The site
http://www.forbesaccountants.co.uk/

The design
We wanted a really nice wide open design.  The company logo was the starting point.  We know that in the future content will be added and the site will grow, so the design needed to incorporate the future needs of the business.  We heavily modified a widely available template to produce a really nice, clean, crisp look and feel.  We opted for a simple typography that is easy on the eye, but conveys the message well

The build
This was a very straightforward build for us.  Once the design stage was complete we worked with Mike Smith on the content

Collaboration with Mike Smith – Marketing expert
We worked in conjunction with Mike Smith Consulting on this site, as part of a new exciting business collaboration.  Mike wrote the content, whilst we delivered the framework and site.  Mike is available on a consultancy basis to all of our customers who need help with sales and marketing copy

The Platform
Essentially this is a WordPress site that has been modified to the business need

SEO
SEO is a very important element of the sites design.  Over the next months we will be working quite hard on both the on page and off page SEO

Feature list
- Easily updatable by the client
- Firewall, and other security features
- User data capture on registration and user forms
- Site automatically pushes new content to search engines
- SEO by design

CSS
The typography for the site is pretty simple and easy on the eye.  It was designed for readability, and to keep the users interest

Technologies
This site uses PHP, SQL, XML, CSS, HTML and JavaScript

Security
As per our normal policy, we have secured the site, using a variety of methods.  We won’t discuss security details here, but would be happy to discuss the issue as a topic on the phone with prospective clients

Hosting
We are providing our unlimited commercial hosting package for this site
Working with the clients
This was a three way process, between Mike Smith Consulting, the client and ourselves.  This collaboration made the build very easy for us

Images and graphics
We sourced all of the licensed photographs for the client, and created all the graphics in house

Part of our work involves shooting products for websites.  We are currently developing a new website for Nottingham Cleaning Services.  Part of this build included us cataloguing all of their products, which will be part of the product listings

Benefits of a product shoot
Getting professional photography done is a key part of a successful web store, and will make or break a potential sale.  NCS have realised this, and this is why they commissioned the product shoot

The advantage of getting a professional in is cost and consistency.  Tackling many hundreds of photographs for the uninitiated is daunting and hard work.  And in the end, costs more in man hours than it does to book us on a day rate.  This shoot was one and a half days which equates to £1200 of photography.  That sounds a lot, but when you factor in that we have produced and edited more than 350 images, the cost price works out at a very reasonable £3.42 an image.  This fee includes the many days of subsequent post processing

• Cost – a day rate for a photo shoot will save you money, compared to commisioning on a per shot basis
• Quality – Professional images are much higher in quality, which equates to improved conversion and ultimatally more tunover and profit
• Consistency – A professional shoot and subsequent post processing will be more consistent and even than doing the job in-house or mixing and matching images from different manfacturers.  Consistency is a way that customers gauge the professionalisim and quality of a website

The Shoot
The shoot took one and a half days.  We took our professional studio flash equipment to the client’s warehouse, where they had already cleared about three by four square metres for us.  We popped a ground sheet down, taped everything down to be safe, and then set up our bespoke shooting table, full length backdrop and lighting

Workflow
Because of the variability of the products, and the huge amount of products that needed to be shot in a short time frame, we set up a fairly generic lighting set up, and then shot the products in batches according to size, tweaking out the lighting as needed

Cameras
For this shoot we chose a 14MP Kodak Professional DCS full frame studio camera tethered to a laptop.  We shot straight into the laptop, allowing us and the customer to easily review things on a shot by shot basis.  This improved the workflow for the day, and produced brilliant high resolution images.  Other images were taken on Nikon professional digital cameras

Lighting
The lighting varied through the shoot, but in the main we used a combination of 2 huge soft boxes, grids, reflectors a snoot on between two and five professional studio flash heads.  We use radio triggers to fire the flashes.  Radio triggers add a lot to the safety of a shoot, as it is another set of cables that don’t need to be used

Working with the client
Between us we produced a worksheet for the shoot, and we shot and prepared the products, as the client picked and located the products.  The shoot went really smoothly and had a minimal impact on the clients business.  This is one of the advantages of us doing a shoot on the businesses premises

The target usage
The usage for the photography is on a website, at a size of no more than 800 pixels in any direction.  The images have been produced at a file size of 4500 x 3000 pixels! This is actually adequate for most print applications as well. We supply the images in the required colour space and resolutions, and sharpen accordingly.  We also provide the full sized unsharpened TIFF files to the client in the event an image is to be used for print

Here are a few random images from the shoot

Did you know we can shoot:

• Products on location
• Products in a studio.  We can also deal with model hire for you
• Corporate portraits and head shots
• Award ceremonies and events
• Company balls and events
• Conferences and meetings
• PR and publicity shoots
• Makeovers and fashion

Benefits of booking with us

• As website designers, we understand the needs of the internet clinet, and how the images will fit into a website
• We offer a true one stop shop process.  Instead of dealing with one firm of phootgraphers and another firm of designers, and bouncing back and forth at both the design and photography and product entry stages, you can deal with one company
• We can shoot precicley to suit the site design, cosmesis and feel

Book us today
If you have a warehouse or shop full of products that you need high quality photographs for, and don’t want to pay the usual £10.00 per image, call us.  Our equipment is portable, and we only require mains power and a reasonably sized space to work in.  The benefits to your business can be tremendous

We can arrange anything from a small shoot, to every product you sell.  Call us on 0115 845 8953 for details

The site
www.emberjd.com

The design
The design was fairly fluid process with the company. We presented a design which was then bounced back and forth until everyone was happy. This is a pretty typical method for the way we work. We designed the front page buttons in a PSD format which the company can amend the texts or inserted images as they need. This means in the future, the company can make a new graphic for any new products in minutes as required

Typography
We used a sharp defined typography, which allows the headlines to led the user. Within the forms, which are fairly long, we have used very user friendly typography, which is easy on the eye, and easy for users to use and read as they type

The build
We staged the site on our own servers, allowing us to present the new site in real time whilst the old site was still serving pages. This meant that the development could be an open and unhindered process. When the site was signed off, the DNS was swapped, and the site switched over gracefully, with a downtime of about half a day.

The build was in three stages. Firstly we got the look, feel, cosmesis and typography sorted. The second stage was adding the content. The third was testing and the minor administrative mopping up, and the general implementation of SEO across the site

The customers were existing Dreamweaver users, so we developed the forms, the CSS and the JavaScript in Dreamweaver locally, and then amended the site template (CSS and JS calls). The net result is that the customer can cut copy and paste out of their version of Dreamweaver into a “New page” in the back end of the site, knowing things like SpryTabs and SpryValidation will work as expected

This is a really important feature we added for the client – that is being able to have a local Dreamweaver view, and a site view that are pretty similar. This will mean the clients will in the future be able to develop and add complex forms that have SpryValidation themselves. Essentially we have added the necessary scripts and stylesheets into the site template to facilitate this.

The platform
This was based on Wordpress. We have not touched the core, so it is still easily updatable. We have however heavily hacked about a fairly standard template, knocking off the “blog” features that were not needed, leaving a really to use basic user updatable CMS behind. This is a concept that originally the clients were unsure of, but seeing the final results we are sure they are very happy with.

Using Wordpress instead of creating a static site for a small business is a very smart move – It separates the content from the design, and allows clients to have a site that they can keep updated, in real time themselves with ease. Adding deleting and editing pages is pretty much as easy as using your favourite word processing package

SEO
Like all of our sites, we provided on page SEO as standard – We will revisit this in a few months as required. Wordpress, with the addition of the correct plug-ins, lets us provide SEO in a systemic way, almost by design -is is important of any pages the client adds in the future will have a good framework for SEO in place

Feature list
- Multi user lightweight CMS site
- Clients can update content as needed
- Firewall, and other security features
- Complex forms and form handling
- SEO by design

CSS
We spent a lot of time setting up the cascading style sheets (CSS) for this site. This will provide a uniform framework for any additional user content. Typography was something we looked at carefully, designed the typography to convey a professional image, yet be user friendly and in the places where the users interact i.e. the long forms. Within the forms we used a proven easy to read and follow text, especially in the input fields

Technologies
This site uses PHP, SQL, CSS, HTML and JavaScript

Security
As per usual we have looked at the sites security, and added measures to prevent spam and the usual forms of hacking

We won’t discuss security details here, but would be happy to discuss the issue as a topic on the phone with prospective clients

Hosting
We are providing our unlimited commercial hosting package for this site

Working with the clients
It was a pleasure to work with these clients, who provided us clear feedback. This enabled the fairly swift completion of the site.

Client testimonial
We desperately needed a complete overhaul of our website, which was over four years old, not very pleasing to the eye and expensive to update. However, we had to make sure that any new site would be user friendly both for us and our clients, easy to make changes to ourselves as we constantly update the site, but above all within a strict budget. We also wanted it rolled out and live as soon as possible as the image we were giving out with the current site wasn’t something we were happy with.

I approached Richard and told him what we needed, he came back very quickly with two options for us, a static site written in Dreamweaver or a Wordpress based site. Not being convinced that a blogging site such as Wordpress would be suitable, Richard talked me through the benefits and this is the route we decided to take.

We gave Richard a few examples of sites we liked the look of, but obviously wanted ours to be unique and not a copy of these. He then went away for a few days while he worked on the template. The whole process was simplified by the fact the site was hosted on their servers, so we could keep an eye on any updates as and when we wanted, rather than waiting for Richard to get back to us. This enabled us to let Richard know what we were/weren’t happy with without wasting valuable time. Once we were happy with this, Richard went to work on the design.

We knew what sort of forms we wanted for customers to complete and I provided Richard of these in the form of rough html forms I had created in Dreamweaver. Richard then tidied these up and amended them to our specifications. Once the content started to go in, things started to move forward quite swiftly.

Once again, we kept going back to Richard with amendments. These were mainly amendments that we’d requested but later changed our mind on, and sometimes even changed our mind again. No matter how many amendments we requested, they were all done very quickly and efficiently.

The transition from our old site to the new one was painless, Richard put a temporary page on the site to advise people we were changing over, and the new site was live in less than a day. All in all, from giving Richard the go ahead to build our site to it going live was just over three weeks.

Throughout the whole process Richard kept us informed of developments and made changes as and when without any fuss. Even after our site had gone live, we decided on more changes and Richard happily did these for us even though it was late on a Saturday night. He then spent time with us going through the back end of the site and the server, showing us how it all worked and how to make amendments, as well as guiding us on the SEO side of things, which is very important to us.

We are completely satisfied with the final website, and even more satisfied with the help and guidance we have received prior to and after the site going live. We would highly recommend Place of Design to anyone in a similar position to ourselves. As we can now develop the site ourselves, this alone will save us hundreds of pounds, let alone the time savings as well now that we don’t have to rely on others to do the updates for us. A thoroughly excellent service all round.

The build
This was a very intense, but fun build for us.  We delivered this site in just over 48 hours.  We used Wordpress for the Blog, and followed the site template through.  The rest of the site is static HTML & CSS, with a smattering of DHTML, JavaScript and PHP.  This site has a very simple implementation of e-commerce – which is essentially using a PayPal and Google payment buttons.  This is a superb method for sites with one or two products

SEO
We have done a few things to aid SEO in the build.  We will be re-visiting the SEO for the site in the near future
Feature list
- Static HTML front end
- Blog – styles to match the rest of the site
- Simple implementation of e-commerce using PayPal & Google Payment buttons
- Validating contact form using PHP for mailing

CSS
We spent a lot of time setting up the cascading style sheets (CSS) for this site.  This has provided a uniform framework for user content.  Typography was something we looked at carefully.  The two coulomb designs, and the expanding rounded corner boxes are all controlled to some extent with CSS

Technologies
This site uses PHP, SQL, DHTML, XML, AXAX, CSS, HTML and JavaScript

Security
We some time securing the Wordpress side of the site.  We won’t discuss security details here, but would be happy to discuss the issue as a topic on the phone with prospective clients
Working with the clients
We worked really closely with the clients.  The clients were a dream to work with – being really organised whilst providing really accurate and speedy feedback

Client testimonial
I had launched my product at The London Baby Show and distributed many flyers; however due to unforeseen circumstances with my previous web coder, I did not have the website to back this up. The visuals of the site had already been created and I needed a professional web designer to make it all work

The communication from start to finish was fantastic, I was kept aware of exactly what was going on throughout. Richard also went above and beyond by adding features to the site to make it more user friendly and manageable, even for a novice like me! I would highly recommend Richard’s services to anyone looking for a completely approachable professional; my only regret is that I did not go to Place of Design from the beginning

Danny
Baby’s first Calendar Ltd

The design
The design was a two way process with the company. The brief was to faithfully represent the company and present a smart business like, organised, operating worldwide, but based in the UK feel. We feel we have achieved this

We used a crisp readable typography, which follows through to the article editor on the backend. This allows new articles, to have a consistent feel to them

The build
This was a fascinating build for us. Partly we migrated content from the old site. We then restructured and re-formatted the content to fit the new site. We created a template, and then the content framework. We created templates for the content, and the corresponding CSS for the templates. Once the content was dealt with we concentrated on users. Firstly we modified the registration process, to collect specific customer data.

As the site is aimed at a global market, and because the laws and regulations and paperwork vary form region to region, we implemented an ACL, allowing different users to be presented with different content. Depending on if they are a customer or not, the size of the account, and the region they are in

Once we had sorted all the customer issues, we dealt with the SEO and security side of things

The Platform
This was based on Joomla 1.5. We migrated some content and users from the company’s previous Joomla 1.0 website
Dealing with users

APS Global wanted a system where registered users all over the world can be presented with different content. We have provided a structure and framework to facilitate this. We are using ACL (Access Level Control) systems to manage users in pre-determined groupings. This is especially useful for ensuring content relevancy and very useful for marketing. The site is set up to automatically contact users that have not logged in for a while etc.
Content management

We are using a ACL, we also created templates with the relevant CSS in the back end, to enable the company to add new content, including coulombs etc.

SEO
The site as we type is too young to report back on search engine optimisation. We have done some structural on-site / on-page SEO and put in systems to ensure new content gets the same treatment. Titles and URL’s are dynamically generated for optimum SEO. We have implemented a clever URL re-writing regime which creates pretty, readable URL’s. We are also doing some off-site SEO to drive targeted visitors to the website. Down the line we will be doing a SEO analysis, looking at site stats, Google analytics + commercial data, and we will tweak out the site as needed

Feature list
- Multi user CMS site
- Owners can update content as needed
- One touch site backup (database and files)
- Firewall, and other security features
- Automatic CRON based database backups
- Specific user data capture on registration
- Features to promote user loyalty
- Newsletter manager
- ACL – for granting differing users different rights to view content
- Form management (stores forms contents on database and also e-mails)
- Document management
- SEO by design
CSS
We spent a lot of time setting up the cascading style sheets (CSS) for this site. This has provided a uniform framework for user content. Typography was something we looked at carefully, which included the introduction of coulombs within content articles

Technologies
This site uses PHP, SQL, DHTML, XML, AXAX, CSS, HTML and JavaScript

Security
We spent a long time closing doors, adjusting server settings and generally locking the site out from attack and spam. We are using a firewall, white list and black list protection and obfuscated administrative login etc..

We won’t discuss security details here, but would be happy to discuss the issue as a topic on the phone with prospective clients

Hosting
We are providing our unlimited commercial hosting package for this site

Working with the clients
We worked really closely with the clients, listening to their needs, and delivering features and ideas that will allow the website to evolve with the customers business as it expands. It was a pleasure to be involved with this very two way process

URL
http://www.cash4scrapcars.co.uk/

The brief
Produce a site to generate leads and interest in the business.  The design needed to incorporate the green nature recycling aspects of the business.  Competition in this business sector is strong, and the site needed to equal and better competitor’s sites, in terms of building client confidence, company image and SEO

The design
We opted for a powerful simple clean design.  This reflects the “We do what it says on the tin” nature of the company.  We unusually opted for a top and tails menu, but this does not distract from the simplicity of the site, and navigation is easy

Feature list

• HTML Brochure site
• Validating, secure information collection form, with cleanly formatted e-mails, ready to print for a collection job
• SEO by design

The e-mail form
We put a lot of effort in the front and back end of the booking form.  In the backend, the client is sent a clearly formatted e-mail, ready to print for a driver or telephone operator to work with directly.  The last thing we wanted was to create extra work for the clients, chopping and changing data form the form before they can begin working on an enquiry

CSS & Typography
We opted for a very clean crisp typography.  There is a clear visual split between the titles (serif) and body (non-serif).  We carefully massaged the text for readability

Cross browser support
By design the site is coded to support and display correctly in Safari (on a Mac + PC) IE5 upwards, Firefox 2, 3 and Opera

Technologies
This site uses HTML, PHP, CSS and Javascript

SEO
The scrap car business is fierce, and competition is pretty stiff.  Because of this, as a bonus to our customer, we have opted to make this site a SEO showcase site.  We have carefully crafted the text, descriptions, title tags etc. We are fully expecting the site to perform excellently on search engines, once the site has had time to mature and be spidered by the search engines. We will update this page in a few months to report on how the site is doing for our targeted keywords and phrases

*** update  ***
The site was launched on 14th August.  It was entered onto google local on 14th August.  It generated it’s first sale on 15th August.  The site was spidered by Google on 23rd August, and is now enjoying page 1 Google results for the customers target phrases!

Google result for Cash for scrap cars

The site is achieveing even better results for GEO targeted searches, which is exactly what the customer specified

Hosting
This site is hosted on our commercial hosting package, which costs just £100 pa

With website planning, bear in mind the 5 P’s
Prior planning and preparation prevents problems

If you went to the bank, the manager would insist on a business plan before even considering funding your website.  This is for a sound reason.  Your website plan should include all the same probing elements as a regular plan

Four W’s – Who?  Where?  What?  Why?
Who are your customers?  Where are they?  What do they do online?  What products do they want?  What are there needs?  Why would they want to come to you?

In essence we are talking about a focused plan.   Focused on the demographic of your customer, focused on the needs and desires of your potential customers, focused on getting them onto your site and then converting them into sales, and keeping them as loyal customers

What not to focus on

You.  Many sites have irrelevant content.  We have all seen the juvenile sites where there is a comment along the lines of “I am 18 and just left college and now I am a professional freelance wedding photographer, and I like heavy metal and cars”  Well lots of grown up sites subtly fall into the same trap

Yes, talk about you – but only to add value to your business, or to increase customer confidence.  Do this with care.  Often site owners are “too close to he copy” meaning they view the texts on their sites with blinkers, and can’t see the problems.  At the point of signing off the copy – get a third party to check

Getting started

You have a well thought out plan.  At some point you are going to need to choose a designer or developer, and collide your ideas with theirs.  This is a key make or break stage in the success of your site

The customer-developer-customer-developer-customer cycle of idea creation is a powerful one and can add lots of value to your project. However you need to keep your eye on the ball, and ensure that 100% of the focus of your original plan remains

The point of the information / ideas exchange in the initial process with the developer is to find out if the developer has ideas that add value to your project.  Often we see things in a way that the client had never imagined was possible. The flip side of this is that some designers and developers will attempt to massage over the “trickier bits” of your build

During this information exchange, you will have a pretty good feeling as to he working relationship you will have with your designer / developer

What will the website designer / developer need?

At this stage, we are talking about content.  Well organised content.  Content focused on the needs of your customers as outlined in your plan.  Make sure you keep your content “on topic”

You may be employing a copywriter, if so, they will need your plan, and the idea of the scale of your site

Organisation is the key here.  Well organised sites have consistent navigation, and content falls into clearly defined sections.  Your content ought to fall on the equivalent of the family tree in structure – the front page at the top of the tree, and the sections and content below.   This structure will directly reflect navigation within the site.  If any content item is more than 3 or four clicks away from the front page, you need to re-organise the structure.  We do this in our office with a white board and “Post It” notes.  When you are done – if your model looks like a plate of spaghetti, you haven’t organised your content properly

When writing the content, begin with what your site is primarily focused on.  Your site will fall into clear sections, write articles for the core sections and areas of focus first, and then plan sub sections afterwards.  You may need FAQ’s and glossary or other supporting articles.  Write these next.  Your articles ought to be forming a tree – spreading away from the main front page.  The last documents to sort out relate to your business the “about us” page, shipping policies etc…

Your website will now have a consistent organised and structured content.  You will have begun the process of figuring out the navigation.  You now need to pick out the “very important things” that appear on each page of your website  On most (not all) sites, this is what lands in the header, and footer of the page

Dealing with images

Either you or your developer will need to provide images and photography.  We are pretty unique hear at Place of design, in that we actually can shoot it specifically for a website

What ever route you go down you need to consider several things: Relevancy, design, and licensing.  In the planning stage, you ought o be specifying your imagery, and possibly sourcing example images or the real images.  Do not underestimate the effort needed to get the correct photographs and images – we sometimes spend days and weeks on this part of the build

If your site needs it, consider visual consistency between the images.  Are they all landscape, portrait?  Will they need to be colour or black and white?  Do they all need to be full frame cropped, or distant? Are they high key (with a white background) or with mixed backgrounds?

One or two key shots commissioned for your site, taken by a professional can absolutely make the difference between a good site and an excellent one.  You may spend £2000 on a site, and then £500 for one image, shot specifically for your front page, that increases your sites appeal so much that conversion doubles or more

Shaking it all up and making some sense of it

Your website is about marketing your business and products, or promoting your organisation, or just conveying information.  You now need to look at your key marketing messages, and re-look at all of your content, optimising and tweaking it to your customers needs and marketing message.  You need to look at all of the articles as a group, and iron out inconsistencies

This is a really important stage, as getting this right will ensure visitors get a clear consistent message from page to page as they navigate through your site

You may have heard about search engine optimisation – well this is the stage where you play your part.  You will need advice from your designer or SEO consultant, but essentially, you need to ensure the right keywords and phrases are woven into your copy at this stage.  Your SEO expert will still need to make fine adjustments to the site down the line – really at this stage we are providing a sensible broad framework for the content based search engine optimisation

To be absolutely fair, well organised, structured and written content, is 95% of the way to being optimised in the first place.  We do not recommend writing content for search engines for search engines sake, we recommend writing real, relevant customer focused content, and sensibly tweaking it to perform well on a search engine

The website design

You have the pictures, the content, and it is all structured and ready to go – What happens next?

The designer will design and create the template or visual framework for the site. They will make sure that the structure you laid out, fits the menus, the information common to all pages fits

The website designer may be using a content management system (CMS) or just flat webpage’s – whichever method of delivering the pages, the templating stage is the same

At this point the typography of the site is generally chosen.  This determines the choices and usage of fonts, and will affect readability

Adding any interactive bits and pieces

At this point things like stores, blogs, forums, galleries, and other bespoke interactive bits are added, and styled to the main site.  It is worth noting that many of these products are “off the shelf” but still require localisation, and text adjustments to match the rest of your site.  They will also need careful styling to ensure they sympathetically blend in with the rest of your site

Editing content, after the site has been templated

The best made plans may not take into account the visual effect the template had on the content.  At this stage, we go back and look at all the content, and edit where required.  The content consists of text, headlines, tables, figures, images etc.

If there is a global issue, we may adjust all of the fonts globally, if there are individual problems with the way lines break, or with specific images, we tackle them as we find them

Pretty much the site is done now

Wrong.  Now the site needs to be tested – on different browsers, operating systems.  Your site also needs to be tested at different broadband speeds, by different users.  This process is vitally important

If the site has interactive features, they need to be comprehensively tested too

It is also worth taking a sample of people from your target demographic and using them to assist the testing process of your site too.  What is obvious to a 19 year old may not be obvious to a senior user.  What makes sense in the way you phrased something to a senior, may be totally misunderstood by a youngster

Marketing and Search engine optimisation

I eluded earlier in the article that SEO was something that will need to be re-visited

At the completion of the site, your SEO consultants may need to begin work optimising for keywords and writing clever code in the structure of the site to ensure your site is ranked well.  Often your website designer/developer does this automatically as the site is developed.

Regardless of the exact process in the beginning, the measurement, marketing and tweaking of your site to ensure you are hitting the spot ought to be an ongoing process

Ongoing maintenance

Things change, sites grow, servers get patched, and security loopholes need resolving.  Agreeing an ongoing maintenance contract with your website developer/designer is vital to ensure your site remains healthy and up to date

There is one big question to deal with first – do you need a static site, or a dynamic one?

Static sites
Static sites are like books or brochures, they are fixed, and you can not update them easily once they are online. To subsequently update your website will  require you to call us back.  We will make the changes for you, and this will usually incur a small charge.   In our price list we call these sorts of sites static sites

Dynamic sites
Dynamic sites have a page which you can log into. There will be a system where you can add / edit or change content yourself.  Long term, this means you are in control of ammending the content on your site yourself, without the need to contact us

Dynamic sites come in many different variants – blogs, content management sites, e-commerce sites etc.

Making the choice

If you want a website that needs to present the same information today, as it will need to present in a few years time, a static site is probably for you. If you feel that you will need to regularly change and amend your content, then a dynamic site is probably the best choice for your business

I want to know more

We have created an article which explains the differences between static / blog / CMS sites in some detail – click here to read it

Get some free honest advice

Part of the process of our free initial consultation is to establish the type of site your business needs. We will outline clearly what we feel is best for your business, and explain why we come to our conclusions. Call us today on 0115 845 8953, for a friendly no-obligation discussion about your website needs

Static sites
Firstly we can produce a static site or “brochure site”. A static site has pages that are fixed and unchanging.  If you want to change something, you need to contact the designer who will alter the site for you.  Static sites are very suitable for companies that have information that never changes very much.  Where price updates are done every few years, or for presenting long term factual information

Static sites are not dynamic, they dont really interact with the user, thry presrnt information, and that is it.  There is nothing wrong with a static site, infact static sites are a very good platform for a small business, and even on larger sites, can work very well.  An example of a static site we have produced is www.journeyafrica.co.uk

The Journey Africa website is a good example of a larger static site, and even though the site owners can not update pages themselves>  Just because we cal the site a static site, doesnt mean the content is not intersting or dynamic.  The individual pages themselves can have dynamic content – look at one of the hotel pages for example: http://www.journeyafrica.co.uk/one-and-only-hotel-cape-town.html.  On this page there is a slider containing nested content, a slideshow of images that is user reactive, a form feeding back page specific info to the site owner etc.  On the rest of the site you will find liknks to on the fly currency conversion, video streaming, and other DHTML slideshows and image scrollers

Blog style sites
This site is a blog style site.  The framework is provided by generic blog software, and the design and template was done in house.  The advantage of this style of site for a small to medium sized business is that information can be added, subtracted, amended very quickly.  We chose this format to cope with the way we present portfolios.  Essentially each portfolio is a new page, which we can add when ever we want

You will notice a few differences between this site and your average blog.  We don’t have calendars.  Articles are not dated and don’t display an author name.  There is no facility to add comments.  In essence, all the standard blog features have been programatically removed, leaving behind the same features that you find on a static site, that is – menu’s, and pages of information

We provide a lot of these blog based sites for small businesses, especially businesses who want to invest the time in continuously adding content to their websites

Blog style sites are quite limited in the way they present information, and don’t do some things very well.  This is why for example on the www.caronphotography.co.uk website; we integrated a blog into a static site and added a separate gallery system.  The customer uses the blog in the traditional sense, the rest of the site deals with the customers other requirements

If you want to keep amending your sites information, and the information you want to present is very simple, a blog style site has a lot of advantages for you

Content management systems (CMS)
Content management systems suit companies and organisations which have a lot of content to present and organise.  You can add, remove, and even time content.  You can have multiple authors, and a person who supervises or moderates the addition of content

A content management framework can deal with other activities, like e-commerce, galleries, forums, blogs, polls, questionnaires etc.  We used a content management system on the www.lencarta.com site.  The site in this instance streams video’s, offers downloads, and sells products.  The staff at Lencarta keep the content fresh and up to date themselves

The major advantage over a blog style site is scalability and extensibility.  A CMS system can scale up from a few pages to being absolutely enormous, with thousands of pages, managing thousands of users, and offering a plethora of functionalities that can be easily added and removed as required

One advantage of a CMS is the separation of structure, content, and design.  In other words, you can re-design the site in a year or two, and the structure and content remain the same.  You can easily re-structure existing content, or just amend existing content.  The power of adjusting the template, while everything else remains constant can not be underestimated.  Example – Christmas sales – you can re-brand your whole site, for Christmas, or the summer holidays, just by switching templates

CMS sites are not exclusively for larger businesses, they are for business and organisations that want that extra organisational layer, or require the additional features that the basic blog system does not offer

Conclusion
If you want a site that presents fairly unchanging information, and you have no desire to update content yourself – a static site is probrably your best bet.  If you have content that needs to be added to on a week by week basis, and you are happy to add the content yourself, using a simple editor, then a blog based site is possibly the best option for you.  If you have a organisation that is spread out, with lots of content, or you need a site to expand with yoru business as it grows,  or you are looking for a fluid reactive site that is scalable, then a content managment (CMS) type of website will be your best option

About the Author

Richard King has been producing websites for over 15 years, and will be delighted to discuss your business needs with you.  We do not have a one size fits all approach.  For a no-obligation, free consultation and chat, just call Richard on 0115 845 8953  The least he can do is make sure you are on the right track

Ethical SEO or “White Hat” SEO
What’s the difference? Black Hat, White Hat, Ethical Un-ethical… Well, in the SEO industry there are a range of practices employed to promote websites.  Some are honest, while others just outright deceive users and search engines, filling cyberspace up with useless links and recycled spammy articles that no one wants to read

What is our approach to SEO?

• Content is King. Unique professional effective content is the starting place. We sometimes re-write your content, or suggest additional content. We appreciate that whatever the search engine sees, it is a human that will be buying from your company, not a search engine
• Your website needs the right appeal to the right market. We will make suggestions and alterations improve the appeal of your website to the market
• We measure everything, and make qualitative decisions. We research your business sector to understand what is actually being searched for. This means optimisation will not normally be for a single keyword, but a broad spectrum of keywords which are chosen to represent their profitability and market placement
• Your website usually consists of more than the front page; this is why we optimise every page independently
• On your site we will include the usage of good well thought out metadata
• If needed we will freshen up the html coding and scripts, cleaning out errors and problems
• We will ensure your site has an excellent logical structure which is both easy for a human and search engine to navigate
• If we write and use press releases and articles, they will be unique, and relevant to your company, positioned with relevancy
• We create a sitemap to enable search engines to effectively find all the pages on your site
• Your site will be carefully added by hand to search engines. This process will include verifying your site
• If we acquire back links for your website, we will not spam irrelevant directories; we will position them intelligently, with relevance to your company

Why do we take this approach?

It works! It worked 5 years ago, and it will work in 5 years time. Search engines are constantly changing their algorithms, to beat the dubious practices employed by un-ethical SEO companies. The constant things search engines have respected and listed sites well for is high quality unique content, and relevance in links

Long term, you do not want to be in a position of constantly playing catch-up, and recovering from failures when one of the bad techniques other SEO companies employ trips up your website. We believe the internet is for humans first, and search engines are a tool to help humans find things relevant to their searches

What is the alternative?
Examples of un-ethical SEO include:

Spamming, by commenting on blogs
Often the un-ethical SEO companies leave a multitude of comments on blogs, all over the place, with no relevance, with the hope it leaves a back link to the target site. They use automatic “Bots” and scripts to do this.  Often tens and thousands of blogs are targeted at once. Not only does this fill the internet up with dross that people just don’t want to read, it causes the blog owners lots of work keeping on top of the spam.

Cloaking redirects
In plain English this means setting up lots of little secondary websites with the sole purpose of gaining page rank, but then having the secondary websites automatically redirect users to the primary, which benefits from a gain in page rank

Keyword spamming and stuffing
This is a bad technique that involves re-using keywords to the point the text is senseless to a real visitor

Hidden text and links
Often hidden text is employed, which is not visible to human, but is visible to search engines, this text is used to add content and keywords to a page that really has different content or no content.  People may do this for example to to widen the pages geographic appeal.  I am a “website designer in Nottingham”, I could hide text saying “website designer in Newark” and “website designer in Retford” etc.  Deceiving Google into thinking that I actually am a website designer in Newark and Retford

Another practice that is totally disapproved by search engines is hidden links.  Essentially hiding content from the user, but not from the search engine

Link farms
Some SEO companies use automated link farms which they place (often without your permission) on your site. The link farms basically are computer generated pages of links, to all of the sites the company wants to promote, along with hundreds of others. The value of the page to a human is zero, and Google disapproves of the method

What to do?

We believe in a straightforward approach. Our approach may seem conservative, and lack the instantaneous impact of the more underhand methods. However, our approach is not myopic, it is focused on the long term benefit you’re your business. If the way we work appeals to you, then simply contact us, and we can get things moving

Ethical SEO sounds like what I want, what next?

Call us today on Nottingham 0115 845 8953 for a free consultation. We will assess your site, discuss your business, and put together a plan for you

How much will this cost

For a 10 page web site, our SEO fees start at just £350.00

As you would imagine, some sites will require a lot more work than others. This is why we offer a free no-obligation consultation