Website Design & Development

Website Design

Your Website is your shop window. Retail shops invest time and cost in ensuring that their shop windows are current and visually appealing. A potential customer will use your website to window shop - a means of vetting you as a potential supplier. Research by Carleton University in Ottawa established that it can take as little as 50 milliseconds for a visitor to decide whether they are interested in your site, based on visual appeal alone. A well designed website will convert browsers to potential customers and is designed around their needs. Equally, a website should be friendly to the search engines, the source of the majority of your visits. It is pointless having a well dressed shop window if it is located in the basement!

At Amplify, we believe that website design encompasses both visual and technical design as follows:

• Market Analysis to understand your online target audience
• Competitor Research to identify differentiators
• Clearly display what your Company does and what it has to offer
• Graphical elements should be clear and consistent across the site with ALT descriptions to help SEO
• Website content should be inviting to read, keyword researched and formatted to help the search engines understand what you do
• Website navigation should be intuitive and links should be textual to aid search engine optimisation
• Sites should not be cluttered with information, just like a shop window!
• Site Visitors should be taken on a journey through your website with appropriate Calls to Action to aid conversion
• Social Media enabled support including bookmarking tools, RSS, blogs and micro blogging feeds
• Integration of analytical tools to measure and monitor visitor statistics from Day 1
• Emphasis on lead tracking and conversion with integration to your CRM and sales processes

Many sites fail to meet these simple rules and even more are created by developers without any knowledge of how the search engines work and more importantly, how visitors behave. Technical considerations should also be included as part of the initial website design e.g. do you want to update content yourself? How frequently?

Amplify integrates the three main elements of online marketing: effective website presence, SEO and digital marketing to deliver measurable ROI and lead conversion.

Web Development

A website can’t just look good visually. A website needs to work well and ensure your visitors are able to move around the website easily and get them to their content destination smoothly and quickly.

Amplify have experience in building a wide range of online technologies from standard websites to functionally rich web applications. Our experience spans across HTML and CSS sites through rich .NET and Java applications to Content Management Systems including Joomla!, Wordpress and Drupal. Our customers range from small businesses through to enterprises. We also provide Joomla training for those wishing to maintain their Joomla! websites themselves.

All too often websites are developed with emphasis on the features that don’t favour search engine indexing e.g. flash animation and excessive imagery. Search Engines need to understand the relevance of your site, i.e. what is this website providing? In this respect, keyword rich content is king - Amplify deliver the right blend of researched and optimised content text is implemented alongside visual elements and in-site navigation to ensure your website is search engine friendly from Day 1.

With our market leading sister division DT ALM specialising in software development and application lifecycle management, we employ robust, professional Agile development processes from requirement capture through build and quality assurance. Our technology stack includes:

Markup Languages HTML & XHTML XML XUL	Stylesheet Languages CSS XSLT	Query Languages MySQL MS Access
Protocols DNS FTP IMAP MIME POP3 SMTP SOAP AJAX	Programming Languages C++ C#.NET ASP.NET VB.NET Java JavaScript PHP 4 & PHP 5 Perl Python	CMS Joomla! Mambo Drupal Wordpress

CMS Websites

Jooma, Wordpress & Drupal are flexible, powerful, enterprise level content management systems that can be readily customised to your exact requirements. They allow us to deliver websites in a shorter development cycle and our designers get to work with a flexible system that doesn’t restrict creativity through technical limitations. In short, CMS websites can make cutting edge websites available and affordable to small businesses.

The key features of CMS websites are:

• Edit your own website content in real time.
• Pre-designed template selection to reduce development effort
• Quality Assurance as templates are already widely used & field tested
• No additional software or special computer skills required.
• Intuitive, user centric design
• Cross-browser compliant pages
• Mobile phone friendly content

Getting Started

Visit our Search Engine Optimisation pages to learn more about how Amplify can improve your positioning with the search engines and our Social Media for Business pages to learn how to embrace online marketing. If you would like to understand how Amplify can help you create your new website or revamp your existing website, Contact Amplify to discuss your requirements.