Web Development Services
Wilson Web Design supplies a number of website development services, from creating a new website to re-designing existing sites and improving search engine optimization.
Website Design and Development
There are still a large number of organisations and businesses that haven't yet established an on-line presence or perhaps have an existing website that no longer meets their needs. The process of developing a website can seem daunting, confusing and expensive to implement, but Wilson Web Design makes a point of keeping our projects straightforward to understand and to manage.
Many web design companies offer their clients a multitude of unnecessary, and expensive, features for their websites but we understand the value of simplicity for effective communication - and we only sell you the services that you need to get your organisation on-line cost effectively
Website Re-design
Many organisations have an existing website which they feel needs more of a revamp rather than a thorough-going and costly replacement. They may be happy with the site's images and graphics, and with its overall 'look and feel' but feel it needs sharpening up a bit. Perhaps it uses old technologies (such as framesets) that make it difficult to navigate or maybe its design makes it awkward and time-consuming to maintain properly.
Site owners may feel that all of this reflects a little badly on the professional image of the rest of their organisation and so want to bring their website up to scratch at reasonable cost.
Avoiding the development work associated with new graphics, site templates and the like does save a considerable amount of time and money. Wilson Web Design can provide this type of re-design service for you at a very competitive price.
Site Maintenance
Designing and developing a website is only the first stage in creating an effective on-line presence for any organisation. In many ways, once a website has gone live on the Web the hard work is only just beginning, because a website quickly becomes a liability, rather than an asset, if it isn't kept updated. A tired website sends out all the wrong messages about the organisation that owns it.
Users will not bother to stay long on your site (or return to it again) if they feel that it's out of date. Some websites even proclaim their redundancy with such statements as 'last updated June 23rd 2007' but even without such blatant shooting in the foot, users quickly sense when a site is being neglected. If you're using a website to keep users informed this is a disaster in communications terms.
Wilson Web Design can provide site maintenance services in two distinct areas. First, all of our development work comes with the option of on-going site maintenance at very reasonable cost. Second, we can take over the maintenance of existing sites which their original developers no longer support - many web design companies develop a site and then disappear for some reason. This option may require a little re-coding but it's amazing how much more vibrant a neglected site can look after only a few hours of updating supported by an on-going regular maintenance programme.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Many companies claim to have a magic solution that can get your site placed right at the top of the page on a list of Google or Yahoo search results, but the truth is that nobody can guarantee this - simply because no one knows how the major search engines go about indexing and ranking sites for search purposes. But there are lots of things that can be done to improve the visibility of your site to search engines - and so to improve your chances of being found by users.
Wilson Web Design provides a full range of SEO techniques that can help improve the ranking of your site on all of the major search engines. These legitimate techniques are basically a best practice approach to designing a search engine friendly website and most definitely do not include so-called 'black SEO' techniques - techniques such as hidden keywords and 'content stuffing' that try to mislead search engines but which can ultimately lead to sites being banned from their search listings altogether.
Existing Site Usability Assessment
How many people do you hear saying that their experience of using a website has been exasperating and, well, downright annoying? All too many web designers design websites from their own perspective - how it works technically (or, more dangerously, how 'cool' it looks) and they forget the most important thing of all: the user.
We've been using web sites for a lot longer than we've been designing them and we understand what users want when they visit your site - straightforward navigation, locating the information they want easily and generally getting things done simply and intuitively.
We try to make the user the cornerstone of every site we design and we can pass this user-centred approach on to you - even if we haven't designed your site - by assessing your website using Wilson Web Design's 'Intelligent User' usability checklist.
The basis for the assessment is simple - you tell us what you want your users to be able to do and we tell you how easily they can achieve this using a selection of users (including ourselves) to carry out the tasks you want. Because these users are not insiders or designers they approach the task cold giving you a much better assessment of the true usability of your site.
The assessment also includes a grading of the ease of navigation across your site, how easy it is to use for people with disabilities and the quality of its coding based on the internationally accepted validation standards of the World Wide Web Consortium (the W3C)
Graphics
Wilson Web Design is not a graphic design agency and in any case we don't believe that outrageous Flash animations or entry pages add very much to a website's usability (if anything, they can dramatically reduce a website's usability as well as its SEO and traffic levels) but we do believe simple and effective graphics, including Flash animations, can add interest and usability to a website, so we do produce them for use in banners and site navigation, and for one-off images or animations wherever they are required across your site.