What I can do for you

Creating a compelling website relies on so much more than making pixels look pretty.
How to build a website

Services

It starts with an idea. But how do you turn that into something that works for you, your organisation, and your users?

I can help shed some light in the darkness. Through a number of sessions with your team, we can knuckle down on what your organisation needs and how it can achieve its digital goals.

Contact me to find out more.

Strategy

Bill Gates said it first: content is king. How you choose to tell your story will determine your website’s success. Here, I can help in two ways:

1. Creating a content plan, advising you on what assets you will need and giving direct specifications on how to produce them.

2. Actually helping you create the new content, whether that be writing copy, sourcing images, or even organising a photoshoot.

While I’m not a copywriter, you can probably tell by now how enthralled I am by words. I’ve also had some wonderful experience art directing a photoshoot (which somehow ended up with the Managing Director of this company holding three horses by their leads in the middle of a field).

Content

My bread and butter. If your web project has already taken shape, my job is to give that shape a structure, layouts, and colour.

But web design goes well beyond merely making the Internet look pretty. Your website must be intuitive, accessible, and consistent in order to delight your audience.

In our evermore mobile-lead era, it’s also imperative to design with multiple devices in mind.

Web design

Whether we’ve worked on your design together, or if you already have a design you need to bring to life, this is where the magic happens.

Read more about the tools I use to build your website

Develop­ment

Once your website is online for the world to see, you’re not alone. From time to time, it will require updates to make sure everything is in working order and up to date with the latest technology.

We decide what this looks like together. I recommend establishing a basic upkeep contract. This means I take some time each month to make sure everything is in tip-top condition.

This is billed yearly and only amounts to a few hours’ work, unless bigger changes are required by you.

Updates

The most exciting thing about the tools I use is that they are so easy to learn.

Need to publish a blog post? Change your ‘about’ page? Update your team lineup? It couldn’t be easier.

Depending on how techy you are, it can take as little as 2 hours to learn the basics.

If there are multiple people in your team responsible for updating content, I can even produce “how-to” videos so everyone’s on the same page.

Training

Tools & features

There’s a good reason why The New Yorker, Disney and Beyonce all use WordPress, alongside 75 million other websites. That’s 1 in 3 websites you visit!

WordPress is open source, which means it’s free to use and modify. It’s extremely flexible and can be used to create virtually any function or design. And its CMS (Content Management System) is easy-peasy to use.

So if you haven’t done so already, I highly encourage you to get on that bandwagon.

WordPress

At the time of writing, 50% of all internet browsing was done from mobile devices. It follows that designing for mobile can no longer be a nice afterthought, but must sit alongside designing for desktop.

We call this responsive design; an approach that uses flexible layouts which detect a visitor’s screen size and change the layout accordingly.

Mobile friendly

Anyone who’s ever Googled anything knows this: 99% of the time, you’ll only click on the first few results that pop up on the first page.

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) encompasses all the activities which make your website appear higher on that page. This starts by having a healthy website that search engines can make sense of.

I use a number of tools and my knowledge of SEO to give your website the best shot possible of being found by your audience.

SEO conscious

Alas, we live in a world in which hacking is rife and attacks on websites are all too common. Even the website for a lemonade stand can fall victim to a bot, which targets multiple sites indiscriminately.

There are preventative measures that can avoid the vast majority of attacks. And when even those fail, you can always rest safe knowing that a healthy backup of your site has been saved.

Safety

UI and UX design are two of the most often confused and conflated terms in web design. And understandably so. They usually sit together in a single term, UI/UX, but they refer to very different things:

UX (User eXperience) is determined by how easy or difficult it is to interact with a website. Is the experience smooth and intuitive or clunky and confusing? Does the user feel like they’re efficiently accomplishing the tasks they set out to achieve or does it feel like a struggle?

UI (User Interface) is concerned with the look and feel of a website. Is it attractive, visually-stimulating, and themed appropriately to match the purpose and personality of the brand?

UX/UI

Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.

Thomas Edison