Your website is a full colour, interactive brochure for your company and any links to it are effectively adverts for your business, but your website is also much more.
Your website gives a quality image to your company and a feeling of size and stability to your customers. They can see the type of company you are and get a feel for the services that they will receive.
You can use your website to answer questions that your customers might have before they contact you and help dispel any doubts that they might have about you.
Your website allows your customers to decide whether they want to do business with you, without pressure, all in the comfort of their own home.
back to topWhen a customer visits your website it is always to answer a question they have. They might want to know what services you provide, where you are located, how to contact you, your business hours, or how much your services cost. The speed and ease which they can answer each question will ultimately answer the fundamental question of whether or not they want to do business with you.
A good website's homepage is not crammed with offers and adverts and every piece of information that a customer could ever need. When people visit a website they quickly start to feel uncomfortable if they can't find the information they need, or at least a link that promises to take them to it. Customers visiting your website don't get a training course, or receive a user manual so your website needs to have clear and intuitive navigation. Your customers will not thank you for confusing them or making them feel stupid.
A good website is clean and easy to understand, where customers can quickly scan the information to find a link to take them to a more detailed and specific page to answer their questions. The links need to been clear and intuitive so your customers can navigate their way around with ease and answer all their questions without any feeling of discomfort.
back to topYour website allows your customers to make an informed decision about whether they want to do business with you.
Your website should answer any questions that your customers need answered before they make a decision to contact you directly. It should show the type of company you are, what products or services you offer, how much they cost, your opening times, your contact details, feedback from existing customers and why they should choose your company rather than your competitors.
It needs to be clear and easy to understand, where your customers can find the information they want without getting confused or frustrated. Your customers will thank you for providing the information they need quickly, without wasting their time, rather than providing a really complex website which leaves their questions unanswered.
back to topMany factors contribute towards the cost of your website. These include the number of pages, how they link together, the complexity of the images that make the visual look of your website, whether you want to be able to update the website yourself and whether you already have a look and logo.
We discuss all your needs including your available budget when suggesting possible solutions.
back to topOnce complete your website needs to be hosted on a web server. We offer flexible hosting solutions to meet your company's needs. We provide a period of free hosting included in your website design package, followed by competitively priced monthly payments.
Changes to the website's text and stock (eCommerce websites) can be carried out yourself (if an appropriate admin tool was included in your initial package), or we can do these for you for a small charge. Alternatively you can pay a fixed monthly fee to cover all potential changes.
We always do our best to make clear all potential future costs in our initial quotation.
back to topThe time taken to develop a website depends on its complexity. The minimum timescale for a simple website is limited by the time required for your domain name to be registered and your web hosting to be set-up. This typically takes 3 days. Extremely complex websites and online shops require much more development and need considerable testing. This typically takes a couple of months.
back to topWhen a customer finds information on your website that is out-of-date or incorrect they will start to form a negative impression of your company. Therefore your website needs updating every time your information changes.
It is usually quite quick and simple for us to update information on your website so the cost is very small. When we discuss your initial requirements we can decide whether it would be better for you to pay for updates individually, arrange a fixed monthly fee to cover all updates, or provide a content management system (CMS) where you can easily make your updates yourself.
Regardless of how often the information on your website needs updating, website design styles change over time. Any website written over 5 years ago will look dated today and there is no reason to believe that this won't continue to be the case in the future. When we create your website we use the latest programming techniques to separate the code that determines its look, from the code that holds the information. This means that when the time comes to give your website a fresh look, only a fraction of the code will need to be changed, resulting in a fraction of the original website design cost.
back to topThere are two distinct sections to the search engine results. There are the sponsored links at the top and right of the screen and the native results in the main area of the screen. Sponsored links are paid for and the more you pay the higher your website appears in the list. The main results are free and the order that they appear is decided by the formulas that the search engines use.
A lot of time and money is spent ensuring the search engine's formulas are kept secret and they are changed frequently. Some web designers add tricks to websites to attempt to falsely increase a website's position, but this can result in the website being penalised or even removed from the search engine's results.
It is not possible, therefore, to predict your website's position, or guarantee that your website will maintain its position in the search engine results.
There are, however, several legitimate techniques available to us as web designers that can help improve your website's position. We manually code your website so the code is extremely clean and efficient. We separate the code that determines the websites look from that which determines its content and thus reduce the amount of code the search engines need to read. We design and write your content to perform well for the searches that are most important to you. We incorporate links into your website wherever appropriate as these have high importance for search engines. We ensure all code and techniques comply with search engine guidelines.
back to topSearch engines continually check the web for new or updated websites. Unless you have specifically requested that your site be excluded, sooner or later it will appear in the search engines results. Exactly when your website will be listed is impossible to predict, but is typically about two weeks. It is sometimes possible to decrease the time taken for your website to be included by directly submitting the website to the search engines for inclusion and we will happily do this as part of our website design service.
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