We develop modern, effective websites that support your business and customers. We use our own custom CMS which gives us maximum flexibility in both design and functionality. The advantage of using our own CMS is that we are not limited by the functionality provided by third parties but instead are able to go in whatever direction is best for your website and your business.
Our bespoke CMS features make it extremely easy for you to amend and publish content and information specific to your business, making it easy for you to keep your site up-to-date, fresh and relevant. Doing our own CMS development means that we can seamlessly add any functionality and additional features needed and make them work in exactly the way that you need them too. We code all our websites using HTML5 which allows us to take advantage of the latest browser technologies and we use appropriate fallbacks to ensure that all sites provide an appropriate experience for users of older browsers.
A truly successful website is the sum of many parts — it has to look good and convey the brand message you want your visitors to understand, but it also has to offer some form of value to them to attract them in the first place, and then to keep them coming back. It has to make it obvious and easy for them to take whatever actions you want them too whether that is to buy more of your products, order more of your services or even something else entirely.
We focus on everything that is critical to the overall success of your website:
We then bring all of these aspects together to create an affordable website that really does do more.
Social media is an important way to promote yourself and drive business to your website but it relies on you keeping it up to date and fresh. This is an important marketing activity that takes effort and time away from your core business activities and can frequently keep being pushed onto the backburner until it is not being done at all.
We can even help you to smooth the demands on your time and inspiration of having to keep up a regular stream of new and engaging content by allowing you to queue articles for publication at a future date. This means that you can write articles when inspiration and time allow, and then relax knowing that your website will publish the article when you want it too, and that it will automatically update your social media with posts and tweets promoting it.
Social media gets most of its value from users sharing the things they like, and we make it easy for visitors to share the content they find on your website on their own social media pages, thus increasing the potential exposure your website and content gets. We are constantly reviewing and keeping up with the features and functions the main social media sites provide to maximise the impact of such sharing, and we ensure that content shared from our client’s sites takes full advantage of this. We are focused on making sure that you get every possible advantage and maximise the value of every bit of effort you put into your website.
We all know that Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is important - after all, your fantastic new website is pointless if no-one can find it - but it can be a confusing and daunting area. To make matters worse, the search engines are constantly evolving their ranking methods. How on earth are you supposed to know what to do? Let alone find the time to do it!
We take an entirely 'white-hat' approach to SEO - this means that we do not do anything to try to trick the search engines into ranking our clients, but instead concentrate on encouraging and helping them to do the things that enable the search engines to rank their sites well organically and naturally. We provide advice so that you know what you should be doing to rank well, and we provide you with the tools to easily create the quality of content the search engines want. At the same time we make sure that your site is built in a way that works with the search engines, making it easy for them to understand and index your site, and then presenting the results in the best possible way to potential visitors.
As well as helping you to naturally improve your website's organic search performance, we offer other SEO services which can benefit your site even more and help you to achieve specific goals. These include:
Everybody loves an app. As one very successful marketing department told us “there’s an app for that” and indeed it's starting to look like apps are
becoming the next must-have for any serious business:
- business cards ✓
- website ✓
- mobile app ?
But wait a minute — there are thousands of apps, but many of them are very low quality and may get downloaded a few times, but never actually get used because they don't really offer anything useful. An app costs money to produce, so if you're thinking you want or need an app (“for that”) you should start by asking yourself some important questions about what “that” really is:
It may seem that we are trying to discourage you from getting your all important app, but this is really not the case. After all, we are a business and want to get as much paid work as possible. However, we believe that in the long-term we will get more work by helping our clients to spend wisely, and in a way that enhances their business.
Of course, it may be that the answer to those questions is just that you want an app simply to promote your business. This is fine although we would always recommend that apps provide real benefits to their users as having an app that is used frequently can give you a real edge over your competitors, and provide repeated, positive engagements between your customers, your brand and your organisation.
We develop native apps (that is, apps built specifically for each platform and therefore able to exploit the abilities of that platform fully) for iOS, Android and Windows Phone. We can also create full desktop applications, both for Microsoft Windows and for Mac OS X. As we can build these alongside your website and any desktop applications you need, we can make sure that everything we build for you fits together seamlessly as a whole, utilising the same data and working together to give you maximum benefit from your investment.
Information and data is often the most valuable asset a company has but a website can be isolated from other systems so that the data on the website may be incomplete, more complete, inconsistant with, or a duplicate of that elsewhere within the company. Any of these scenarios can lead to headaches and more work as you have to fight against the chaos this can create.
We can integrate with any third party or back office systems that provide an API to do so (and with many that don't). Exactly why we would do this, and exactly what we would do, depends on your business and systems, and on the data involved, but in general it means that we would be able to use data from those other systems without you needing to do anything manually to keep everything in sync and up-to-date. For example, if you had a back-office stock control system that had a suitable API we could use this to automatically keep your website up to date with products, prices and stock levels available. Or, if you were an Estate Agent we could link in with your property management software to automatically keep the website up to date with the latest details on all your properties.
In addition we can provide APIs and Web Services from your website for other applications to use ensuring that whatever your business processes, circumstances and needs we can make your website and mobile applications sit seamlessly within your data flow and help rather than hinder it.
Of course, if you don't have a suitable back-office system you use, or if you're not entirely happy with the one you've got, we could always talk about building you that as well.
The internet changed the way that people got and shared information and now we are seeing a change in the way and the places that people access the web itself - this change is being driven by the wide variety of devices people use to access the web, especially with tablets and smartphones. People can now access the internet on a huge variety of devices and in almost any place they like.
The proportion of people accessing websites on traditional desktop computers is getting smaller and the proportion of website visitors using some form of mobile device is increasing. Website owners cannot afford to ignore this or they will alienate a large proportion of their visitors before they even (try to) read their content. The web is hugely competitive and alienated users won't usually bother to persist with a difficult site, or to return later - they will simply move on to the next site which does cater for their needs, and another visitor and potential customer is lost.
The most obvious example of this issue is with screen size. Visitors may be viewing the site using a desktop computer with a huge monitor or they may be using a tiny smartphone screen. Do we design for a small screen or a large screen? If we make this choice we will create a frustrating and unusable experience for any visitors who choose the opposite. And we will likely lose them and their business very quickly. Not exactly what we want.
In addition we have the issue of browser capabilities - the web has a number of standards but despite this, not all browsers behave the same way with the same code. Worse, there are still large numbers of visitors who will be browsing using very old browsers and these older browsers simply won't support the same functionality and behaviour that modern browsers do. So we are left with another dilemma - do we build for older browsers so that everyone can use our site (and we cannot take advantage of the latest browser ehancements to build a site that truly wows it’s visitors), or do we build a site that takes advantage of these latest features — but simply won't work for users with older browsers? Neither choice is particularly satisfactory.
The old solution to this problem was to create two versions of a site - the ‘normal’ desktop version and a second ‘mobile’ version. However, this is less than ideal as it means duplicating the site (which in turn means duplicating the effort needed to create it in the first place as well as to make updates and publish new content). In addition, having two classes of visitor doesn’t really work anymore as we have such a huge range of devices they can be using and this number is increasing almost every day. And if we don't want to duplicate our site for two types of users, we certainly don't want to duplicate it however many times we need too to cover all the possibilities today, let alone tomorrow or next year. There must be a better way.
Enter responsive or adaptive websites. By creating a responsive website we only have one site (so no duplication of content and effort) but that site adapts to the users browsing choices both in terms of size and in terms of the functionality of the browser. This means that users of different devices and browsers may get a slightly different view and experience of the site, but that they will get one that is adapted to and appropriate for the device / browser they are using. We only build responsive websites and web applications.
We believe that the best results are achieved when we work in partnership with our clients. We are the web experts but you are the experts on your business - by working together to understand each others perspectives, we can create something special; something that exploits the potential the web offers and really benefits your business and customers.
We will help you to understand the opportunities and possibilities offered by the web and, by taking the time to understand your business and needs, we will help you to prioritise the website features and functions you need and want to ensure that you get the best value for your budget.
Building and maintaining a successful website does not end on the day it launches and neither, we hope, does our relationship with you. We always build websites designed to be extended and have new features added — as cost effectively as possible — as your business changes or as new opportunities arise. We hold regular reviews with our clients, even after their website launches, to ensure that they are making the most of their website investment and to discuss any concerns, thoughts or new ideas they may have.
We have even been known to come up with a few winning ideas for our clients ourselves!