The filling in the sandwich really does affect how it tastes
What do you plan to say?
We are happy to help you polish your copy so that it has the best impact on the page. If necessary, we can write it for you to meet your requirements. Decades of experience really do make a difference here!
Yes, a pretty-looking website is nice, but visitors usually want information, so the words and pictures really do matter.
Workflow
How your website is updated isn't just a matter of the technology used. Someone has to decide what to put on. Someone has to write it. Someone has to type it. Someone has to edit it and remove any mistakes. Someone has to approve it for publication.
These functions may all be combined into one person's task, or shared between different people. The way it is organised will vary, and it may be as simple as remembering to do all the steps, or it may use some sort of software system to manage the changes.
How will it be updated?
The content of your web pages may not need to change very often, if at all. Many brochure websites need little or no updates from one year to the next. Some websites are updated on a very regular basis. It all depends, which is why we don't impose a ‘one size fits all’ approach.
Basically, there are two approaches to getting the content into the pages. You can have static content, or a content management system.
Static Content
Each web page is really just a simple text file with some special ‘punctuation’ that web browers recognise. Many web sites (including this one) are just static content. They are easy to maintain, very fast loading, secure and search-engine-friendly. To change the pages, you amend them on your computer, check that they are right, then put them onto the web server.
To maintain static pages you do need to have a grasp of the HTML ‘punctuation’ to edit the pages. There are programs that claim to be able to do it for you, but we've yet to find one worth using. If we maintain pages for you, we are most likely to use the static page approach.
Content Management System
This is where you use a web browser to go to an Admin page to edit the content of your website. Most web design and development companies promote content management systems. There are clear advantages for them to do this. It means that to create your website, they only have to create the shell of the site, leaving you to do all the tricky business of putting in the content, making it look good on the page and making it understandable and clear.
We are more focussed on what suits you than on what suits us.
Setting up a content management system (CMS) to maintain your site can be as much work (therefore as much cost) as putting the content on for you.
If you plan to make frequent and significant changes to the content of your site, we suggest a CMS, though you would have to learn how to use that and decide how you will copy edit and proof read your content. If we're doing the updates for you, that's part of our task.
For ecommerce sites where product stock levels and prices change, there is little alternative to content managed pages, but some online stores with a stable product range use static pages.
Or something in between
We have developed some sites that are part content-managed and part static content. This gives the speed and efficiency of flat file static pages with the ability to quickly update some parts of the site on a regular basis. We're happy to provide what works best for you.