Our website design

Regarding our website design we follow a simple but effective ten step processes to ensure the highest quality of service for website design:

1. No 3rd party applications
When it comes to web design, almost all companies will use software such as dreamweaver, frontpage and other available applications in the creation process of your website. These applications add unnecessary code and automatically insert program code for the designer. Our websites are programmed from scratch, what does this mean? It means when beginning to create a website we literally start with a blank page and begin to add code. Anybody can create a basic website using other software, not everybody can create a webpage using program code... this is what we do. To use an example from the motor world it's the equivalent of purchasing a hand built Aston Martin Sports car as opposed to a factory produced Skoda, but without paying the extra price.


2. Avoid pre-built web systems
Almost all website design companies will install software they've not even made when creating your website, and then charge you large amounts of money for the site. We believe in building our own sites and avoiding pre built systems. It could be said that the majority of other web design companies are resellers; they lead you to believe that they are creating a site for you when really they are installing and slightly tweaking a free system. They have not actually created any of the program code themselves. Almost all web design companies do this, we do believe that there are times when this can be the best option, but we prefer to avoid strategies such as this and prefer to create a website for you that is totally tailored towards your needs, and has been programmed by ourselves. Take www.elite-numbers.com as an example. As this is a shop based system other website designers would have installed a downloadable free shop, then tweaked it leading you to believe that they have created the shop, and then charged thousands of pounds for this. We don't believe this is ethical and the Elite Numbers site was coded completely by ourselves, every aspect of the functional site (the cart, admin system, etc) was created completely from scratch, starting with a blank page. This means that the website is completely tailored to the needs of the owner, does not contain any unnecessary program code, and is of the highest quality.


3. Use relevant web technologies
The web is ever changing and many technologies/methods are becoming extinct. One example of this is using Tables in websites, a table-less design is now the preferred option. The W3C (the consortium who set out website guidelines) state: "In 2002, W3C designed a new layout for its home page using CSS techniques instead of the less usable table-based layout. While most of the modern standard-compliant browsers will parse and understand correctly this layout, the W3C Communication Team has done its best to give to older or less featured browsers a good experience by using the adaptability and scalability of CSS." We always follow these standards. A sign of a quality website is XHTML compliance, if you check our website using the following link you will see that our site is fully XHTML valid:


http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.targetict.com%2F


In implementing a table-less design, our websites are programmed to load as quickly as possible, avoid old technologies, use as little code as possible and separate functionality from design. Our websites are therefore free from clutter.


4. Optimise code for search engines
This is related to point 3. Search engines will favour a website that follows W3C standards, is not cluttered with unnecessary code, loads as quickly as possible (can be crawled faster), and contains certain data that guides the search engine through your website. We can optimise your code to ensure it is suitable for search engines.


5. Split design and code
Even before our code has been created we believe in separating graphic design from code as these are two specialist areas. It's all too easy for someone who can code a website to decide that they can also create the design of the site, or a designer to think that they can code a basic site. However we believe that this should be avoided. Before your site is created you will be presented with a template from a professional graphic designer which once you are happy with will then be converted into a working website by a coder.


6. Keep the price low and respectable
A low price does not always mean low quality. In our case this is quite the opposite, as mentioned earlier our sites are totally hand built and coded from scratch. Therefore the cost should be much higher than other companies who use code that they've not even created. Even though our sites take many more hours to build, we still charge a lower price than those who borrow code. Theoretically we should charge a lot more for our sites because many more hours go into their creation. We could save time and use pre built code but we prefer to offer quality, and be ethical whilst also keeping the costs of our computer services low.


7. User friendly
The internet contains all different levels of user, you cannot guarantee that the person browsing your website knows how to use the web at an advanced level. Therefore we try to keep our website design as user friendly as possible, keeping a professional feel, with a function that can be easily navigated by all types of user. With sites such as facebook & mysapce it is true that users are becoming much more adept when it comes to interacting with websites and website browsing. It would therefore be easy to create a website that may only target these users. We believe that all users must be accommodated for, but at the same time often embrace technologies used on the sites previously mentioned.


8. Compatibility
Internet explorer may be the most common, but it is not the only browser software that people use. More and more people are starting to use browsers such as FireFox and Safari. All browsers are different, you may find that your site appears correctly when viewed with Internet Explorer 6 but when opened in FireFox or even Internet Explorer 7 the layout is totally different and not what it should be. Our sites are programmed to be compatible with all browsers; we believe this is a very important aspect of website design.


9. Interactivity
Interactivity is a big factor in drawing users to your site. You only need to look at the popularity of interactive websites such as facebook and youtube. Alexa.com states that facebook is the 3rd most popular site within the UK, youtube being 6th. Interactivity is therefore a very attractive feature within a website. This does not need to be on the same scale as websites such as facebook, but there are certain interactive features that you can add to your site - such as a Blog. This would display your latest news and allow users to subscribe to your news updates via an RSS feed. Users would therefore be kept up to date with your latest information and in some cases could even respond and interact via a comments form.


10. Your Feedback
Throughout the design of your website we constantly require your feedback. We want to present your ideas in a web format and create a website that you are totally happy with. Your feedback is very important to us, not only during the design stage but when the website is live. Through your feedback and ideas we can constantly develop and improve our service.

Prices

Every site is individual, therefore prices vary for each client. Below is a price guide:

Up to 3 pages: £300 - £500
Up to 5 pages: £500 - £800
Up to 10 pages £800 - £1200
E-Commerce Systems: £800 - £2500
Content Management Systems: £800 - £2000
Bespoke solutions: £2000+

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