Our Website Development Principles

1. Layouts are kept simple and navigation is consistent on all pages.
2. We create well designed sites with intuitive graphics using simple techniques such as HTML 5 & CSS 3. Documents are well structured.
3. We use full URL’s on links including the domain name (eg. yourdomain.com/contact-us).
4. To reduce the bounce rate (the percentage of visitors who enter the site and leave before viewing other pages) keep the page simple and put less content in sidebars (left and right content modules, eg. related articles, latest comments…) to avoid driving people away.
5. We use internal links (a link that points to another page on the same website) to important pages (eg. contact page, faq page) to encourage users to stay on the site and read more.
6. Breadcrumbs allow your users to easily navigate around your site and search engines to determine your site’s structure (breadcrumbs are a navigation aid which allows users to keep track of their location, eg. “Home > About > Team”).
7. Headings are defined with <h1> to <h6> tags where <h1> defines the most important heading and <h6> defines the least important heading. The site should have only an <h1> for the site name on one page and should have at least one <h2> and one <h3>. Search engines use your headings to index the structure and content of your web pages.
8. All javascript and CSS (stylesheet) files should be in external files (this will help to easily apply design changes on all pages and also help to load pages faster) to keep the site templates clean and organized.
9. To increase your site speed we implement caching. Most of the websites we build use a CMS or Content Management system. These rely on a database back-end to store your website content. Caching helps the browser to save a copy of images, stylesheets, javascript or the entire page so that the next time the user visits that page the browser doesn’t have to download it all over again).
10. We avoid building sites with Flash (not compatible with ‘Apple’ devices and some ‘Android’ devices) or html frames.

A Pre-launch Checklist

1. Prior to launching your site we will work with you through the following pre-launch action plan.
2. Assist with choosing a good domain name in the first place (using keywords).
3. Use your Google account or create a new one to set up a Google Analytics profile and a Google Webmaster Tools account. We will upload a verification file to the server and place the analytics ‘code’ into the template to enable Google Analytics for you.
4. We will create a Sitemap and send it to Google using Webmaster Tools (a sitemap is a list of the pages of your web site accessible to crawlers or users and is typically organized in a hierarchical fashion).
5. We can also create a Bing Webmaster Tools (Microsoft Search) account (optional) and send the sitemap to Bing Webmaster Tools.
6. We add information (provided by the client) to enhance SEO to each page as follows: the page title, meta description and keywords, page URL (this is optional, usually based on the page title).