Web design & development

When building a new website, or updating an existing one, it is important to understand what you aim to achieve with the website and who is the target audience. The website's purpose and how your visitors engage with it can help to shape the way the site is built, how you expect people to find it and what actions you wish them to take when they do.

It is important that the appearance of the website ties into any existing branding and this can be applied to the functional elements (navigation and structure) to make your website appealing and easy to navigate.

By working closely with you we can bring together your business processes and good web design, and readiness for indexing with search engines such as Google and Bing. While we expect that you will have ideas and vision for your website, you can expect us to challenge and enhance your ideas so that we can work together to achieve the best result.

Meeting face-to-face can be helpful, but we often find it often isn't required and we can successfully work with you by discussing by phone, Zoom® and email. Once we have something to work with, you will be able to access an early working draft of the new website from your own computer. This saves your time, and helps us to keep costs low.

Solutions for organisations and individuals

We offer website solutions for small to medium sized organisations, and individuals, whether commercial or not-for-profit. Our service includes provision of domain name, email accounts and website hosting facilities using our preferred supplier. 

We are especially experienced with building websites that you can edit yourself, using a web Content Management System (CMS). Our particular expertise in this area historically lies in Drupal, but we are now working principally with the excellent Backdrop CMS, which is a 'fork' of Drupal 7.  Backdrop enables us to construct websites with a minimal of custom coding that takes advantage of the third party open source (and free) contributions from other developers. 

Although we usually provide a fixed quote for a website package, you can also hire us on an hourly rate for larger scale or variable jobs and consultancy.

Upgrade to Backdrop CMS

A major part of our current workload consists of upgrading Drupal 7 websites to Backdrop. We have found this a very cost-effective way of moving an established Drupal 7 site to a more secure and better-supported platform. Drupal 7 will be retired in January 2025, but development on the contributed modules has been winding down for several years now. Backdrop has a strong future, with an able and enthusiastic support community.

eCommerce

We are occasionally asked to provide an eCommerce website, and have in the past built such sites using Drupal Commerce and OpenCart. There are many alternatives available in the marketplace now and we would recommend using a service such as Shopify, which allows you to build your online shop with a pay-as-you-go subscription model. The effort and costs associated with building an online shop from scratch are high and so a suitable budget will be needed.

We now provide eCommerce sites using Backdrop CMS and Ubercart - a solution that just works and integrates well with your content-managed website. 

Consultancy: website improvement and data migration

We offer web site design, marketing and social media consultancy for organisations that want to improve their existing websites; and of course, we build on these services when working with a customer requiring a new web presence. 

A particular issue that affects many existing website, shop or CMS owners is the need to migrate from one system to another. We have a good deal of experience of analysing an existing set-up and recommending a strategy for migrating to a new solution. This can be a real nightmare if you have little experience of such things - not to mention a huge amount of time that can be spent in moving content from one platform to another. Copying and pasting is an easy solution for small websites, but those involving hundreds or more pages of content is no joke. Automating content migration is one area we can certainly advise on and offer support. If you have such an issue to deal with - and think Backdrop might be right for you - then we would be pleased to help.