Website Development

Our front end development teams are able to develop designs which are vibrant, attractive and innovative and turn them into tangible web pages that are accessible, adhere to industry best practise and retain every design feature from the design process. We are able to deliver sites using the latest Javascript, JQuery and AJAX functionality and all our sites are delivered so that code conforms to best practise HTML and CSS standards.  The structuring of our sites in this way also ensures that natural SEO is excellent.

We are experts at delivering websites which are easy to maintain, fast to set up and deliver a great brand experience.  The content management systems which we use are very user friendly, therefore training requirements and ongoing costs for modifying the content are much lower than our competitors.  You may have experience of using content managed websites where the majority of the website has to be changed by contacting your agency and paying them every time.  We aim to make everything that you need to change feasible to change yourself, meaning that if you want to make a change at any time, you are free to do it without paying for every tweak.  We are sure that a quick demonstration of what we can deliver for you would make you ditch your old websites in the blink of an eye.  Our websites are developed using our user cented design process, deliver great SEO and great features such as slideshows, rotating banners, call to action buttons, contact forms all wrapped up in great design.

We can deliver a succesful blog for you in one of an array of different systems.  We are experts in delivering Wordpress blogs, and we can also use concrete5 and a range of other systems.  We aim to make your blog an integral part of your website so that it fits seamlessly into your website.  A blog is an opportunity to bring high volumes of traffic and new potential users/ customers to your website.  We only use systems which allow the easy categorisation of blog posts, of being able to easily add metadata to your posts and to be able to easily add tags, add comments, moderate comments and prevent spam.  Using these systems, we are able to deliver great blogs, that inspire your users, deliver your opinions to the wider world and define you as thought leaders in your industry or sector.

An Intranet, an extranet or a portal can be an important tool for any organisation to share information internally or to disseminate information to teams or clients.  We aim to work with you to define your requirements for sharing information, look at your audience groups, sharing and security requirements and the types of information or documents that you want to share.  Once we have done this, we can work to define the interfaces for the front end users to use the system, and importantly an interface for the administrators to ensure that it is easy to add and edit content.  It is often the case that poorly constructed Extranets or portals can allow information to be released to the wrong people due to bad admin interfaces which make it impossible to tell who will see the information.  We aim to use simple categorisation to make sure that the risks are low and the system is fast, easy and efficient to use and train new users on.  Keeping it simple is the key to the succesful user buy in to these systems.

We will define and develop your database or application to run fast, and to deliver the content to your users in a timely manner.  Within eCommerce systems and applications, the delivery of data is especailly important, and we take every step to ensure that no user is kept waiting in these scenarios.  It is a well known fact that a user kept waiting is a user lost.  We are fully versed in the migration of databases, the creation of scripts to migrate data from one database to another and the definition of database schemas to support the planning stage of any complex database driven project.

We are experts in the field of content management.  Each one of our team have worked with a variety of content management systems over a period of years, including commercial CMS systems such as Tridion, Rhythmyx Percussion, Interwoven, Alterian Immediacy, as well as a full range of open source systems such as Wordpress, Concrete5, Joomla, Drupal, Expression Engine and so on.  We also have many developers who have built proprietory content management systems, often favoured in smaller web agencies in the late 90's, but these days, with the proliferation of high quality systems available, the possibility of any small closed group of individuals building a system that is competitive in the digital media industry is long gone.  We are able to give you recommendations on what system would be the best fit for your users, and also for the often forgotten content entry teams in your organisation.  Many a team get saddled with a user unfriendly system for 2-3 years, which can make their job tiresome, when content entry should be an inspiring and easy task that benefits everyone.

eCommerce is an area of rapid growth in the digital media industry.  There are a host of commercial systems out there which are highly configurable and potentially expensive.  There are also a range of less expensive options available to the discerning small to medium enterprise which can provide great functionality at a reasonable initial and ongoing expenditure.  We have worked extensively with Magento powered systems. For the small enterprise/ entrepreneur, there are also other systems based on open source platforms for Wordpress and Concrete5 which deliver a lot of functionality for a very small budget at the expense of flexibilty.  We also have experience of integration with various payment systems including Worldpay, RBS Streamline, Netbanx, Sagepay/ Protx.  PCI compliance and is 3D secure transaction processing are also areas where we have expertise and can offer advice in these areas to ensure your business is doing the right thing in the online trading environment.

The systems that we use as the foundation for our projects vary, but we do insist that all of them deliver the correct structure to ensure good SEO and to allow organisations to easily attain and maintain a good ranking through good site structure.  All pages should have the right structure in terms of H1, H2, paragraph tags etc, but should also have the ability to add meta names, meta descriptions and meta tags and categorisation.  The pages should also have the ability to use friendly URLs, meaning that each page should be named as /this-is-an-important-page.php/ instead of page.php?id=123456.  It is also absolutely essential that any public site should display a sitemap.xml document, which google uses to spider every site.  This document describes each page in the site and tells google how important the page is, when it was last updated and the change frequency.  From this Google and other search engines can work out if your site is worth visiting to spider and how often it should visit.  Having a sitemap is fundamental to delivering good SEO.  The aforementioned elements really ensure that the site has the best chance of SEO success.

We can deliver Pay Per Click campaigns, and have a range of specialist partners for any pay per click work which varies dependant on the level of monthly investment.

We are highly capable of integrating 3rd party systems into your site, whether this is integrating a feed from an RSS, or integrating a web services feed of eCommerce stock data into your site.  Integration is a highly complex process and does require significant planning and investment, it is therefore essential to undertake proper scoping and fact finding at the early stages of any integration project to ensure that the risks are fully understood and the scope and complexity of any project is fully understood by both parties.