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:

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:

Hope will design your website using Web Standards as defined by the W3C guidelines.

Online Store

shopping cart 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:

In other words, Google ranking can be influenced by:

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.

^ top of page