Website Design, Creation and Optimisation.

Think of your website as a personal advertising hoarding or billboard. There may be several parties involved in decisions about its placement, its size, how long it stays up and so on. The one decision that is entirely yours is what impression it gives to anyone that sees it when it's visible.

We can design your website to meet your needs and provide you with an advertising vehicle that shows your business off in the best possible light. We can also assist with optimisation of existing websites, either as a stand alone activity or in conjunction with search engine optimisation.

We can also help with the design and development of intranet sites. Intranets only differ from websites in their accessibility. A website will be available via the internet while an intranet will only be available on your own local area network, or LAN. Running an intranet provides all the benefits available to websites but with the added bonus that much more complex sites can be utilised due to the higher bandwidth capabilities of a LAN over the internet. By comparison, a hgh end internet connection will get up to about 24Mbps in the UK while a gigabit LAN can have a badwidth of 1,000Mbps and higer. Intranet sites are very useful with database applications where there may be too much data transfer for an internet connection.

The key to any website is to understand your prospective users - what are they expecting to see and do when they interact with your website. If you can nail down these aspects, it becomes easier to achieve conversions. A conversion is where a user performs a pre-determined act via your website like a purchase or contact. Conversions, if properly defined, will be a good indicator of the return on investment (ROI) for your website. We recommend "designing for humans without hindering the robots". Design your website to be something you would want to use while making it compatible with the automated indexers. Take a look at our tips & tricks page for a quick checklist of website creation.

Once you have the type of website you need, you can assess what technologies to employ. Do you need a lot of bandwidth for media? Do you need an underlying database? Do you need static or dynamic pages? These are some of the questions that will help to define the underlying design of the website.

After the basic foundations are set, the next step is to define the layout. There are many "standard" layouts that can be adopted and they each have their own advantages and drawbacks. Understand how the layout fits in with the content you are trying to deliver to maximize the impact for the user. Remember that the delivery can be as important than the content! If you have a lot of valid information on your website but the site is hard to read or difficult to understand, you may find lots of your users abandon your website in favour of other easier-to-use sites.

As far as possible you should try and write all the information on the website yourself (or get an editor). Original content is much better received than copied text or information. It also gives you the opportunity to express your ideas and opinions about your subject matter and to present it the way you want to. Make the copy as interesting as possible for your users. Structure the documents properly to make each page quick to find and easy to read. Wherever possible, use valid HTML and CSS markup as this will help when the time comes to manage or update your site. We have links to some 3rd party on-line validators on our data validation page. Decide which keywords relate to your site and use them in the text as much as possible (within reason, people!). Utilise HTML tags as these help to define the page structures.

When writing your pages, you should take into account the web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG) . These are a set of guidelines that help with making sure that websites are easily accesible to disabled or partially disabled users as well. While these are still only guidelines and legal action is usually a last resort, it must be understood that failure to provide good levels of accessibility can ultimately lead to prosecution. We have on-line links to 3rd party accessibility validators.

Make sure that all your pages are linked to from at least one place on your own site. Try and use text links as far as possible and make the link text meaningful (don't use "click here"!). Creating a link-rich pages not only has the benefit of assisting with navigation but also helps make the site SEO friendly. Lastly, make sure all the links work! - both internal and external.

Once you have completed the initial construction of your website you need to make it available. Upload it to your designated web server and make sure it is available. Submit the site to search engines and useful directories to help make it more visible. Don't overdo the submissions or this can hamper your serch engine credibility. A well designed, written and optimised website will give numerous benefits when it goes live - faster page load times, reduced bandwidth requirements and better cross-browser compatibility amongst others.

Remember to make regular updates to your website. This helps to keep the site fresh and alive and therefore more interesting to the users. Tracking and statistical systems, like Google analytics can help with understanding which parts of your website are good and which need improvement. These systems can also be extremely useful tools to the process of search engine optimisation.

Finally, remember our 3 rules of websites;

• Make your website easy to find.
• Have a design that makes it interesting and easy for users.
• Priovide content that makes users want to return.