Dimension6000

Website design

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Introduction

Your website is an important investment. You need it to deliver results. With Dimension6000 you are in the right place, and you are in safe hands.

If you can’t remember where you left your specs, or if you just want to call for a quick chat, we look forward to hearing from you. But we’ve also provided some information for you here, just in case you need it, to help guide your decision-making process as you consider your company’s home on the fascinating, evolving and revolutionary world wide web ...

Website design & development

These two key areas of expertise need to combine holistically to ensure a website works perfectly to deliver a fantastic user experience whilst also keeping the web gurus of Google happy.

Although every website requires multiple skill sets, there is a big difference between web design and web development, yet the two terms are often used interchangeably. They are actually two completely different processes that usually require two different professionals to ensure you get the most out of your website in both areas.

Let’s define the two:

Web Design

Web design is the process of creating the look, feel, and branding of a website. It is the use of purposeful aesthetics, based on marketing psychology, wording, dynamic, direction, balance, shape and colour; it considers usability and functionality from the beginning to the end, and is ultimately the process of creating the overall look, feel and branding of your website.

Web Development

Web development is the programming (data processing) of your website. This should be seen as building the engine of an automobile. Web development often refers to data driven websites but also refers to other automated features such as mail scripts. Web developers add the functionality to your website. This may be a shopping cart, registration system, or any other automated tasks you might have that, in most cases, require a database.

To find someone who is skilled at both is very difficult to do. In most cases, one person does the web design while another is tasked with the web development. Designers normally do not do programming and programmers are normally not graphic artists. Each requires enough work of its own.

We have both web designers AND web developers in a team that works to amalgamate their own expertise and create the best of all worlds for your finished project.

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Your website must work for you

Think of your website as the very best employee you have ever had. At their desk 24 hours a day, all year round, promoting your company and its products to millions of potential customers. Never going home, no tea breaks and, if you use Dimension6000's coding experts, definitely no sick days!

Having some sort of web presence online isn’t actually that difficult, but you need to be more than another flashing billboard on the Vegas strip. Ensuring your site will generate traffic and work effectively and efficiently on behalf of your business requires a little more expertise and experience. Dimension6000's web developers will be ensuring your site quickly becomes a powerful part of your marketing strategy.

Most consumers start their search for products and services online, and in 2015 and beyond, your website must deliver a great customer experience or your business is never going to reach its potential.

The website must be responsive: accessible on different devices (i.e. tablets, smart phones as well as desktop computers). Apart from the obvious benefits, websites that are not responsive are now ranked lower on Google.

The code must be of a high quality and a modern standard otherwsie it adversely affects functionality, Google ranking and accessibility.

Content must be well structured, relevant to your brand, your service and your customers, and easy to understand.

Limit repetition of key words. There is a lot of SEO ‘advice’ out there. ‘Keyword stuffing’ refers to the practice of loading a webpage with keywords or numbers in an attempt to manipulate a site’s ranking in Google search results. Filling pages with keywords or numbers results in a negative user experience, and can harm your site’s ranking. Focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context.

Social media is much more connected to SEO than you might think. After all, search engines simply seek to follow the behaviours and trends of real people. As search progresses, we’ll begin to see more and more social factors being incorporated into the ranking algorithms. And even now, there are many benefits social media offers SEO campaigns. Being active on social media now means getting ahead with SEO for tomorrow. SEO isn’t just about keyword research, optimizing page content, and building links anymore. You need to get social to achieve success. Online marketing initiatives are converging (especially search and social), and the more areas you can cover, the better results you’ll see in each.

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What makes a good website?

Domain names are becoming increasingly difficult to get hold of. As the web grows, domain names are being used up. A good domain name should be short, and easy to remember. If the domain name you want is taken with ‘.co.uk’ then try something different, such as using another extension. Try to avoid adding separators – such as hyphens – into your name, as these make the domain more complex to remember.

There are a lot of websites that clutter information into small spaces. Hiding the information that counts, and hiding their own branding. Your website should keep information clear and to-the-point. If you want to expand on what you have written, make it optional with a button such as ‘Read more’. If you provide a service, tell the world why you are the best person offering that service, don’t just describe the service and why you do it.

It is important that if someone wants to get in touch with you then they can easily. Having your contact information buried in link after link and then hidden within content on that page isn’t a good idea. It should remain visible, and could be at the top and the bottom of the webpage so that the viewer can find it no matter which way they scroll on the page.

Navigation is one of the most important parts of a website. If your site has bad navigation then visitors will find it difficult to find the information they want, and potentially leave and go to a competitor’s site instead. Keep the navigation simple, easy to use and visible at all times.

Pages should be well thought out. Plan how they will look and how they will be organised. Using different techniques to assist the users’ understanding of what things do is important. For example, if you have an input field, you may not want to show information to start with, keeping the page simple and friendly looking. However, when they start to type into the box show a little tooltip ‘helper’, so they know what they should be typing.

It is important to have good content on your website. This doesn’t only mean that your site is interesting, but with the web always changing, it should be accurate and up-to-date. Spelling and grammar should be checked, as once a page goes live it would be cached by many different services, making the mistakes stay online for months, years or forever.

Simple static websites don’t need to have too many security measures in place. However, if you allow for users to login or input sensitive information then it is key this information is secure. SSL encryption should be used on pages which contain sensitive information, this would help prevent someone from accessing the information while it is being transferred to the web server. It is also important to secure the data on the server, if passwords are stored in a database then you must ensure they are encrypted first. If a SALT is used then it might be a good idea to store the SALT somewhere else, perhaps in another table or database. This would help to secure your visitors’ data, and improve your website’s reputation.

With social media becoming huge over the past few years, people are increasingly relying on others to give them feedback on a product or service. Including testimonials on your site could improve the sales of the product or service. People can see what real clients thought of your service.

6 essential features of a great website

Marketing and consumer behaviour has changed. You can now buy almost anything online and for most businesses, your website is your silent sales person working 24/7 to generate leads and sales. In fact, most consumers start their search for products and services online and in 2015 your website must deliver a great customer experience or your business is never going to reach its potential.

So, is your website driving plenty of traffic and customers? If not, let’s look at six essential features your site needs to have to win new business.

Blog

Not only is a blog a good way to update your website with new content, or talk about topics relating to your website or business, it is also a way of providing fresh, regular content for your site's visitors. If they see that the website is updated with new content regularly then they might bookmark it, and visit it every couple of days. A blog is also good for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – search engines like to see sites updated regularly; a blog would provide that feature.

Be responsive

In 2015 mobile browsing usage overtook desktop usage for the first time with over 60 per cent of internet traffic now being on mobile devices. This shows the importance of a website being responsive. Enhancing your website with responsive features provides your mobile users with a much better browsing experience. It will also increase your rankings on search engines, especially Google who now show a 'Mobile friendly' label next to responsive websites.

Search Engine Optimisation

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is vital to ensure your website is ranking higher than your competitors on the major search engines. SEO is a fairly simple concept, you make your content and page look better to a search engine. This includes meta information to tell the search engine what content your page has, and to include keywords or a brief description of the page.

Social Media

Incorporating social media into your website helps with SEO in a similar way to a blog. If the social media profiles are updated regularly then it will ensure that your website has updated information, improving your SEO ranking. However, if the content on your social media profiles are not relevant to the website's content, then this would negatively impact your SEO ranking.

Analytics

Adding analytics to your website allows you to monitor the viewers on your website. It provides vital information about what page they visited, their demographics, the device they were using and how they navigated through your website. This can allow you to make decisions on which pages need to be improved, and how you could improve your navigation menu to keep visitors on your site.

Regular updates

Search engines, especially Google, like to see a website being updated regularly. This shows the site is still active and maintained. This could be full content updates, or if the home page of your site links with dynamic sections such as social media or your blog, then it will be regularly updated without you needing to do anything. If the website doesn’t get updated then Google will lower your ranking, making your site harder to find, causing you to lose vital visitors and potential sales.

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How can we help?

Web development and hosting has been one of Dimension6000’s core strengths from the beginning. We have a strong track record of developing interactive websites using all the latest software platforms and technology, such as ...

  • PHP 5+
  • CS3 and HTML 5
  • MySQL/PDO
  • Responsive UI design
  • Jquery 1.11.3
  • Javascript
  • AngularJS (Not required but useful)
  • Linux server management
  • Custom hosting packages
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Need to speak to a human being?

All of our staff work in-house. Therefore, as a client you will not be waiting to hear from someone on the other side of the world, nor will you be waiting for freelancers to finish gaming, nor for students to pop back from their gap year in Thailand! We will all be working closely with you, and be there for you when you need us, from concept to compleion. And beyond.

Some of our work

See all of our web work

Client Testimonials

I have had the pleasure of working with Mel and her team at Dimension 6000 for the past four years, both in terms of the design and production of my bi-monthly Village Tribune magazine (and website) and other bespoke publications, sites and marketing collateral in the tourism market. This is a business who really are prepared to ‘go the extra mile’; delivering great solutions, on time and with very reasonable prices. Cannot recommend Dimension 6000 highly enough.

Tony Henthorn - Managing Director, Cheeky Monkey Media

The Dimension6000 team have always impressed me with their fresh ideas and professionalism. I have always tested them by giving them work on tight deadlines and they have always delivered high spec design work. They are true professionals.

Arman Zabair - Eagle Foods Ltd

The Dimension6000 team have been a great professional support whilst designing my new website; very personable and easy to approach, especially at times when I was unsure about my ideas. They are able to interpret clients' requests confidently and adapt these requirements to the website layout.

Karen Tibbett - Tilly Rose - Vintage Workshop

Dimension6000 produced a fantastic website for one of my projects, at a very good price. It looked and functioned exactly how I wanted it to. The few small things that needed amending on the demo version were completed in a matter of hours.

Amy Wilson - Fenland District Council

Dimension6000 delivered excellent, creative design work on time and within budget.

Vicki Whittingstall - Fenland District Council

As owner of Papa Luigi, I instructed Dimension6000 to create a new website. I wanted to retain a flavour of our old website but also allow for tablets, phones and all modern day computers. In essence this was a difficult website to build as we have different offers for each shop and this could cause confusion to the customers, however Dimension6000 have made the new website postcode friendly and only offers for that area are displayed. The choice of graphics and design is of a very high order giving a corporate modern feel. This also connects seamlessly to online orders which are flowing nicely. The crew at Dimension6000 are friendly and offer very good advice and they also offer sensible prices, I can strongly recommend them.

Stef Malajny - Papa Luigi