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What does my business need to do in order to develop our own website and what will the process involve?

Every brilliantly successful website starts off with a brilliant idea. Whether your idea is to fill a gap in the market, a way for you to earn a living, whether it's to satisfy a great need, or whether it's a product, a service or some form of entertainment, the idea is the main reason that your website will succeed or die a slow painful death. You need passion, a great team, discipline, hard work, of course you need all the tools available to you that a website will afford you, but if your idea is a dud then if will ultimately all be for naught.

Once you've completed all your planning, you know what constitutes success and how you're going to measure it, you've done your market research and have the funding in place you can then think about how you're going to make the next step of anctually getting online. These days it is definitely a question of how, and when and not if - the internet has become so fundamental to the success of a business that not to have a website is not really an option! It's at this point that Maddison Creative Web Design Newcastle get involved and provide support with industry expertise, over a decade of launching websites, and an in-depth knowledge of what can be achieved, what works and what doesn't, best-practice, what you will require to acheive your goals, timescales and costings.

Once that's all been agreed, the next step is generally for us to come up with a site structure and a visual (usually flat without any functionality) to give you a feel of how the website will look. Once these two have been agreed and signed off, then we set to work combining the two, and hey-presto! You have yourself a website.

From a logistical perspective, to build, launch and maintain a website, you need a domain, ie www.something.com, space on a server which can be provided by a hosting company , you need your website files, and you need a program to allow you/us to transfer your files onto the server. and you need the files you create. Once they're up there then your site is live for ayone to enjoy.

We can take care of all of this - it's what we do. We've built relationships with some of the best hosting companies to get your the best deals of hosing and domains. We use cutting edge FTP software to transfer your files quickly and securely. All this is included in any of the packages you can get from Maddison Creative Web Design Newcastl, so you needn't worry about it.

If you already have hosting or a domain and you'd prefer to keep it, then it's not a problem - we can work with what's there, transferring over anything we need and talking to providers to ensure that everything we need for your site to work beautifully is there.

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and how is it affected by web design?

SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation is something that affects your website from start to finish. Every element in the construction and design of your site can have an impact on SEO, which is effectively another way of describing best-practice for websites, only the best practice guidelines were written by Search Engines, such as Google and Bing, in order to ensure only relevant websites of sufficient quality are returned when someone does a search. This ensures that only websites that have adhered to accessiblity and useability standards get the search engine performance they so keenly seek, and that those who don't won't be found, encouraging them to adopt best-practice in the process.

SEO incorporates your site's content, how it is written, whether it is written well and whether or not it relates to the search the user has just performed. It also encompasses your design and your coding, looking out for whether or not everything is tagged properly and coded in such a way that browsers can clearly determine how to render everything, and that users with special needs such as visual impairments are also having their needs met.

One downside of the need for SEO is that content written specifically to perform well for SEO isn't necessarily the easiest to read from a human perspective. This is because the more prevalent a keyword or keywords are, the more significance a search engine places on that term, which can result in copy bing little more than a long list of keywords.

A good web designer/developer will do this as they are building your site, but there is always scope for improvement and refinement, especially as technology develops and guidelines and best-practice recommendations shift with that progression.

Can you update and develop my existing website, built by someone else?

Yes, not only can we build you a website from scratch, but we can also work with what you already have to increase performance, update any branding you might have, or bring the technology up to speed. Essentially we can give it a new lease of life!

Flat websites vs CMS - what's the difference?

There are two main categories of website: the flat/HTML brochure style website and the CMS (Content Management System) website. The main difference is that the website owner cannot update the flat/HTML website without web design/development knowledge. They are intended to be built and managed by the web designer/developer, and whenever the site owner requires an update to the site, they would go back to their designer/developer who will be able to make the update for them. This works well for sites that don't require many updates, as they are more cost effective for the site owner, taking less time to set up and build than their CMS counterpart. Flat/HTML websites also traditionally have limited functionality.

A CMS website is built on the back of a content management system (Wordpress for example) and is generally connected to a data source; A database for example (other data-sources are available!). They are also built using more complex programming language; php or ASP.NET for example (along with HTML in many cases) to allow for a greater scope for functionality, enabling the user to interact with the site in much more depth. The main benefit of a CMS website however is that they can be updated and managed by the website owner without any prior knowledge or experience in website technologies. Because they are more complex however, they will cost more than a flat/HTML site, but this is balanced out by virtue of the fact that the site owner does not have to pay a web designer/developer to make updates.

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