Website design & web strategy

PageTypes is not just a software developer providing a content management platform, but also a consulting company and a network of partners who build websites and web strategies that work. The PageTypes team are different to most web design companies because we are, first and foremost, a business solutions provider that understands the power of the Internet and the importance of design, rather than a design or Internet development company approaching the business issues from the other direction.

In today's business environment, every company needs a web presence as one of their routes to their target audience. The approach, ingredients and budget required will vary considerably from business to business, and so we start by understanding your company, and then tailor and recommend a web strategy to suit. You probably have in mind that you want your website to:

◦Provide information for existing customers
◦Provide information for prospective customers
◦Have an e-commerce environment to sell your products and services
◦Drive traffic from your target audience to the website.

This last one is vitally important. It's why one of the key ingredients of our approach is to demystify the whole topic of Search Engine Optimisation, so that you understand how we can work together to:

Make your site useful, and tell people about it!

BUSINESS FIRST

The first thing we will do is make sure that we have a clear definition of your company, both in terms mission, strategy and the way you want to present yourself in the market place. The web strategy we devise will be built around your answers to these questions:

◦What are your business goals?
◦How can a website help you reach those business goals?
◦Who is your audience?
◦What are they looking for in the website?
◦Who's going to write the content?
◦How will the site be kept up to date?
◦How do we drive more traffic to the site?
◦How do we get people to take action once they've visited the site?
◦How will we know if the site has been successful?

FIRST IMPRESSIONS - IN THE BLINK OF AN EYE!

This research paper on Nature.com tells us that users can make up their mind about a site in less than 50 milliseconds - the blink of an eye! First impressions are absolutely vital, so the page of your site we'll spend the most time on is your home page. We'll create a design brief to make sure the style and content fits the bill, and then our experienced designers will make sure it's striking and easy for your audience to find their way around and get the answers they need. However, we will also focus our design towards getting them to take action in the way that you need them to do before they leave the site.

CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

Every website should be built on a Content Management System, and here is a good explanation of why. You need a CMS so that you and your colleagues can maintain the content yourselves rather than always needing to go back to a technician or the web design company to change a word on a page. Our sites are based on page types which has 20 different template modules, for the different types of content, media galleries, functionality and e-commerce that your website might need.

CONTENT, CONTENT, CONTENT

Those are the three main ingredients to making a good, useful website - it's all about content. Beyond our standard service to design and build your the site, you can access our professional writing team to help you with creating good content. We can write from scratch, or edit and rework your existing content so that we get a consistent and clear voice. We make sure the site presents your key messages in the appropriate language, whether it needs to be punchy and irreverent after the style of a tabloid newspaper, or a more conservative style like the "Times" or the "Wall Street Journal".

YOU NEED A BLOG

One of ways that business, the media and marketing are changing is with the rise in importance of the Blog (short for Weblog - an online journal) and web communities. This is a major topic in its own right. In fact ITBrix, the company behind PageTypes, has another product called WordFrame which we use to build better web communities, corporate blogs and collaboration solutions. One of our recommendations will almost certainly be to get the founder, or some of the key people in your organisation to start a Blog or build a web community as part of your web strategy. You will find that it will help with many of the business objectives we will have defined in the project, and become a factor in driving traffic to your main site.

TAKE THE NEXT STEP

Contact us to discuss your website and web strategy. Whatever the size of budget you've allocated to the topic, we'd like to understand your business objectives and then propose a strategy and a PageTypes solution that's tailored for you. Call or e-mail us.