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Our website design services

The internet is a great leveller

In our opinion, the above statement, never has a truer word been written. Your website is your shop window, and it’s up to you to choose whether you want be budget or luxury

Think of your ‘digital strategy’ as your ‘sales strategy’. The days of digital playing second fiddle to your offline activities are long gone.

At the start of all our web projects, we make sure we understand the goal of your site. This includes the role it plays in your sales pipeline, and how your online and offline channels integrate with it.

We take the time to understand your audience, competitors, your USP, and what will keep you at the forefront of your sector.

And then we craft the most usable and beautiful site for your customers.

“Don’t make me think”

User experience, or UX (as it is commonly known), can seem like a jungle of jargon. A language only developers in dark offices, powered by sticky energy drinks know.

The reality is, it’s all about creating a straightforward product that is simple to use, and understands its intended users.

It should feel as though it has been crafted specifically for them.

The bible of many web developers and designers alike, is Steve Krug’s 2000 book, “Don’t make me think”. And it’s still as true today as it was decades ago.

UX is the art of making interactive elements obvious, clear, and intuitive. All this while still looking drop dead gorgeous.

The DPC process revolves around the key phase of prototyping. This allows us to test, change, and test again until we know we have the right solution for your customers.

Example of a wireframe

Is it the end of the high street?

The last few years haven’t been kind to bricks and mortar retailers. Take Primark for example. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, they reported monthly sales to be around £650 million. But following forced closures in lockdown, they made nothing. Zilch. Zero. Why? They have no online store.

As the footfall on the high street has taken a plunge for many reasons, online stores have never done better.

Online giants like Amazon and eBay have become household names. There is no excuse for any wholesaler or retailer not to have an effective eCommerce site of their own.

The eCommerce team at DPC have technical solutions to fit all requirements, capabilities and budgets. From entry level to multi-lingual, multi-store marketplaces. As well as options to utilise hosted solutions as well as self-hosted sites. We love systems like NopCommerce and Magento, however we are also big fans of entry level systems like Shopify.

We use the same eagle eyed processes for all our web design builds, including ecommerce sites.

Check out our opinion and views on NopCommerce

Building on a quality framework

Google loves fresh, current content. Keep your website up to date, and the rewards will be seen in the search engines.

Many businesses will blame janky CMS platforms for their outdated websites. Perhaps they’re hard to use, perhaps they aren’t sophisticated enough. But there’s no excuse anymore. There are so many awesome CMS systems on the market. Some are open-source, others have annual licencing. Each with their own specialities.

We ensure that all the platforms that we choose come with as much flexibility as you need. That way, the task of keeping your website up to date is a breeze. And zero technical ability is required!

The UP for Digital development team are proud to recommend the following technical platforms:

Umbraco is our CMS of choice
WordPress is our preferred entry-level CMS
NopCommerce is our enterprise-level eCommerce platform
Shopify is our preferred entry-level eCommerce platform

Other platforms that we use regularly are: Magento, October CMS (laravel), Ionic.

Example of CMS system Umbraco

Getting you noticed, organically

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is so much more than getting to the top of Google. While that is the goal, those pesky algorithms you’ll have heard about can get in the way.

Having a technically sound website with a clear offering is how Google knows you’re legit. Afterall, their goal is to deliver the best, most relevant, and honest sites for their users. And who can blame them?

SEO is split into two areas:

‘On-site’ which makes sure everything from content to technical build is ticking all the boxes for Google.
‘Off-site’ is the external activities affect your rankings. In short, it tells Google what other sites think of yours and the content on it.

SEO needs monthly, ongoing management to build your profile, and to make sure you’re doing everything that Google thinks you should be doing! It’s more of a slow burner, but undeniably worth the effort required.

Our process

It’s important to have a process that can adapt accordingly

All digital marketing agencies worth their salt should be able to articulate a process like ours. It is the basis for all good web projects. However, the way we tackle a couple of the stages are really rather special and is what sets UP for Digital apart from our peers.

Discovery – Brief, audit & strategy

As with any project (e.g. building a house), the planning and early stages are the most important. We should not even be considering design or technical development until we have completed our discovery and definition phase of the project. It is like the architect’s plans for a house. Get the plans right at the start and the rest of the build flows smoothly and to budget.

Included at this stage are requirement gathering, user research, personas, sitemap, user journeys and interactive wireframes.

Discovery – Prototyping and user testing

Now it’s time to map out user journeys and test our ideas with interactive prototypes. This is where the UP team process excels!

We use Axure software to create an interactive prototype for all key pages and functionality. This allows us to test our ideas and concepts with your users. This forms the basis for the specification for the website.

Design

Then the second key phase, the style tile…This is a visual guide showing all colours, fonts, textures, typography, buttons and styles that will for your website’s design.

Using the IA as a blueprint and the style tile as a design guide, our designers will begin the creative process of producing a visual representation of your site. We then test designs and functionality to ensure that the user experience is as effective as it can be.

Development & testing

Developing your site and integrating the front end HTML, CSS and JavaScript into the CMS platform (back–end). A responsive framework is always used, we recommend Bootstrap to ensure the site looks perfect on every device, no matter what the resolution or size.

We carry out rigorous QAT (Quality Assurance Testing) and when we are happy, hand over the reigns to you.

Next, we populate your website via the CMS, and make sure it’s integrated into Google’s suite of tools. This ensures all ‘on–site’ SEO elements have been set up

Launch, optimisation and online marketing

Once the website is approved for launch, we manage all the 301 redirects from your legacy site. This means you won’t lose any of your previous organic Google rankings.

Then it’s finally time to optimise your site for conversions! We help set your strategy so that quality traffic is driven to your new site, ready to get those leads rolling in. We do this through multi-channel campaigns, featuring SEO, PPC, social media and content.

Evaluate

We recommend adding an analytics tool like Hotjar to use alongside Google analytics to measure against the objectives and use them to refine the site experience to further improve the user experience. We then review the site 6 months after launch and we will provide a report of our findings and any recommendations.