A professional site

Just as you can usually (but not always) tell the difference between professional building work and DIY, so it is with websites. Whilst there are some great tools to make the job easier, there are still common pitfalls which the inexperienced may overlook. These may reduce the impact of your website through long loading times, incompatabilities with different computer systems and be less likely to show up on the search engines.

Competition is strong in this market with over 40 website design companies operating in Bath alone. Many offer a wider range of re-branding services including logos, brochures etc, whilst others specialise in graphic design. We'd recommend that you don't get too carried away with the graphic impact of the site, and ensure it meets the needs of its target users. This means:

• Displays quickly: Studies show that many users will have given up if the first page takes more than about 8-10 seconds to load. Subsequent pages should be even faster, although it doesn't need to be instant.
• Easy to navigate: It should be easy and logical to walk through the site and go quickly to the information needed. Sometimes it's surprisingly difficult to find the contact information for a business on their website.
• Relevant and informative: The more information you can give about your business the better. It demonstrates that you are an authority on the subject, and may prime the potential customer to be able to ask the right questions during your initial consultation. It should also get your site noticed by the search engines too.
• Visually appealling: This tends to mean following a theme, not mixing many different types of font and/or colours. Just like painting walls magnolia, you may find a simple design can be long lasting and appeal to a wide market.
• Standards compliant. Its easy to forget that many people won't have a computer setup identical to your.Your website should look the same whether viewed on other types of computer (e.g. Apple mac), other types of browser (e.g. Firefox, Opera),and even other versions of Microsoft Windows. You can achieve this partly by ensuring you comply with World Wide Web consortium standards, and partly by avoiding known "quirks" in these software variants.

We offer three website packages, depending on your needs:

Brochure Site

A simple 3 page website which gives an effective initial presence on the web. The pages describe your business and give clear contact information for prospects and customers. Where many businesses may have a simple 2-page listing with one of the large national directories, our sites are more personalised and allow you to describe your business in more detail.

The page structure would normally be:

• Home Page: Introduction to your business, usually with a photo of your premises and/or yourself.
• History: Brief description of how your company came about, plus any key points during its evolution. This can also list the types of work offered/products for sale and any other unique selling points.
• Customer Projects/Testimonials: Varies with the type of business, but could include photographs of completed projects (before/after), letters/comments from satisfied customers
• Contact Us: Phone, email, postal contact details. Your phone number would also appear on each page.

You would have to provide photographs, testimonial letters and any other material for inclusion into the site. A short interview is often all that is require to capture the rest of the information needed. As with any project the more thought and information that you can supply at the outset, then the better the result, but overall this type o site should not take up much of your time.

Usually these sites are rarely updated and so changes are processed on an ad-hoc basis when required. Small changes are typically included free with annual hosting fees, but larger changes would incur a small fee.

Updateable Site

Usually more extensive than a brochure site, once completed these can be changed and updated by the customer without any special software. Customers can login to their website with their own password, and directly edit the pages including adding or changing photographs and graphics/layout as easily as editting a "Word" document. The system automatically takes care of aspects including resizing and rescaling images so they load quickly and efficiently.

A typical layout would be similar to the brochure site above, but could include a wider range of products/services and more information about your business speciality. Once completed, you are then free to extend or amend the site as you wish without additional charges.

It is important to realise that updateable sites of this nature are not directly transferrable to other website host provders. It may be possible for another website designer to make a look-alike copy of your site fairly easily, but it would not be identical and may not be updateable by yourself.

Community Site

Building up a wider web presence involves building a community around your business and its website. Many organsations and businesses are growing their market by publishing more information on their websites, including articles, blogs (online diaries) and forums.

Such sites can require registration, which captures and validates email addresses. These email lists can then be used to send regular newsletters and promotional offers to your prospect list, and stimulates further use of your site.

Sites like this may have a team of contributors and editors/moderators who write, proof-read and publish articles on a specific topic.

Such sites use a Content Management System (CMS), which handles all of these aspects and can be extended with a variety of additional features depending on your needs. We have researched many different CMS systems, and have selected Joomla for many of our projects. There is a wide and growing range of add-ons plus skilled experts who provide support for this OpenSource system.

All of the articles and information published on the website is held in a database, thus giving them the name "database driven websites". Articles can be written and given a range of dates when they will be active, so that time sensitive material (Christmas sale offers etc) are no longer shown after their due date.

It is important to realise that these sites take up a lot of ongoing maintenance to keep them relevant. Once completed, you should ensure that some staff time is allocated each week (or even daily) to update the site. There are also more operational maintenance issues to consider, with updating of software patches, database backups and performance monitoring required on (at least) a monthly basis by specialist staff.