Interconnect IT - Liverpool Web Designers and Developers

Website Advice

Sometimes it’s hard to know what you need when shopping for a website designer. After all, the language is jargon, and the choices endless.

Desirable Features

Our websites always have the following features – even if you don’t use our services we would advise that you seek web designers who conform to these standards:

• Full accessibility – our sites can be viewed easily by people with sight problems and are compatible with screen readers for disabled use.
• Performance – all pages are coded in order to make them compact and quick to load. Especially useful if visitors are on dial-up or connecting from remote locations.
• Compatibility with all major internet browsers. We test our sites thoroughly. If an issue is found with a new or updated browser we can generally find a workaround very quickly that maintains the look and feel of your site.
• RSS feeds – if you have a dynamic site that changes frequently (for example, one with features and articles) then visitors can subscribe to an RSS feed, allowing them to see updates in a suitable mail, portal or internet client.
• Search engine friendly – we don’t resort to any of the tricks that some web design companies offer as we know that the search engines may de-list sites that attempt to artificially boost their rankings, as happened recently with BMW on Google. Our sites are, however, easy for the search engine ‘robots’ to navigate and your content will soon be indexed.
• Rapid search engine updates – the fact that your site provides an RSS feed means that search engines will subscribe to the feed, thus meaning that any new content on your site will quickly be indexed by the search engines. We also ‘ping’ Google when an update is made to your site - to make sure they know.
• Separation of content, management and design. This means that a design update can mean little or no work on your content in order to refresh and update your site. The cost savings can be significant in the future. The site is also managed dynamically, with all content on a database. This makes content and structural changes incredibly easy to manage.
• Open standards – we don’t use obscure proprietary software or standards. That means that should you wish to transfer your site to another site designer they will be able to understand and modify the code we created. Although our code is copyright, we freely allow modification by and for past clients. This prevents any lock-in.

Things to Consider

Our company policy is to work ethically and in the best interests of our clients. To this end we have a number of recommendations for sites that we like to provide when making first contact:

• Choose a domain name that reflects the nature of your business. For example, if you’re a garage in Liverpool, then liverpoolgarage.co.uk might be well worth registering. There’s no reason why you can’t have multiple domain names directed to your website so for the small fee of as little as £10 each you could make your business easier to find on the internet. The search engines also give preference to domains which reflect common search terms in their names. As an example, if you search Google for Cheshire Smile, one of our recent clients, the site already appears on the front page in spite of there being many thousands of references to the term on the internet.
• Have your domain and at least some basic content prepared at least two months ahead of your project going live in order to improve your search term results. If not you may find that your site is not indexed for quite some time after it is created. There is little you can do to accelerate this process.
• If you decide to purchase your own hosting or domain rather than go through interconnect IT, make sure that you go through a reputable company with good contract terms. You must be able to maintain control of your domain at all times and it should be registered to your business, not to your host. You should also ensure that the domain can be easily transferred to a different registrars and that its records can be easily changed so that you can host your site on the hosting provider of your choice.
• Be wary of paying for search engine submissions services. They often charge a lot for something that is effectively free of charge. It can be better value to pay for advertising on the search engines. For example, your website will be referenced from our own website and this entry will be quickly picked up by Google, MSN and Yahoo, with the others not far behind.
• The more information you can put on your website, the more likely you are to receive traffic. If you can add articles and features related to your business on a regular basis then you are likely to generate increased traffic. For example, if you’re an expert on genetics, adding information to wikipedia.org, along with a link to your own site, may well generate a large amount of traffic as well as improving your ranking.