When you are in the initial stages of website design and development it is easy to get carried away with how it is going to look. Sometimes you need to take stock of what you are trying to achieve before plowing forwards with what could end up simply a pretty website that does nothing for your business.

The structure of your website needs to be thought out to make sure that it includes all the information that visitors to your website will want to find out as well as any legal requirements. Your sitemap is your plan, it is a visual representation of how the site will be structured, which pages are required, images and video requirements and also the complexity of the project.

You also need to consider how the website will grow over time. You should be adding and updating information on a regular basis and so it is important to make sure that you can do this easily without having to re build the site at a later date.

Your sitemap is also your basis for collecting the content that you need, you can assign different members of the team specific pages to write and come up with a plan adding timescales so that you know when different pages should be completed.

This week we launched our newest site  http://www.radiatorvalvesonline.com this was a website design and development of an existing e-commerce site.  Up until now orders had been processed all via Paypal only and why this was fine they wanted to implement a payment gateway and have a more professional website.

We came up with two initial designs which were then tweaked to come up with the finished product.  We then built the site, we chose prestashop for the e-commerce element of the website and integrated the payment gateway so the website now accepts visa and mastercard payments as well as paypal.

The range of products on offer was also expanded and this is something that is planned to continue and so the requirement was for a solution that allowed this easily alongside visibility of orders placed, email notification and analytics.

The website predominantly sells automatic radiator valves which are easily fitted onto a radiator to alleviate the need to manually bleed.  As a result of them keeping the air at bay, the idea is that the radiators will be more efficient, remain hot to the top and ultimately save you money on your heating bill.  The most popular two products are the HV30C valve which fits modern radiators and the micro which fits older style radiators.  The new range includes good value designer radiators but the company are always looking our for new suppliers, so feel free to get in touch if you have something that you think would complement the current range.

Conversion Architecture is basically ensuring that visitors to your website have as easy and stress free experience as possible.  There are lots of ways you can do this and it’s always best to start out in the right way rather than having to go back an revisit your website once you have put in lots of effort up front.  So when designing a website we obviously need to focus a lot of energy on design, look and feel, branding etc.. but this cannot be to the detriment of converting visitors into customers.

The images you use on your website should be considered carefully, firstly make sure you have permission to use the image in the first place.

If your business does not have its own images then using a resource such as IStock or Fotolia can help you get hold of photos that represent your business in the right way.

Things tend to quieten down for a lot of businesses during the Easter break and so this is a good time to review your website. I bang on about the importance of content in terms of SEO I know, but it makes such a difference not only in terms of your rankings but also about keeping your visitors interested. Here are some ideas of how you can keep your website up to date:

Dental Hygienics supply and install dental equipment key in the sterilisation and decontamination of equipment at surgery level.  They came to us to develop a full online marketing solution including the development of an e-commerce website.  We worked with them to come up with a design that was clean and reflected the industry at large.  We wanted navigation to be simple for the user whilst providing enough product information to allow the user to make a purchasing decision whilst on the site.

Starting a business can be a daunting time, apart from the excitement of going it alone, there are often a huge number of new skills to learn.  Running a business is very different than working for someone else, there is no IT company on the end of the phone or a HR Manager on tap to give you advice.  A lot of these areas either need to be learnt or outsourced.