Web Design

Your website is increasingly the window, and the door, into your business. It's not a one-off project but an ongoing part of your business sales, marketing and operations. This means you need a website that's easy to manage and update, flexible enough to change as your business needs change, and will scale up as your website grows. To achieve this, we build all of our websites using Joomla and Wordpress, two of the most widely supported open system platforms in the world. These minimise expensive the custom programming that can lock you in and make your website difficult to maintain.

You'll appreciate this approach if, like a lot of companies, your experience with the internet has been with 'first generation' websites — sites that typically offer limited features, are inflexible to change, and require expensive web designers to make even small adjustments to the content.  They often end up languishing with out-of-date content and become missed opportunities.

But we think the least you should expect today – even if you start out with just a handful of pages – is a site that is:

• future-proof – it should scale and adapt as your online business needs grow. And you shouldn't have to anticipate everything at the start. The system should be adaptable enough to change as you see new opportunities.
• based on widely supported open systems standards – no lock-in to dead-end technology, no expensive reinventing of the wheel
• supported by an extensive library of third party add-ons and extensions to do most of the things you might want to do now or in the future. This means you maximise the use of off-the-shelf packages to avoid expensive custom programming. While it's not always avoidable, custom developments rapidly become an expensive black hole to pour money down and almost always become support problems later on.
• lets you do updates to the site if you want to – it should be as easy to use as a word processor

We build all of our websites using widely supported open system platforms, maximising the use of standard components and eliminating or minimising custom programming. See some examples of our work.

The Internet has seen some significant developments in recent years, particularly in the field of so-called open source software. One of the benefits of this is that even modest websites can now be built on foundations that allow them to go well beyond the old, first generation "brochureware" sites.

At the heart of all of our websites is a powerful content management system (CMS), a program that manages all aspects of the website from its configuration to the creation, management and display of its content. At Digital Strategies, we recommend Joomla and Wordpress, two of the world's mostly widely-used, and easy-to-use, Content Management Systems.

Examples of the features you can expect with all of our sites, all delivered at very competitive rates:

• Stories can be added and edited by you. Anyone on your team who can use Microsoft Word or similar can do it, and each story is in a separate HTML page for better readability, linking and search engine access.

• Search engine friendly with each page optimized to ensure best search engine rankings

• Statistics profiling your visitors, how they found your site, what they looked at, where they went after leaving your site

• An unlimited number of pages with text and images can be added by your own team

• Polls and simple online surveys

Our future-proofing means, immediately or when you’re ready, you can easily extend your site. Some of the things you can do:

• Email marketing

• Product catalogues

• Shopping cart

• Photo / portfolio gallery

• Company blog

• Private areas for registered users, such as key customers, staff, sales reps, etc, with special content not available to the general public

• much more