Regardless of if you are designing a website, flyer, brochure or any other promotional material you should always use quality graphics. There is often a noticeable difference between high quality images and poor quality ones. Images should not be distorted or stretched, should be clear and not pixelated and should be the correct colour tones. All too often, businesses will websites or flyers that display poor quality images and therefore make the company look cheap and unprofessional. This is sometimes enough to put people off using them and they go elsewhere. You can buy graphics from a number of places online such as Istock or Getty or you can ask for a designer to create one for you based on an idea you have. You must insure that the graphic that you purchase are big enough for the purpose you need it for or ideally is in a vector format which means the size can be altered without the image distorting when enlarged. Quality graphics... Read More »

Having a web presence is, some would say a necessity for growing your business. Although there are some companies who rely on social media to promote their local business, a website could generate more business and possibly result in rapid growth and development of your company. When you decide to launch into designing your website you may have the skills to attempt this yourself and there are many useful online sites to guide you however utilising the services of a web designer will probably  give you a more professional looking website. The home page of your website will be the first thing that a visitor to your site will see and so should be attractive and clear so that visitors can see links to relevant pages and contact information. A link to a map showing the location of your business is a useful addition to your home page. The following pages of your website should have the same colours and design as your home page... Read More »

Your website may contribute hugely to the success of your business. Some businesses get most if not all of their revenue through a website. If customers can purchase items directly through your website and allow customer to complete the payment process then you have an ecommerce website. These types of websites should be designed very much with the customer in mind. It needs to be easy to complete the purchase and make contact with the business should they have any queries. Trust is vital when it comes to ecommerce websites. If a customer trusts your business and your site, then they are more likely to purchase through you.  Adding logos such as the PayPal logo or Visa Secured Checkout, can help build up that trust. You need to carefully think about the layout of your site, making your products or services easy to find, easy to compare and most importantly, easy to buy. If your website asks the customer for a lot of information during... Read More »

If you are looking to have a website created then you may want to use someone local. There are many advantages to using a local web designer and programmer. It can make it easier when it comes to discussing ideas and passing material between the two parties. Firstly you will need to find a web developer that can produce quality work at a price you are comfortable with. It may be that you chose a freelance programmer to keep the costs down over a web agency but be aware that your project may take longer this way. Most companies will either use a web programmer that has been recommended to them by someone else or they may search online. If you use Google to search for a programmer or web agency localised results are often shown first making it is easy to see how far these people are away from you.  Once you have found a number of web developers that you may be interested... Read More »

If you are a self-taught programmer learning PHP you may feel a little overwhelmed with all the jargon and snippets of code you have to learn. Trying to remember every piece of code you will need to use to build a website is a massive task and one which takes some time. When it comes to PHP you need to think of it as another language. Once you can understand what different code snippets do you will start to understand when and where you need to use them? Often people start off by looking up the code that they need, but over time you need to start to understand what the code is actually doing and how it works. For example, understanding that one bit of code is referring to another page or a style sheet will help you learn where to use it and if there is a problem, trace it back to find out what is causing it. You may want to build... Read More »