WEBSITE RESCUE
Don’t put that problem off any longer, it can only get worse.
Contact us today. We are often able to respond same-day (weekends included).
We are only a small team but we have decades of experience. Our MD worked for many years at a major UK financial organisation progressing through a variety of jobs including a programmer, tech support and IT manager. He was involved with the bank’s earliest involvement with the internet in 1993. With that experience he saw an opportunity to create affordable web sites for local businesses. Initially that was in parallel with working at the bank while employing a team to handle graphic design, copy-writing and marketing.
That business operated successfully for about 20 years undertaking thousands of projects for businesses and organisations of all sizes, not just locally but nationally and even a handful of international clients.
When that business closed there was a continuing need to support the existing clients and ten years later many still remain. Website rescue continues to serve dozens of customers some even dating back to our first year in business back in 1995. Most of our business is repeat customers, from recommendation or from people having seen a website we created looking for the business that built it.
It seems that the majority of web designers are now drawn from a graphic design background with relatively little technical and coding ability. That creates a problem for them and for their clients when technical problems arise. That is one of our strengths, the other being perseverance, we will make a very determined effort to find a solution. We are perfectly happy to work alongside graphics designers and others on a “no compete” mutually beneficial basis, using the strengths of each party.
Our focus is on those small tasks that can represent huge stumbling blocks for those who don’t have the expertise to address them. The aim is to provide fast responses and affordable fixes.
If we look at what is involved with a website there are two main strands, the technologies and the content.
Technology
- Domain name (like example.co.uk) which will be directed to the nameservers hosting the DNS records for the domain
- The DNS (Domain Name System). Typically there will be a dozen or more DNS records performing tasks such as routing website requests to the relevant webserver, email messages to the mailserver.
- Hosting, the webserver where the web site is located
- Mailserver, handles routing of email, possibly on the same hosting as the webserver
- Software
- The web server probably relies on the LAMP stack, that stands for Linux (operating system), Apache (Web server software), MySQL (Database), PHP (a programing language).
- Nearly 40% of websites are now created using a piece of software called WordPress
- Most websites use PHP, HTML (hypertext markup language), CSS (cascading style sheets), and Javascript (a computer language that runs on the web site visitors web-browser)
- Tools like WordPress will also use PHP, HTML, CSS, Javascript but for the most part the complexity of those is hidden from the designer.
- Various APIs. An API is an Application Program Interface, it is the mechanism a website will use to interact with other web services in a sophisticated way in order to deliver customised services. Common APIs include those for various social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc), for PayPal and for Google Maps.
Content
- Images
- Photos and diagrams. A common problem is with filesizes. The file-size of an image from a digital camera or mobile phone can be 10 or even 100 times the size needed for web site use. Unless resized it will make the web page load slowly. In addition the dynamic manipulation of images such that they work OK on mobile phone screens sometimes involves automatic cropping. That risks important parts of the image not being seen by all visitors.
- Visual design, layouts, colour schemes, typefaces
- Text there are so many inter-related issues to consider
- Copy writing – what do you need to say about your products?
- Marketing – you know what you need to say, how do you best get that message across to your target market.
- Search engines – your text content needs to be structured in such a way as to lead to your website being found by potential customers using Google (or other search engines) in response to relevant search phrases.
- Meta-text content – this is data hidden from the normal web site visitor but intended to assist search engines to index your site effectively. There are a few simple Do’s and Dont’s.
- Navigation and the “call to action”: your web site visitors need to be able to find what they’re looking for, the design must make a dertermined effort to facilitate that and ultimately lead the visitor to take the action you intend – which might be to place an order, make a phone call, send you an email, complete a form, visit one of your retail outlets etc…
- Legal issues: GDPR, Terms & conditions, Cookies, Company law compliance, copyright issues.
Sometimes our response to your query will include a comprehensive fact-sheet from our extensive in-house, regularly updated, library covering one of the topics mentioned above.
What is code? Unless you are a programmer you may only have a vague idea just what coding is and you may be happy to stay that way. I found a comprehensive (long!) explanation here. “Long” might deter you but it isn’t complicated and you don’t have to read it all at once. It’s not trying to teach how to code, it’s intended for non-technical managers and aims (in my opinion, succeeds) to keep the language simple and to demysitify the topic.