Whether you are considering establishing your first business web presence or looking to update an existing website design, we can advise on the opportunities the Internet offers.
We have a range of solutions available to suit all budgets prices start from £500 for a basic brochure website, please contact us for prices on bespoke design and ecommerce web design solutions, we pride ourselves on offering our clients affordable, high quality web sites that perform for you and your business.
For more information about our web design and marketing services then please call our office on 01743 367691 or alternatively you can complete our online enquiry form.
Web Design
Our on line ecommerce shops are powerful, flexible and above all easy to manage.
Our ecommerce web design solutions provide you with everything you need to start conducting a ecommerce shopping business on-line. By utilising an ecommerce web design solution, the Internet becomes your marketplace. Ecommerce - enabled websites bring the whole world to the merchant's doorstep. Just think of the possibilities!
We offer everthing your ecommerce website needs to be successful, including: search engine friendly web pages, VAT control, unlimited products and above all an easy to use content management system.
You don't just need just a ecommerce website designer; you need a solutions' provider - that's us.
Ecommerce web design
Ben Stokes Marketing are specialists in brochure style websites.
Brochure websites consist of a few concise select web pages that are aimed at promoting your product / company awareness. Brochure websites are suitable for new and existing companies who are yet to benefit from a web presence. This type of website is also suitable for large corporations who wish to market their promotions, new products and services.
Brochure web design
A lead generation website is a website which entices a viewer to make an inquiry or express an interest in purchasing your products and/or services. Lead generation websites accomplish this through persuading visitors to call a phone number, fill out a form or set up an appointment.
Lead generation web design
Our new business web design packages are designed in such a way that they can be updated along the way, giving you control of the initial set up cost. So as you grow, your website will grow with you. After an intial website design consultation we design and develop your website to achieve your objectives.
New business design
Search engine optimisation is required to make your website show high on the all the major search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo.
Search engine optimisation is very useful as it allows you to precisely target an interested key audience, we specialise in organic search engine optimisation, sometimes known as natural search engine listings.
There are no contracts, it simply works on a monthly pay basis. The campaign can be canceled at any time and you are not bound by an annual contract.
Our aim quite simply is to make your website more visible in the search engines and improve the quality and volume of traffic to your website providing you with more sales leads to work from.
Ask to see our page one google optimised websites we have designed for our customers.
Search engine optimisation
If your company focuses on serving the local area, we can optimise your website for your local area. For example if you are an alarm fitter working in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, you do not want to receive phone calls from Scotland!! You will ideally be wanting to receive calls from your local area.
We can optimise your website to show on the first pages of Google for your local area.
Local search engine optimisation
When starting up a new company there are so many things to consider, your new business venture will need to portray a professional image from the outset.
Ben Stokes Marketing have put together a brilliant professional Business Start Up Package, which will give your new company the best image possible from the onset.
To include, Web design, logo design, business card design and printing, Letter head design and printing.
Business start up package
Web video is becoming increasingly popular and common on commercial websites and ecommerce sites in the UK.
On line web video allows you to talk directly to your audience in a non-intrusive way. Ben Stokes Marketing offer website video solutions either with presenters or yourself being cast on a video clip.
This relatively new concept is an ideal way to stand out from your competition especially if you have a USP (unique selling point), it has been proven statistically that on line web video will keep a viewers interest for longer than a text site.
Website presenters and videos allow you to explain your business more clearly to your potential customers generating a higher rate of enquiries from your contact page.
Normally when you appoint a company to create a website, you would expect to go elsewhere for the other major key components such as web SEO (search engine optimisation), web development and web graphic design. This can hinder the speed of the web project and reduce its overall impact. Fortunately Ben Stokes Marketing have all the specialist skills in all these areas, so there is no need for you to appoint different specialists.
We are a firm believer in keeping things simple.
Web Site Design
How are today's modern websites created? We have listed the work that may be carried out to design your modern web site:
Planning (flowcharts)
When designing a web site, the design should not start to be coded straight away . Instead, the web design process should begin on paper or using flowchart software.
What is a flow chart? A flowchart is used to provide a visual chart to show the structure of your website. The flow chart process will include the following:
How many main navigational items will your website contain?
What will the website navigation links be called?
Will there be any web pages contained within the main pages?
What will those web pages be called?
The use of a web design flow chart will give a head start on:
The usability of the web site
Determining the volume of web content required
Modeling (wireframes)
In the web design modeling stage, we create static "wireframe" mockups for each unique web page. To create your website wireframes, we may use either:
Paper and pencil
Software such as Adobe Photoshop
These wireframes contain in essence, the skeleton which illustrates the layout of a particular web page. Where will the logo go? Where will the content be located? Will there be breadcrumbs? Will you have a login box? Each of these questions (and many more) are answered in the modeling stage.
Execution
Creating the graphic design, in this process we code (mark up) which web browsers use to present your website on the Internet.
In the final stage, both the flowcharts and the wireframe mock-ups are created to create the final page layouts and designs. The design will then be finalised in Photoshop.
Trust us, a well organised process makes a perfect website.
Following a well-structured web design process is by far one of the most important steps that many web designers in Shrewsbury choose to neglect. Ben Stokes Marketing follow a strict web design process, ensuring that your website is well-organised, easy to navagate and user-friendly.
High-quality design
How would you dertimine "high-quality design"? It is not easly answered. One persons opinion of a design is diffrent to the others. Despite this fact, there are several things that a high-quality web design should have:
Balance. The balance of a web page should have a equal distribution of the heavy and the light elements on a single web page.
Unity. Unity keeps all of the similar elements in the website alike and those that are diverse further apart; everything should be pulled into one integrated whole.
Emphasis. Emphasis involves the main points where the eye is drawn into the design.
Contrast. Not just color contrast, but also contrasting shapes, sizes, textures.
Rhythm. Also known as repetition, rhythm brings internal consistency into your web design.
Current web design technology (CSS)
CSS - also known as cascading style sheets - replaced table-based website layouts years ago. However a lot of web designers are still using tables for designing. Not only is this unprofessional, but tables just dont work. Here are a number of reasons why using tables for your web design is a bad idea:
Tables slow down your website
Tables make messy code
Tables limit a websites creativity and design
CSS websites take less time to produce hence saving you money
Browser compliant
Perhaps the most difficult, time-consuming aspect of professional web design in Shropshire is making sure the website is browser compliant.
In layman's terms, if you want your website to be considered professional, then it must look and function the same in all major browsers. In addition, achieving interoperability lowers costs to content providers since they must only develop one version of a document.
Creating a standards-compliant website will take a good deal of time and can even involve using basic hacks in order for certain elements to appear the same across all major web browsers. Major web browsers include: Internet Explorer 6 (IE6 -PC), Internet Explorer 7 (IE7 - PC), Internet Explorer 8 (IE8 - PC) Firefox (PC and Mac), Safari (PC and Mac), Google Chrome, and Opera (PC and Mac). These web browsers control the majority of the browser market share and therefore your website should be tested extensively in each of these browsers to ensure standards-compliance. In addition, XHTML and CSS validation (as mentioned in Step 8: XHTML and CSS validation) are extremely important when programming a website to be standards-compliant.
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) friendly
All professionally designed websites should be designed search engine friendly.
Today, most businesses understand the power of leveraging the internet; however few have figured out how to turn their website in to a lucrative search engine optimised working model. The way that information flows through the Internet has changed the way any company does business. Whenever you are looking for a product, service or valuable information - the easiest and most common place to find it is threw a internet search. This is creating a dramatic shift from traditional marketing to a complex, and always-evolving array of interactive strategies that offer immediate, and long lasting (measurable) results.
Search engine optimisation now consists of a lot of factors, in the early years optimisation just included altering the meta tags of a website. Today search engine optimisation is very diffrent, our SEO service includes the following steps.
On page Web optimisation
We will inspect your website content and coding and optimise the website to meet the guidlines of the major search engines, producing the best results for our clients. These methods include:
Keyword research
Alt and H tag optimisation
Meta tag optimisation
Latest table-less coding
Off page Web optimisation
If your website faces heavy competition in the keyword or phrase that your customers will be searching, then your website will need a targeted optimisation strategy, for it to have a chance of having a sucsessful ranking in the search engines. This can only be achieved by linkbuilding. Off page web optimisation includes:
Link building campaigns
Quality directory listings
Article submissions
Forum and blog posting
Search engine optimisation cost
Ben Stokes Marketing's website optimisation services are charged on an ongoing basis. There are no contracts, it simply works on a monthly pay basis. The campaign can be cancelled at any time and you are not bound by an annual contract. We work with this pricing method because we know that we are good at what we do; and if it's working for you, then you will want to maintain your working relationship with us.
The best way to start your search engine optimisation campaigne with us is to list all of your target keywords, we will then work on a no obligation campaigne and monthly price for you.
Contact Us now to see how we can help your company.
Tel: 01743 367 691 - 0871 901 0321
Web design planning
Web design is a complex, but essential ongoing activity with new technologies being added to the mix at alarming rates. Before designing and uploading a web design project, it is important to take the time to plan exactly what solutions are needed in the web site. Thoroughly considering the user audience or target market, as well as defining the purpose of the web site and deciding what content will be developed, are extremely important.
Web Context
Bespoke web design is the simplest way, is just the same as a brochure or a book. However web design uses a framework based on code to construct and maintain the web site. Taken to its fullest potential, web design is undoubtedly the most sophisticated and increasingly complex method to support communication in today's world..
Purpose
The most important thing of the web design process is to determine the purpose of the web site as one of the first steps in the planning process. A clearly defined purpose will help the rest of the planning process as the audience is identified and the content of the site is developed. A purpose project plan should show ideas based on what the web site will accomplish and what the web users will get from it. The best way to do this is to Set short and long term goals for the web site, this will help make the purpose clear and help plan for the future when expansion, modification, and improvement will take place.
Web Audience
The web site audience is a key step in the web design planning process. The audience is basically the users who will visit your web site. These people will be viewing the web site for a specific reason and it is important to know exactly what they are looking for when they visit the site.
History of web design
Web design is still a relativley new concept, Tim Berners-Lee published what is known to be the first web site in August 1991. Berners-Lee was the first person to combine Internet (virtual) communication (which had been used for email for years) with hypertext. Web sites are written in a program code called HTML, with the early versions of HTML being very basic, only giving a web site 's basic structure (paragraphs and headings), and the ability to link pages using hypertext. This was all new and very different from existing forms of internet communication - the web site's users could easily navigate them selves to other pages by following/clicking on the hyperlinks from page to page.
As the Web and Web design evolved, the web programming language changed to become more complex and more and more flexible, giving the ability to place objects like tables and images to a page. Features like tables, which were originally intended to be used to display tabular information, were soon subverted for use as invisible layout devices. With the introduction of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), table-based layouts are commonly regarded as dated and not very web user friendly, with most web designers shying away from the old style. As times evolve, web designers are changing the code on the inside and visual design on the outside with ever-evolving programs and utilities.
