The Design Process
Identity and Brand Design
Website Design
Planning and concept visuals
Greyboxes and wireframes
Reducing the initial colour visual to a set of simple grey boxes with identifying labels may at first seem a bit of a dull thing to do. This technique however cuts through distracting details during the early stages and lets everyone involved get to grips with the fundemental building blocks of the site and how they should fit together.
Basic structures and relationships can then be determined using wirefame (stripped down) pages, with alterations being made quickly and easily during the planning and layout development stage.
Concept visuals
Having established exactly what goes where and how one area relates to another, we produce static working visuals from supplied to you generally as pdf files which are emailed to you. These files are stored on your client page and can be downloaded via this site at any point once you have logged in. Feedback from you then allows us to flesh out and modify the design until we are all happy to move forwards to begin coding.
Prototypes and test servers
A working prototype of the site is the next step in the process. Accessed by the client live on the web via a test server this working prototype can be configured to demonstrate much of the functionality that the finished site will have.
Modifications can be made and tested in any number of targeted monitor resolutions using an agreed range of web browsers.
Hosting and platforms
Reliable and Secure Hosting
We host the majority of our client's sites for them and our CentOS based server located in London's docklands has an enviable track record for reliability and support, providing an enterprise level hosting specification. Cutting a long story short and leaving out any more tech talk let's just say our hosted sites run smoothly, reliably and they do so 99.999% of the time.
Adobe Business Catalyst
As Business Catalyst partners we can design and host sites on this rapidly developing, state of the art and future proof business platform, offering our clients access to a user friendly, supported CMS that boasts high levels of site functionality. The platform allows new users to commence hosting with an economical, straightforward plan but with the knowledge that in the future the site can grow and evolve to take on board a comprehensive range of database driven functions such as HTML eMail, automated customer relationship management tasks and unlimited eCommerce catalogue configurations.
There are no fixed contracts and plans can be upgraded or downgraded at any time.
Wordpress Development
We offer hosting, development and CSS customization services for this popular open source site framework which has proven to be both flexible and powerful and is supported by a worldwide community of developers working on exciting new plugin functionality all the time.
Social Networks
Maximise interaction between your site and LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and the rest. Keep your customers up to date with your business, and keep your business up to date with their ideas and comments. Both Business Catalyst and the Wordpress platform offer powerful tools to enable social network integration and feedback from the huge base of people now registered on these networks.
Content Management Systems
Fast content updates
The need to regularly update the pages and information on a website has become fundamental to most businesses over the past couple of years and content management systems (CMS) have evolved greatly to meet this demand.
Technologies developed recently which support the use of in context editing (ICE) are amongst the most user friendly, allowing the site administrator to edit content directly on the live page. We provide our clients with a robust and flexible CMS framework (including ICE) from which they are able to add and delete pages, edit copy and images, create links to internal and external pages and lots, lots more.
Having designed and coded a site we decide along with the client which areas need to be editable and configure these areas to be accessible via the ICE editor upon logging in. Site updates can also be scheduled with specific release and expiry dates making site changes a task that can be planned in advance and then executed at a specific time.
In Context Editing
Update your site quickly and easily. View your website just like your customer would - and actively edit the content as you go. Just point, click and edit your pages, with full access to the HTML code if you need it.
Keep it consistent.
With site wide templates, you safeguard the site's design framework on every page you create or edit. Think of it as a photo frame wrapping around the content you create, keeping the professional look and feel on every page.
Control who sees what
Make any part of your site a Secure Zone, assigning customers unique usernames and passwords. Keep private information secure or sell access to a Secure Zone to customers, on a subscription basis.
Make it social
Create and control an unlimited number of blogs, forums, and RSS feeds. Keep your customers up to date with your business, and keep your business up to date with their ideas and comments.
HTML eMail marketing
Targeted messages
We can create bespoke, professional templates for your eMail campaigns, styled to reflect your brand and identity. You just add the content in an editable region, choose a mailing list from the database and away it goes.
Reach everybody
Send up to 10,000 emails per month as part of an unlimited number of personalized email marketing campaigns. (Business Catalyst - Business Hosting).
Automate your campaigns
Automate sales responses by creating a pre-written series of emails which are sent to a customer after they subscribe - in sequence, timed and paced as you like. You can even set the system to send customers an email on their birthday or another special day, unique to their personal information.
Who opened and clicked
Our marketing software tells you who opened the message, any links that were clicked and the actions your recipent took after clicking on the link, allowing you to measure the true effectiveness of your email campaigns and how they can be modified and adjusted to increase your open and conversion rates.
Customer Relationship Managers
Get to know your customers
With integrated customer relationship management built-in, every interaction your customers have with your business is logged, creating a unique profile and history. You can also import existing customer databases, using Excel spreadsheets.
Watch your customers, live
Your online business has a live feed of customer actions, on your dashboard. Whenever customers open a newsletter, submit a web form or purchase a product, you can see their action appear in real time on your live feed.
Create automated workflows
You can automate text and email notifications, tailoring them to the specific needs of filtered groups of subscribers, notifying them of important events.
Easily managed details
Our CRM is clean, clear, intuitive and user friendly. It can be quickly configured to edit and sort customer details , monitor cases and orders, manage access privileges and deal with all site contacts and subscriptions, all handled from from a single, easy to use central dashboard. Over time a well managed CRM can significantly reduce the costs of your business marketing and client services whilst helping to grow and streamline your online business.
eCommerce and online stores
The Business Catalyst platform
Through the power of this state of the art hosting platform you can create an unlimited number of products and organise them into catalogues. You can even sell downloadable eProducts. We can help you to make the transition by designing a unique, bespoke web page that presents your products to visitors in a style that reflects your brand and identity, with an easliy managed administration dashboard that gives you total control in all areas of online store management.
Highly Targeted Marketing
Every customer who interacts with your site has their details automatically captured into your integrated CRM system. Keep a history of customer orders and actions, run loyalty programs based on segmented customer lists, or link targeted Email Marketing to these specific segments.
Search Engine Friendly
Search engine friendly URLs mean that your business and online store can be found with ease. Search Engine Optimization will be a breeze, with all URLs containing the product or catalogue name and automatically generated Google Sitemaps XML files.
Measure your success
Powerful analytics and reporting tools allow you to measure the popularity of products, basket abandonment rates and much more, so you know exactly how your Online Store is performing and what you might need to change.
Discounts, vouchers & referrals
Available sales tools include discount codes, gift vouchers and referral tracking, helping you maximise profits and deliver greater bottom line results.
Import, export, migrate
Import products from an existing inventory via a simple spreadsheet format. Or export your catalogue, update with popular spreadsheet software such Microsoft Excel and then import to update your product catalogue in a single operation.
Automated and recurring orders
As long as your Payment Gateway supports it, you can sell products that have a built in re-occurrence, great for customers in need of regular deliveries.
Billing and shipping integration
A global range of popular payment gateways and shipping providers are supported and configurable from within the system.
Search Engine Optimization
Search engine friendly code
Adopting standard coding practices when building a site is important and there are numerous benefits for any site that toes the line. The content of compliant sites are displayed with greater accuracy and uniformity by the web browsers that are asked to serve their files, search engines are better able to understand the content and can therefore index the content with greater success.
Honest SEO
Despite the claims of many web design companies, there is no magic technique that guarantees a high page ranking in Google's directory and sites that are near the top of a search listing (that haven't paid to be there) generally earned the position by providing content that was relevant to the search that was entered. The number one rule to improving page rank then is making sure your site does what it say's on the label and that people searching for what you do would actually find answers to their questions if they visited your site.
Encouraging spiders
It must also be remembered that the Googlebots (spiders) that crawl your site in order to index it do a much better job if the site has been built with their visits in mind. We code all sites with a structure and hierarchy that makes the spiders' job easier and your site therefore better indexed in future searches.
Site promotion
We can play an active part in promoting your site both on and offline, monitoring changes in page rank and adjusting the business marketing strategy accordingly.
