride that we give your website the best chance of appearing high in the search results.
For more information about search engine optimisation see SEO
W3C Compliance
This is a tricky area! To be honest, it doesn't mean much... to most people - however, there are Laws which any website needs to comply with! Many don't... but their day of reckoning will come!
Few people would disagree with the statement that: The Internet is the number one source of information in the World.
In October 1999, there was an amendment to the Disability Discrimination Act 1995. The amendment states that it is "unlawful for a provider of services to discriminate against a disabled person" by "refusing to provide any service which is provided to members of the public". The Act refers explicitly to "access to and use of information services".
What is YOUR website? Answer (however you look at it) - an information service!
So, if a disabled person (problems with vision, problems with using a mouse etc) can't use your website... you are discriminating against them. You are breaking the Law!
Someone with a visual impairment will have a screen reader which will generate a spoken voice to read out the content of a website.
Someone with a nerve/motor problem and can't use a mouse will have other ways (keyboard or separate hardware device) to navigate your website.
If your website is not structured correctly (incorrect use of Tables, Flash animation, structure etc) it will be unusable for these people.
Not just that - your website must be usable to everyone, regardless of:
- what browser they have
- what version of browser they have
- what operating system they have (Windows, MAC, Mobile etc)
- what hardware they use (PC, MAC, WAP phone, SmartPhone, NetBook, Web TV etc)
How do you avoid these problems?
The first step is complying with the W3C guidelines. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has produced guidelines - "rules", "standards" - to which all "Internet" devices must comply.
If something complies with the W3C guidelines it should always work - whether it is with a new version of a browser, a completely new browser, a new bit of hardware, some new operating system (eg. the next version of Windows!), some new software/application (eg. for SmartPhones or the iPhone etc).
Most importantly to you: YOUR WEBSITE needs to work with all these devices and for all these people!
With our web design service, your website will be created in such a way that it complies with these standards.
Contact Us form
This sounds like one of the most basic requirements of any website - and it is!
You need to give people, prospective customers, the facility to be able to contact you. Your website will feature "click here to email us" links but not everyone uses Outlook (or a similar email program on their PC).
Giving people a "form" to fill in, with a "Send message" button to click on, provides them with a simple way of sending you a message. People love to fill in forms!
This would be on a "Contact Us" page similar to the one on this website. Once they have clicked on the "Send" button, the page would show them a message saying that their message has been received etc. Optionally (included in the price), your webpage could then automatically send the visitor an email - thanking them for their message and telling them that you will respond within a certain time etc. This works well, as the visitor then has a message, in their inbox, reminding them of your website.
No Spam
There is no better way of increasing the amount of junk mail that you get, than having your email address displayed on your website. Spammers use special "harvesting" programs to scan websites looking for something with an @ symbol in (your email address!) and automatically adding it to a database which they then sell on to their spamming buddies.
We WILL display your email address on your website (it is a bit suspicious if you don't!) but we do it in such a way that spammers can't get it.
This is done by splitting your email address into meaningless "chunks" and then "stitching it together again" using JavaScript programming.
The result is: your email address is visible and useable (a clickable link) to visitors, but invisible to spammers.
Advanced Functionality
We can create anything from the most basic website up to a full e-commerce website with a catalogue of products and shopping basket, fully integrated with a payment provider (your Bank, WorldPay, Paypal etc.)
"Basic" - means static pages which don't change - unless you ask us to update them (included in the price!)
Beyond "basic" - we can create anything you want.
We use PHP and JavaScript to produce webpages with any type of functionality you want - and we use MySQL to create websites which use an online database. Databases are used to generate "dynamic" content for webpages - like: having information about all your products stored in a database and then extracting specific bits of that data to show a visitor what they want to see... certain products, types, ranges etc.
We can also use a database to create a feature where visitors can add themselves to your "Mailing List". Giving you a very valuable list of names and email addresses so that you can email them periodically to tell them about special offers etc.