Bespoke Development & Design
We have designed and built websites for many different clients, from start-ups to multi-national corporations. Our work ranges from completely new websites, through to re-designs and ongoing maintenance.
We favour flat, clean, modern design that lends itself well to responsive web design (mobile friendly) and use the industry standard "Bootstrap" framework to ensure the websites' code can be understood by any Developer in our team so that maintenance is not overly difficult.
Responsive web design allows us to create websites that work perfectly on all devices from mobile phones and tablets through to desktop computers. Our websites are designed to respond to the size of the devices' screen, so it will work regardless of operating system or technology, so long as that device obeys web standards. This means, the website will even work perfectly on devices that haven't yet been released to market!
Planning for Success
Before we start designing a new website, we need to undertake the planning stage. This would normally involve creating a full website sitemap to understand how all of the pages relate to each other and ensure that pages appear with the right prominence within the website. This really helps to get everyone thinking about how the site will work and can identify any issues with the old version of the website (if there is one).
Once the sitemap has been agreed we can begin to focus on the layout of the pages. At this stage we produce wireframes to show where the elements of each page will sit. This allows us to quickly present different options and discuss whether the most important parts of the page are in the right place. The idea is to help present the most important things to visitors as easily and clearly as we can.
When the wireframes are agreed with the client we can confidently move onto the design stage and then start to build the new website. For more information, please either contact us or read more about our processes.
Designed to Convert
There's no point having a nice website if your visitors can't easily enquire or purchase from you. When a visitor buys from you, or contacts you from the site, this is known as a "conversion".
When designing new websites, it is vitally important to consider what conversions you want and how to help your websites' visitors to convert as quickly and easily as possible when they land on every website page.
We use Google Analytics to set up "Events" which help measure conversions and track the behaviour of visitors on your website.
After Going Live
Straight after going live with a new website project we install Google Analytics and Search Console.
Google Analytics will then start collecting data about each visit to the site. How many people visit a day, for how long and what do they look at? This is just some of the invaluable information that Google Analytics collects - completely free of charge!
Search Console is another tool provided by Google that is extremely important when launching a new site. Search Console will keep an eye on the health of your site and flag up any technical issues that could be affecting how the site appears online.
Once live, we fully test new websites to ensure they are running as fast as possible and there are no obvious issues with broken links or how it displays at different screen sizes and in different browsers.
We provide all clients with extensive guides on how to update their websites, or if you like, for a reasonable cost we can visit your office to provide a comprehensive CMS training course. Another alternative is for you to leave any future additions or updates to us and we an make any changes you require, charged at our usual hourly rate.
Speed Matters
How quickly your website pages load really matters. If your website is slow, visitors will leave quickly without converting and you'll see a high bounce rate in Google Analytics. What's more, if you are paying for advertising, such as Google Ads / Adwords this will be a huge waste of money too.
When it comes to speed, the faster the better. We optimise all new websites by reducing the amount of http requests, optimising images, using PHP 7 and Opcache, adding expires headers and various levels of caching etc. The results mean you have a dramatically faster website than an unoptimised one.
We offer super-fast hosting that can immediately transform a slow website to a fast one with minimal cost. Please read more about our Concrete5 hosting and Wordpress hosting pages.
In addition to these user experience considerations, there is now an SEO impact too. Google is now starting to rank fast websites higher up in their search results than slower websites.
