Our Services
We offer the complete web site design and development service from hosting & email to e-commerce catalogues. For more information on any of our services, or for just a bit of advice if you're not sure where to start, please do not hesitate to contact us.
Web site Design
Before a site can be developed, we must first explore the jobs the site is required to do, and who it will be doing these jobs for. To this end we explore a number of factors, such as:
- Target audience groups
- Client requirements assessed and met
- Accessibility and coding standards
- Security properly applied to applications and secure areas
- Maintenance and ease of updating
- Project timescales
- Budgets applied effectively and extraneous costs minimized
Once we have an idea of the scale and complexity involved, we can then start the fun bit – how the site looks! Feedback and dialogue is crucial at this stage so that we can arrive at a template that you like. Once a template is agreed upon, and all of the content is delivered or has been created, the build begins.
E-Commerce
If you are going to sell goods online, then a robust and flexible ecommerce system is a must. We have experience deploying different shopping cart systems, from simple paypal solutions, to 3rd party shopping carts, to fully-fledged secure systems selling many items each with customisable options and preferences. We can supply the most suitable online shopping & payments system for your requirements now and in the future.
Databases & Content Management Systems
A database is used to store lots of information. Member details, customer profiles, stock inventory – they all can be stored in a database. This database can then be utilised as a sales tool, customer service reference system, or made available online for users to search and view within your web site. It’s an effective way of making lots of information available to your staff and/or your online audience in an intuitive way, often with a multi-option search function.
For a large site that is going to be very active, a Content Management System (CMS) is often a good choice. A CMS is a more complex database-driven application which will, for example, allow your staff to maintain the site themselves without having to become expert web designers. Content can be added, edited, archived and deleted all through the web browser interface and without fear of ‘breaking’ the web site.
Web Hosting
We have an arrangement with a hosting provider in a state-of-the-art Data Centre in central London. We can host sites of all sizes, with all traffic requirements easily and on a very fast connection. Contact us for more information about our hosting options. We don't have set packages as all sites are different and have different requirements.
Domain Name Registration
We can secure domain names as cheaply as anyone else - about £10 inc VAT for the popular '.com' domains, and about £3 inc VAT for the '.co.uk' variety.
We would advise against having domains which contain numbers in place of words, or mis-spelt words, as your customers are just as likely to spell it 'properly'. Eg phones4u.com is a poor choice as it is difficult to get across the spelling of the domain without going into a long-winded explanation of the domain's structure! Similarly, try to avoid hyphens for the same reasons.
Lastly, it's often advisable to purchase both the .com and .co.uk versions of your domain name if possible. Potential clients might remember 'mybusiness.co.uk' as 'mybusiness.com' - if you have both, this won't matter.
Email
Hosting packages always come with email addresses. You can have as many as you require with us - no limits on these at all. You can access them using your email client, such as Outlook Express or Eudora, or you can opt for a 'webmail' interface, where you use the browser to log in to your email. You can, of course, use both if you wish - useful for checking your email when away from the office or on holiday.
Search Engine Optimisation
All of our sites are built in such a way as to make them fully accessible to search engine indexing software (commonly called 'spiders'). We don't make excessive use of code which cannot be read by the search engine spiders - and this has the added benefit of making our sites fast to load.
During the preparation for the site build, we will research the key words and phrases which users might use to find the services and products you offer. These important phrases are then strategically placed in the important parts of your site so that they are prevalent when the search engine spiders index the site. With time, your site will become more prevalent within Google and the other search engines for these key phrases.
Email Newsletter Distribution
If you want to maintain contact with your existing customers and secure repeat business, then a newsletter is a good way of achieving this. The newsletter can be a full HTML (web page style) newsletter using your company logo and branding, or it can be a simple text email with just the important bits. We have software which can maintain your newsletter distribution lists and send out the newsletters seamlessly.
It's important to remember that the recipients must have asked to be added to the list. Failure to adhere to this can have your domain name added to a 'spammer list' and blacklisted by various bodies set up to reduce spam levels. We can add a very simple form to your web site to capture the recipient's email and other details and confirm that they do want to be put into the database.
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