Planning is key to website design.  Here are a few things for you to consider before the process can begin.

What is the main purpose of your website?

It may be to generate sales, spread the word of a particular brand, stand out from your competitor …

Who is your ideal customer?

Thinking of the type of customer you want, generate content aimed at them.  If you have luxury items for sale, you wouldn’t use words like, “cheap, bargain” etc.

What would you like your customer to read about your business?

This will be the content of the pages you create.  The focus should always be on the content.  If you are struggling to think of enough to write, feel free to ask your family and friends.  It’s amazing how others see your business and it can lead to ideas you haven’t yet considered.

Keywords

Keywords are the words or phrases that internet users type into search engines, e.g. Google, to find which websites match what they are looking for.

Legalities

You’ll need to research which legal pages you need and include these pages on your site.  Usually this consists of a privacy and cookie policy, terms and conditions plus return policy for E Commerce sites.

Selling online

You’ll definitely need an E Commerce site.  Plenty of pictures and content along with how your customers can pay you, delivery options, returns, etc.

Planning

In order for us to build you a successful site, we have our own questionnaire for you to use as a guide.  You can find this in the knowledge base section via your online account.  By filling in as many details as possible, it helps us to understand what it is you want on your website and speeds up the design process.

How we can help

We always use WordPress when creating a website for our customers.  WordPress has a huge selection of templates and you can take a look to see if there is any particular theme that takes your fancy.  They also offer a huge amount of plugins.  Plugins are software add on’s that add a specific feature to your website.  We can check for compatibility to your theme and test them out before installing them on your live site.

Using WordPress keeps the costs down for you as we’re not having to spend hours coding and testing.  It also enables you to look after the site yourself after it’s completed.  You can easily add pages, blog posts and edit content without asking for help or relying on a technical team to do this for you. We are happy to show you how to do the updates and edits to the site.

Some themes will need paying for.  This is usually a one-off payment and will be discussed before any work starts on the site.

"WordPress websites can be tailored to your company's needs. As technical experts, we know how to make the site work, and that’s what counts".

Hosting & Domain Names

You will need a domain name and hosting for the website.  Our domain names cost £7 for a “.co.uk”, or you could opt for a “.com” which costs £13.  Your domain name will need to be renewed annually.  Our hosting costs £30 per year for a small site, £45 for Woo Commerce sites.

If you are looking to host your website with us, we offer the following:

Unlimited bandwidth
99.9% uptime guarantee

With free:

• SSL certificate
• Backups either weekly/monthly
• DDoS protection
• SpamExperts anti-spam

Website & Domain Name Ownership

All documentation will be put in your name.  We will not own your website or its domain name.  It will be your responsibility each year to pay for your renewals but we will send out a reminder.  As you will be the owner of your site, any work we do for you must be paid for in full before we begin.

Website Maintenance

After the site is built and live, we will set a date for it’s ‘reveal’.  If you would like us to look after the site for you, we offer a monthly website maintenance service.  Costs will depend on the size of your site but include: adding content, editing pages, updating plugins (tested on a replica site) and updating themes.