Website Design & Development
Advice on Domain Names and ISPs
Hope can provide advice on appropriate domain name(s) for your needs, and the purchasing and managing of your domain name(s). Hope can also advise on choosing an ISP for hosting your domain name(s) and website that will best fit your needs.
User-Friendly Design & Navigation
Having a user-friendly website is equivalent to having courteous and knowledgeable staff greeting and helping your customers. Hope designs user-friendly websites enabling your visitors to:
- Tell at a glance what information is available and how to navigate to it,
- Easily navigate from one section to another with a minimum number of clicks, and
- Always know where they are within your site.
Webpages Created using Web Standards
The Web depends on everyone sharing the same conventions for HTML pages. Despite this, many websites on the internet do not use Web Standards, contain invalid code, and do not work across different browsers and platforms. Many web designers are not even aware of Web Standards.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the international body that sets the evolving standards for the web. The W3C website explains the many benefits of using Web Standards which in summary include:
- interoperability—content can be viewed on all devices from computers to mobile phones and hand-held devices
- accessibility—content is more accessible not only across different browsers and platforms but also for those using assistive devices such as screen readers
- search-engine friendly
- greater forward compatibility
- greater backwards compatibility
- easier (and therefore cheaper) to maintain and update
Hope will design your website using Web Standards as defined by the W3C guidelines.
Online Store
Whether you have just one product or hundreds, Hope can set up a secure online store for your
business.
Search Engine Optimisation
Searching is one of the most used functions on the web. Google uses many factors in determining ranking based on the searched keywords:
- The frequency of and importance given to the keywords in a webpage,
- Links using those keywords that link from other websites,
- Click-throughs from other Google users who have searched for the same or similar keywords.
In other words, Google ranking can be influenced by:
- The developer & owner of the website through the content that appears in the site and way it is semantically constructed,
- Other websites giving it significance by linking to it, and
- The general googling population "voting" for the site by clicking-through from Google's search results.
Hope understands how to make your site search-engine friendly. When your website is ready, Hope will submit your website to search engines for indexing (where no fee is required). To help your search engine ranking, Hope will code your webpages using your keywords in the semantically-correct search-engine-significant html tags such as for page titles, headers and alternative text for images.
In addition, it is also important that the keywords your customers and potential customers are mostly likely to use in a search engine appear in your main text content, particularly near the top.
Understanding the medium of the web—which is very different from the print medium—helps make a website more user and search-engine friendly. See usability expert Jakob Nielsen's Writing for the Web for a very useful resource for understanding how people read webpages and how best to write for the web.
Spam Prevention
Spam is a serious annoyance and waste of your valuable time. Hope will encrypt all email addresses listed on your website to hide them from spambots that havest email addresses to bombard with spam.
Enabling Clients to Self-Edit their Website
Webpages can be developed using a Content Management System (CMS) which will enable you to edit the text in your webpages without worrying about accidentally altering the layout of the pages. If you know the basics of how to use a web browser (such as Internet Explorer) and a word processor (such as Microsoft Word), you will quickly learn how to use a CMS.