A really good website also needs to be:

• user-friendly – so visitors find the site easy to use rather than a chore
• logical - so it’s easy to find information and navigate from one page to another
• accessible – so users with different browsers, screen sizes, connection speeds and disabilities can still access it
• reliable - so all the functionality works when visitors want to become customers
• engaging – so visitors want to come back time and time again
• optimised – so search engines rank it highly for the keywords your future customers are searching

All our websites are custom designed to meet the needs of the individual client, with no standard templates or recycling of past creative. From small sites with just a few pages to large e-commerce or content-managed web presences, every website we build is unique.

If you want to be able to update your site yourself, we can integrate WordPress, a powerful content management system (CMS)and blog platform, with your site, enabling you to post news, events and articles through a web-based interface. Alternatively, if you only need to make minor changes, we’ll implement PageLime to make small changes to your site content easy.

Well-written, engaging and concise content is the key to converting users into customers, but web users don’t read webpages in the same way that they do brochures and offline material.

The typical objective of a web user is to find information, and to do so they’ll tend to scan, not read, pages, looking for links that will get them closer to their goal. It’s crucial to write web copy that caters for that seek-and-find behaviour while also motivating your users to complete YOUR objectives – whether that’s making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter or just making an enquiry.

In parallel, it’s vital that a website is designed for search engines to find, read and index, too. Search engines like Google and Yahoo drive a huge percentage of web traffic, and making your site appealling to them is equally as important as making it engaging for humans.

We work with our clients to list keywords and phrases that their customers (and future customers) are likely to be searching for, then optimise the copy, page titles and descriptions and many other elements for those words and phrases. We also develop strategies for inbound links – links from other relevant websites, which increase your site’s ranking in Google.

We use Google Analytics, a free but extremely powerful web analytics tool, to track visitors, and use the information to measure return on investment and make improvements to our websites.

It integrates closely with Google AdWords, and gives us the information we need to write better ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives, and create higher-converting websites. Google Analytics helps you find out what keywords attract your most desirable prospects, what advertising copy pulled the most responses, and what landing pages and content make the most money for you.

Google Analytics is:

• free – so you can spend your marketing budget on marketing, not analysis
• sophisticated – with an almost unmatched set of features and complex reporting tools
• easy to use – you can look at a summary of site traffic or run very specific reports

Of course email marketing is impossible if you don’t have any contacts, so we’ll help you gather email addresses from existing and prospective customers. Then we’ll produce great looking email designs, ensure that your email is delivered, and maximise the open-rate and clickthroughs to your website.

Our powerful email marketing platform enables us to offer:

• customised signup forms
• design and broadcast of great-looking emails, with no ugly logos or links
• personalisation of emails to individual customer names
• management of lists and subscribers
• single and double opt-in subscription
• unsubscription and suppression list management
• forward to a friend functionality
• segmentation and A-B testing
• data import and export from/to Excel
• detailed reporting on delivery, bounce, open and clickthrough rates

We can integrate online sales into your website in one of three ways.

PayPal ‘Buy It Now’ buttons

If you have a small number of products we can set you up with a PayPal business account and create PayPal buttons for each product. These enable:

• secure payment via PayPal account, debit/credit card or bank account
• purchase of individual products
• stock and inventory management

PayPal shopping cart

If you want your visitors to buy several products at once, we’ll set up a PayPal business account and create ‘Add to cart’ and ‘View cart’ buttons for your site. These enable:

• secure payment via PayPal account, debit/credit card or bank account
• purchase of multiple products
• PayPal shopping cart viewing and management
• stock and inventory management

Integrated e-commerce

If you have a large number of products, and/or want to include a sophisticated shopping experience as part of your web offering, we can set up and integrate a full e-commerce solution into a website based on WordPress, including:

• secure payment via a number of payment gateways, including PayPal
• purchase of multiple products
• shopping cart viewing and management without leaving your site
• seamless integration into your website’s look and feel
• stock and inventory management

We can assist in areas including:

• search engine optimisation of your site
• pay-per-click (Google AdWords) strategy
• landscape and competitor analysis
• usability and accessibility review
• web project scoping
• social networking strategy

If you’d like us to consult for your organisation, please get in touch.

We can offer:

• design and production of posters, flyers and business cards
• logo design
• custom-printed, individually-numbered event tickets, with or without security holograms

If you’re interested in our print services, please get in touch!

Google, Yahoo, and MSN all offer pay per click advertising on their search engine result pages (SERPs), and smaller search engines often show sponsored ads from one of the bigger search engines on their SERPs as well.

In the same way that natural search engine optimisation (SEO) requires expertise, analysis of your target market and keyword research, the same is true if your paid-for advertising campaign is to be successful.

Why pay per click?

Although optimising your website for good ranking in the natural listings is free, it takes time and is an ongoing process of adding fresh content and building links. Even if you already have a well-optimised website, there may be some additional keywords that you would like to show up for in the search engines – it is virtually impossible to naturally optimise your website for every single keyword related to your content.

You may even want your ad to show for those extra-competitive keywords that are also poor choices for natural optimisation.

Getting it wrong will cost you more

Pay-per-click advertising (PPC) provides a great solution to all of these problems – and it works, just as long as you know what you’re doing! Analysis of your target market, keyword research, great ad copy and relevant website content are essential to making sure you get the most amount of relevant traffic for the money you spend.

Benefits of Pay Per Click

The benefits of pay-per-click advertising far outweigh the costs, which is why it is such an effective form of advertising. You get targeted traffic to your site that’s looking for you. It’s easily measurable , and it often yields a great return on investment (ROI).

So how much will it cost?

You choose a daily paid placement budget, so what you spend is entirely up to you! We provide guidance on strategically selecting terms, as well as a recommended PPC advertising budget (based on number of terms and how competitive the desired terms are). It is extremely important to have an adequate budget, and budgets can vary greatly, depending on your industry.

Our hosting service covers:

• domain registration and renewal
• website hosting
• server software maintenance and upgrades
• high bandwidth
• 99.9% availability
• multiple email addresses and email forwarding
• email virus checking
• web-based access to your emails

Effective online PR boosts your credibility, raises awareness of your products and services and helps generate high value traffic to your site.

Benefits of online PR:

• increase the number of visitors to your site
• boost your website’s credibility
• generate consumer interest in your company’s products and services
• achieve a high search engine ranking for your chosen keyword terms
• build good quality links to your site that meet the guidelines set out by Google and Yahoo

We can offer training on:

• updating your website using WordPress
• adding news, events and blog posts
• writing for the web
• cropping, resizing and optimising images
• effective use of Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites

Accessibility

Accessibility is the process of ensuring that all elements of a website, from the design to the content to the underlying code, can be effectively used by any type of web visitor, regardless of age, environment, experience or physical ability. While most customers will use a browser on a PC or Mac, there are many browser types and versions, as well as different screen resolutions and connection speeds. Some visitors may use alternative access devices such as mobile phones and PDAs (personal digital assistants) while visitors with disabilities might use screen readers or only the keyboard.

Usability

It is widely understood that web visitors go to websites to perform one of two principal actions: to find information, or to perform a task. If visitors can’t find the information or perform the tasks they want, they will:

• find another website that gives them the information or allows them to carry out their task – usually a competitor!
• find an alternative source or method, eg telephone, which costs you more

However, if visitors find using websites easy, they:

• are more likely to return
• will visit more often
• will use the website before other channels such as the telephone
• will recommend the siteto their colleagues and friends