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Creative digital design for the web

What technologies do you use to design websites?

For functionality, we use php, an open-source, commonly used scripting language that is particularly well suited to web development and that can be inserted into HTML. For Content Managed Websites we use Wordpress, an open source, online website creation tool built in php. We use HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript to develop front-end website interaction, functionality and animation. We use SQL and MYSQL wherever we need a database, and from a design perspective we use the Adobe Creative suite to create for the web.

What about good web design and Search Engine Optimization?

Search engine optimization, or SEO is the process whereby you make your site as finely tuned as possible in order to ensure that Search Engines such as Google and Bing consider your website worthy enough to show ahead of all the competition.

This involves writing the content in such a way that it relates to the words (keywords) your potential customers will be searching to find whatever it is you're doing/selling/saying. It also entails making sure that all the key elements of what makes up a good website are there and put together properly. Titles, images, framework of your site, links - they all have to be right.

This also includes things you can't see - the invisible tags that sit behind your webpage, but that do an important job nonetheless. A good web designer will do all of this as a matter of course, but there's always room for improvement, especially as time marches on, and best-practice and guidelines change and what used to be the done thing is now frowned upon.

Is it possible to work remotely with Maddison Creative web design Newcastle?

So you're based in Manchester - wouldn't it be better to recruit a Manchester based web designer to build your new website rather than Maddison Creative web design Newcastle?

Because of the nature of the web, of web design and the technologies we have at our disposal nowadays there really is no necessity to physically restrict yourself to people and businesses that happen to be based around you any longer. You can choose a company based anywhere in the world and it won't be any more difficult to work with them than it would be the company next door.

150 years ago in the California gold rush, people flocked to the rivers of the Sierra Nevada in order to make their fortunes. So many people relocated in fact that it was said that it wasn't the gold prospectors who made fortunes, it was the hoteliers, and the bars and the stores selling picks and shovels and bedding that cleaned up, because of the massive influx of people. Nowadays, the 'gold rush' would more than likely be a digital one (think of the dot com bubble in the early 2000s), and those hoteliers and traders would go without because the 'prospectors' would search for 'gold' from the comfort of their own homes and offices.

If we were building a website for someone it's not uncommon to have a teleconference over the internet in the morning with three people hundreds or even thousands of miles apart, once we're all happy, we all switch off and get to work at our desks, by the end of the day some progress has been made, we jump on to a product design program like InVision where we can share screens and attach comments to a visual, we'll continue to instant message each other via Skype, have another Webex call over the net the following morning, the website will then be built, sanity checked by sharing it around our closed group on Slack, user tested via What Users Do and launched and despite being in constant contact throughout the entire process, the first time any of us meet is at the launch party!

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