How our website designer will build your website

Designing your website could not be easier and our website builders will build the website for you. Your website will be built before your very eyes all from the comfort of your own home or office. Our website building service has it's own unique sample website where the basic frame work of your website will be built before your very eyes. Every customer will be taken to this site and given the chance to specify their basic website requirements.

If you don't believe us then take a look at our samlpe website, use this link. This website allows us to start to build your bespoke website before you even have your free domain name, no other website design company offers this service.

Please read this more in depth pdf on how we will build your website and what is expected of you during the build. How it works pdf

Building the Site

Site Content

Although we know an awful lot about websites we may not know a lot about the subject that your site will be on and that is where you come in. You will be expected to email over the sites content page by page in a word or notepad document, just the text for the page.

Any pictures or photos you would like displayed on your website should also be sent over again via email as attachments and some explanation on where and how you would like the pictures displayed should be put in the text part of the email.

We then build the pages using the content you have sent over and you can choose such things as the font type, font colour, background colours etc all of which you will be able to choose from viewing pages that we supply with samples on.

We build the pages and the displayed area and supply you with a link to the site from which you monitor our progress. We build a rough webpage which will roughly match your requirements and when we have finished this rough build we will then perform what we call a snagging process; in which you tell us your required adjustments page by page. We perform snagging just before we prepare the site for indexing and not as we go along, this way we avoid having to perform constant adjustments but ultimately obtain the site you require. So please just send the page contents in the first instance and try to ignore the site whilst it is being built, we will adjust it to your requirements once all the pages have their content on them.

Text content

For normal text MS Word is the easiest method of writing your text and sending it to us as an email attachment, we will then turn the text in to your webpage content and build the webpage. Please remember to perform a spell check on the document using UK English spell checker and not the standard USA spell checker.

When sending the page content you are asked to send the documents one per email and with the page that the contents relate to clearly marked in the email subject line - this helps us sort and access your material much faster and thus your sites build time will be vastly reduced. We are sent hundreds of emails every week so the easier you make it for us to find and process your required content the quicker we can build your site.

Some times you may need to send us some HTML or similar code for us to use - say a payment button or affiliate link if you need to do this then we recommend that this type of text is sent in a notepad document. The reason for this is that Word text and HTML text are not exactly the same and this can throw out any intended HTML code you wish to send. The nearest thing that most computer owners have to html is the text used by notepad. The words used for text in a MS word document will have little effect on the page as they contain no instructions for the browser and therefore normal page text is acceptable in word format.

When writing your webpage please been mindful that we will build what are called Meta tags on such things as keywords and content all of which are used by the search engines to rank your pages in the search results. If your main page content is very weak then you will be very lowly ranked by the search engines.

Arguably the most important page of any site is its "home" or what is known as its index page, every site must have an index page. This page should be well written and with links to other pages of information on the site both in the navigation menu and within the body text of the page. Search engine robots (often referred to as "spiders" because they crawl the WWW looking for sites to index etc.) love links the more they find the happier they tend to be - but a word of caution, they only like what they perceive as relevant links of use to the user or searcher. Load your site with links to sites whose content are not related to your sites content then they will mark you down.

We will read all your sites text content and analyse it for keyword richness and its usefulness regarding search ranking. We could if we wanted choose the easy life and just blindly add it to your site, take your money and run. However we have a policy of advising you that your sites content may be to weak and that your ranking will be harmed and may well ask you to consider re-writing a pages content - we do this to attempt to help you so please be open minded should we request that you re-think a page's content. You can still choose not to change the page contents we only advise you; we do not force you.

So many sites lie at the bottom of the searches with very little or no hope of ever climbing to the top of the searches, these sites were doomed from the moment they were written, this is good for you as one of our customers as they are easy to outrank. Sites with great content but with flashy intros or slow downloading sites will rank lower - don't believe us then try a few searches on any subject and see just how many sites you find in the top ten of the searches have long flashy intro pages of take ages to open.

If you find any then they may be great to look at sites but searchers are often just looking for information or something to buy and will not wait for loads of slow opening sites to open and just move on. These sites have in short been built and designed to meet their owner's ego and not with the customer or internet user in mind.

What we recommend you do is think about what a user might enter in to the search bar if they were looking for sites on your subject and try and compile content that matches those possible searches, the more the sites content matches the search requirements the higher up the ranking you will go.

For example;

If you are a Plumber looking to increase trade with a website then you will be tempted to place lots of useless information on your home page with very little keyword relevance.

You, like so many might be tempted to place on your home page the following and little more!

"Hi, I'm Pete and am a plumber in the Bristol area. I offer a 24 hour call out services and have been trading for the last 20 years with very reasonable rates."

Take a look at that statement, keywords "plumber" and "Bristol area" are the main ones and they are supported by very little else on plumbing, the spiders will correctly assume that the site is of very little help to the searcher and rank it very low.

Now if you were to enter the following text on your main page your ranking will be higher.

"Looking for Plumbers in the Bristol area. Pete your local plumber covering Bristol and the surrounding areas with over 20 years experience in the plumbing trade. We cover all aspect of plumbing from central heating, Gas installations with our corgi registered plumbers, bathrooms, shower rooms, wet rooms, en-suite are our speciality. We also carry out lead work, drainage and all kinds of plumbing work all undertaken by our fully qualified plumbers.

Please see our help guides (then list a few links to guides that you can write on plumbing)

(Use a slogan)

Pete the local plumber for all your local plumbing needs in the Bristol area"

The more keywords the better the richness of the site and the higher the search ranking and if you include links in the text to say a whole page on central heating etc then the spiders will rank you higher.

In just that short peace of text you will see that the word "plumbers" is mentioned 3 times, "plumbing" 4 times and "Plumber" twice and Bristol 3 times and Bristol area 2.

Both sites are on the same subject it is just that one will be seen as of more use to the searcher and therefore placed higher in the rankings.

Avoid what is called "keyword Spamming" which is using other well know sites names or brands in an attempt to enhance your sites position in the rankings. For example "eBay" is the 8th highest ranked site in the world and a lot of webmasters try to cash in on its popularity in the rankings buy including referrals to it in their own sites content. This will harm them in the long run and may lead to their site being removed from the index. Most major search engines encourage other webmasters to report any "keyword spamming" to them and then they act.

Sending us images

We welcome images to be used on your site and will display them for you, but there are a few simple rules that you should adhere to.

You must own the photos or images you wish to display on your site, you can purchase stock photo's or even obtain free copies with license restrictions which may amongst other things require you to place a credit or link to the site that you have obtained the image from on your site - you must advise if that is the case and we can then take the action needed to comply with the licence conditions regarding that images use.

If you took the photo you are deemed to own it.

Images and photos should be in .jpg or .gif format and be of the highest quality available

The images should be named as a single word and all in low case.

The images should be sent as an email attachment and the email should contain such information as on which page the image should be displayed and with which text if any.

Images can be used for many things such as backgrounds or banners they can be turned into links or thumbnail galleries, slide shows etc. all of which are happy to do for you

The sites Banner

Most websites have banner or headers on each page which normally consist of a picture or photo with some text written on it. You are quite welcome to design this banner yourself and send it over to us. If you choose to do this please email us first to obtain the dimensions required.

When designing a banner you are advised that text embedded on to a photo is not read by the spiders and therefore do not count towards the sites content or ranking. To include to much text in a banner may harm your ranking as this would need to be repeated again on the page itself to be attributed to the sites content and it could look strange to the searcher if they suddenly see repeated information on the page. In short keep the banner contents simple and to the point; say just the business name or sites name and very little else.

We are quite happy to design a banner for you but you will be expected to supply the photo or image you wish to form the background of the banner.

The design and build

As mentioned before our first job will be to build a rough site using the content and design requests you send us page by page.

Please take a look at the wonderful-websites page effects page to see some of the features we can build for you, fonts and background and font colours can also be viewed using links from that page.

Once this rough template is built and he site is almost ready for indexing then we will go through the site with you page by page making any adjustments you require and once this is done we then prepare the site for indexing. You will be sent a link to the site which will allow you to watch you site being built.

You must click the refresh button every time you visit the site during the site building process otherwise you will just see the catch of the site without any changes.

Your site will start life just like a proper building site - a jumbled mess; as we position things and play with the layout please do not bombard us with emails requesting changes as we build. Please be patient and wait until the snagging stage.

Your finished site may well be very different from the site we start with!

Contact forms and other items

The easiest form of contact form is the mailto link which just involves us placing a email link on your contact page which would then allow your potential customer to easily contact you by just clicking on the link then their own email system will open for them with your email address preloaded for them. They can then just type away and send you an email.

This simple system has its good points and some bad points.

Good points include;
* Simple to set up.
* Easy to use.
* Easily changed or updated with new addresses etc.
* No complicated forms to fill in.
* No restriction on the size of the email sent.
* Attachments can be sent.

The bad points are as follows;
* Much higher risk of being spammed.
* No control of the information being sent to you.
* Takes the customer away from your site.
* Looks less professional.

We recommend that you use a contact or survey form on your contact us page and that you keep the required fields down to a minimum thus encouraging the customer to actually use the form. Asking for loads of personal information will put a lot of customers off using the form.

You really only need their names and email addresses and the nature of their inquiry which in certain circumstance can be obtained using radio buttons or check box's and or a text box for them to fill in.

A contact or survey form needs what is called a processor which handles the contents of the form in the first instance and then sends the contents of the completed form on to your email address. Basically the customer fills in the form and clicks send, then information is then sent to the processor which carries out a quick process checking the form details for its instructions and then sends the contents to you in the form of an email.

Auto responders can be set up on the form to send an automatic response to the customer which more often than not contain a brief acknowledgement of the inquiry and your expect response time.

We use to be able to provide our customers with a free processing service but alas even this service now carries a small set up fee (charged by the form processing service not us) currently the set up fee is £6 and that should cover all future form processing for you though it should be pointed out that the form processing company "reserves the right to charge for its services in the future", this cost if employed will have to be passed on to you - but at the moment £6 is a one off fee and paid for out of your monthly subscription.