Blog

When you have a website built you’ll often have discussions with a website developer/designer. This is someone who will head up the project and talk to you about design ideas, options of what sort of things you could include on your website and help you to plan out the content and overall appearance of your website.

Once all of this has been decided the website designer will then produce some visuals, documents that show how the website would appear on screen, for you to look through and approve. Once approved the website designer will then pass the visuals with instructions to a website programmer for the backend work on the website.

The website programmer will then built the website using coding to instruct the computer how to display the items on the website, it’s almost like a translating instruction.

Once coded the website will then displayed what has been approved in the visuals and any changes will be passed back to a programmer to make the necessary amendments.

For businesses, having a website is important for not only marketing efforts but also to give them a competitive edge.They are able to create confidence, build trust and establish themselves as an authority in their respective niche.

When it comes to design , some business owners prefer to outsource rather than have the task done in-house because of the many benefits they can gain. These include the following:

(more…)

Many companies are now opting to outsource much of their programming requirements to other companies or individual programmers often saving themselves time and money. This can be a very viable option, especially if you are outsourcing to a business that has much lower rates than you charge.

There are however some points to consider when doing this, a few I have listed below:

1. Chinese whispers – Sometimes when a project is being passed on to someone else to work on there can be miscommunication which can result in errors and time delays. Be sure that the third party understands exactly what is required of them before they start.
2. Time differences – If you are thinking of outsourcing work to another country, you need to be aware of time differences that may have an effect on how quickly you can communicate with one another.
3. Payment – You may find that you have to pay your sub contractor up front or prior to you getting paid by the client. This may out a financial strain on your business if not managed correctly.

Website security is a massive concern to companies and also programmers. Hackers are becoming smarter and finding new vulnerabilities in the code of websites that will allow them access to sensitive data.

There are many ways in which you can try and protect your site from being compromised but nothing is 100% guaranteed, which is why it is vital to ensure you back up your website regularly.

Always make sure that you are using up to date versions of all plug-ins, external scripts and content management systems as often an update will contain fixes to known security issues.

Sites can not only be hacked by external sources as it can sometimes be ex employees or subcontractors. It is vital to change passwords when someone leaves and it is advisable to do this on a regular basis anyway.

Your programmer should be aware of how to make your site secure and if you are in any doubt do not hesitate to ask.

Out of the numerous web designers in Milton Keynes, some offers quality services while others offer poor services that leaves the client frustrated. A client’s ability to get the best services is only determined by their ability to discern the good designers from the unqualified ones.

To identify a professional web designer that will meet all your website design needs, you need the following guide:

Qualifications of the web design company
A professional web designer in Milton Keynes must possess some top skills that guarantees you of a great site. Such skills include:

-The ability to write HTML codes: this is very much important in website creation as it prevents the occurrence of code bloat common in Dreamwear and WordPress. (more…)

Adding videos to a website is something that is on the increase with many of the most successful companies doing it and even the smaller local companies following suit. For many websites, having a video on there is a great selling point and allows you to personally interact with the customer almost face to face. This gives some visitors a little peace of mind and often may just be enough to sway them in to contact you or making a purchase.

Auto playing videos on the other hand can have the exact opposite effect. If you land on a website and a video starts to automatically play you may be a little confused as to where the sound is coming from or even how to stop it. Some sites are also programmed so that when the page is refreshed or another page visited, the video will start to play again. I recently saw one website that had two different videos playing simultaneously which was extremely confusing and very annoying.

If you do decide to have a video on your website, think very long and hard before asking the programmer to set it to auto play.

If you are looking to sell items or services online through a website (also called e-commerce) then  you will need to consider which payment gateway you want to use. PayPal offer a very easy method of selling products on your website, which involves little programming. The downside of using PayPal is that their fees are quite high in comparison to other merchant services.
If you are looking to sell a large quantity through the website then I would suggest looking in to other methods such as WorldPay or SagePay. These cost slightly more on a monthly basis but the fee per transaction can be substantially lower. The initial cost to get a programmer to integrate this payment gateway method is likely to be a lot higher than PayPal integration so all of this will need to be taken into consideration.
If in doubt, talk to your website developer to work out exactly with method would be better suited to your website.

If you have a business in Northampton and want to increase traffic to your website then you should take advantage of PPC or pay per click advertisement. It helps you increase traffic to your website.

It is a simple advertising technique offered by search engines and other businesses. Yahoo Search Marketing, Google AdWords and other advertising systems offer ad solutions in this field. You have to pay a fee every time someone clicks on your advertisement. It can be textual, graphical or animated ad.

The advantage of pay per click in Northampton is that you do not have to worry about finding websites suitable to your advertisements. It is almost impossible to know about websites where your prospective customers or clients visit regularly. PPC solution providers use complex algorithm to identify the data posted on a particular web page. (more…)

With the internet growing day by day it is vital to keep up to date with computer and online security advances. If you are a website programmer you need to ensure that you are aware of the current security comprises that are arising and how you can try and protect your customer’s websites from them.

E-commerce websites are the ones that are most likely to be compromised and in turn can have detrimental consequences for the website owners along with the consumers. When programming an e-commerce site, you must always follow the correct procedure that complies with the current PCI DSS standards. You should not attempt to build an e-commerce website without having the adequate knowledge to do so. It is also very important to ensure that you have the correct level of insurance to cover you should a site that you have built become hacked and you find yourself being held responsible.

The internet has completely revolutionised the way people purchase goods. In the comforts of your home, you can purchase almost anything you want from the internet. These include physical goods and services. With just a few clicks of the mouse button, you’re done and all you have to do is wait for the goods to be delivered to your door. This isn’t the only benefit of online shopping. There are countless others but we are going to discuss the major ones below. If you currently reside in the East Midlands of England, there are several ecommerce websites in Northampton that you can use. Here are some of the benefits of using the ecommerce sites to shop for goods. (more…)