Web Design ★ Web Development ★ WordPress Themes
A well-designed, fast-to-load and easy-to-use website is more important than ever.
We are now living in what has become known as the digital era. Much like the Yellow Pages beforehand, the internet has become the go-to tool when searching for a local company, product or services. Today any company that doesn’t have a website is losing out on potential business. Globally, behaviour changes over time, adapting to modern technology. With a whopping 97% of consumers going online to find a local business, if you want to be found online, you need a website!
Web Development
A website can’t just look great, it needs to work well too. The building and maintenance of websites is known as web development, simply put it’s the work that is going on behind the scenes to ensure your website works well too!
Talking of working well, did you know many websites suffer from something called page bloating? This is where a website has a lot of superfluous code the browser needs to read and execute before it can actually display the web page. This ‘bloating’ can have a negative impact on your page load-time, which has a direct impact on your position in the search results.
If you would like to know whether your website is under-achieving, performance-wise, you can use these free tools Page Speed Insights (from Google) or GTmetrix.
Should you require assistance with improving your website’s performance or user-experience, please do get in touch. We can take a look at your site and advise where we could help improve your site’s speed.
WordPress Theme Design
What is WordPress? WordPress is one of the most popular Content Management Systems out there. WordPress started out as a blogging platform, enabling non techie folks the opportunity to write their blogs and publish them on the internet with minimum fuss and no need for web skills. WordPress quickly evolved to allow people to manage their entire website.
Today, WordPress is used to build over one third of all the websites on the internet. We also use WordPress to build websites for our clients. Over the years we have tried most, if not all, of the main Content Management Systems, Drupal, Magento and Joomla for example, and have found without doubt WordPress offers the best solution.
If you look at the websites in our portfolio, every website is built using WordPress. We design and develop WordPress themes. A theme allows us to create your tailor-made design and at the same time provide you with all the tools to maintain and edit the website on a day-to-day basis.
The Web Design Process
We build functional, fast-loading websites with seamless user-experience.
Discuss
We kick off every web design project in a similar way, discussing with you what it is you actually want from your website. This conversation will give rise to a host of information, we will be able to use in the design stage. These details ensure the website designs have the right overall look and feel for your brand and target audience, the site content is structured appropriately, the interface and user-experience is designed to make the final goal, be that selling a product or generating an enquiry, for example, as seamless and easy as possible for the site visitor.
Once we have a better understanding of your company, the services or products you are selling and your target audience, we will put together a series of website design concepts which meet that criteria.
Design
This website design process usually starts with us creating a series of very different looking concepts. The first set of ideas allows us to explore a range of different areas, including typography, colour psychology, graphic and illustrative styles, user-journey, interface design and site hierarchy.
After presenting these initial ideas we will refine your preferred design idea. Often this involves pulling different ideas from the first set of ideas into one website design which ticks all the boxes for you.
We will usually design a home page and a secondary page to give you a good idea of how the site will look once we start building it.
Develop
The development stage is where it starts to take shape. We take your approved visuals from the design stage and start building your website.
When building any website we ensure that our code meets W3C validation standards, is well documented and is as lean as it can be to minimise file sizes impacting your site’s page-load time.
Our web developers love getting stuck into code. Their job is to ensure your website meets your unique requirements, be that selling your products online, an eye-catching portfolio of your work or simply generating new business leads. Our web developers are experts in web languages, such as PHP (including Ruby on Rails), Javascript, HTML and CSS.
Deliver
Once we have built your website, we will thoroughly test it across different browsers and devices to make sure it is working and displaying correctly, regardless of how the site is being viewed, whether this is on a laptop, tablet or smart phone.
We will also carry out usability testing of the website. This process provides many benefits that are crucial for business success, such as verifying users can complete the goal task(s) on the site successfully without issue; checking user-satisfaction for key web pages and the overall user-experience whilst on the site; and uncovering usability issues before the site is launched.