Website Design & Development

Website Design

We believe brand image is essential in creating a ‘personality’ for your business that customers can relate to.

The intangible characteristics of a service are the emotions behind people’s perception of a business or organisation. The sophistication, morals, lifestyle, customer service, value and overall image of how the target audience perceives your business are the effects of what branding does. We believe this is much more important than just selling a service or product because it creates lasting relationships instead of one-time purchases.

BRAND/CORE TONE OF VOICE

The visual language for the website will portray your brands ‘core tone of voice’ values, which we’ll identify in collaboration with you as part of our project insight and analysis.

DESIGN APPROACH

To meet both your business needs and target audience needs we will work closely with you on the following approach to design:

Sitemap & wireframes: sitemap defining the structure of your website content, with wireframes demonstrating the layout of features to best engage your target audience;
Moodboards: a collection of image treatments, typographic approaches, colour swatches, etc. intended to evoke a style or concept;
Initial designs: 3 design routes for your homepage;
Concept development: developing 1 design route and applying it to each of the website’s page types;
Final design: implementation of final design refinements and preparing artwork ready for build of the website.

Website Development

Our solutions are scalable and flexible, allowing your web presence to grow and evolve with your business to cope with a shift in the market place.

We build to the following best practice guidelines and web standards:

HTML5 + CSS3
SASS
Git for version control
WCAG 2.0 for validating compliance with the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA)
Performance testing – Google Development Toolkit and Pingdom, including compliance with Google’s mobile-friendly guidelines
SEO analysis
iThemes and Sucuri security configuration
Uptime Robot monitoring

CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM (CMS)

We don’t believe in tying you to a single service provider for all your digital media needs, although we hope you’ll be impressed by our service and continue to work with us. That’s why we’ve chosen to include the web software WordPress in our solution for establishing a web presence for your brand.

WordPress is an ‘open source’ technology. Put simply, no one owns the software and there are no license fees.

It is our intention to make sure that once we have established a web presence for your brand, that you have the tools to continue growing it online. Over 25 million people have already chosen WordPress to power the place on the web they call “home”.

CONTENT EDITING TOOLS

You can easily edit and add new content to your website pages. Editing and formatting your content is pretty much the same as using word processing software, eg. Microsoft Word. You’ll find all the usual familiar tools, plus a few extras!

IMAGE, AUDIO AND VIDEO CONTENT MANAGER

Through your CMS media library you can manage and add image, audio and video content. Although we recommend uploading your video content to a dedicated video server like YouTube to help further extend your web presence.

PLUGINS

There are thousands of plugins available to transform your website into almost anything you can imagine. Your CMS will come with all the essential plugins already installed and configured. As your brand evolves and grows in the future, your web presence will be able to reflect and support this.

GOOGLE ANALYTICS

Real time data to show you how your website visitors are interacting with your website. You can get a quick overview from your CMS dashboard.Or log in to Google Analytics for more detailed reports.

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION (SEO)

SEO is essential to your web presence as it provides you with the best possible chance of search engines, like Google, including your website as close as possible to the top of search results for your brand name, and other key terms that identify your services and/or products.

We optimise your website for search engines to provide the best chance of being at the top of a user’s search results.

More about our search engine optimisation…

WEB ACCESSIBILITY

Meeting W3C and DDA web accessibility guidelines is not only a legal requirement but also makes your content more accessible to a greater number of potential customers. All of our projects meet a minimum of WCAG single A compliance, with the aspiration to meet double and triple A where possible.

Hosting

We have carefully selected a hosting service provider that is dedicated to providing the most reliable web hosting service possible, which we recommend to all of our clients and use for our own website.

Fast, reliable, web hosting with secure servers, and 24/7 technical support.

This includes an Admin control panel that gives you full access to your hosting environment.

If you have your own hosting provider that you’d prefer to stay with, we can of course use this.

Documentation and Training

Our aim is to provide all of our clients with the tools and knowledge to update and maintain their own websites using in-house team members. For more complicated updates and changes we are of course available to help.

As part of our standard service, we will provide you with:

CMS User Guide – outlining the key functionality of your website and how to make changes to content;
CMS Training – demonstrating how to use the powerful editing capabilities of your website CMS;
Web Services Documentation – detailing all of the login credentials for successfully continuing to manage your web presence.

Project Stages

Having clearly defined stages, along with their associated deliverables, for the life-cycle of a project provides you as the client with an open and transparent overview of how we’ll work in collaboration with your organisation to successfully establish your brand online.

Throughout the project we will provide you with regular progress updates, including the opportunity to review and approve all deliverables for each key stage to make sure we continue to meet both your brand and target audience needs.

Launch

Before we flick the switch and launch your new web presence, we will of course provide you and your team with the opportunity to review and approve everything on our test server.

Then the most exciting aspect of any web project is undertaken – the launch!

Contact us today to help successfully launch your next website…