The reality of business today is that, whether looking for a restaurant, mechanic, hair salon or lawn care, customers reach for the internet first - if they can't find you they'll move along to the next one. A well-built, well-designed online presence is more than an electronic signpost, it is a critical part of your business plan and way to ensure that your brand identity, product or service is represented accurately and that the latest information is up-to-date and readily available.

A new web design (or redesign) is usually driven by a couple of factors:

A: You are starting fresh with a new brand, identity or business. The website may be a stand-alone project and may function as your primary foray into your particular sphere of endeavor or it may go hand-in-hand with a larger branding project or marketing initiative. A new web presence may also be part of a phased rollout to an existing business or perhaps even a new product launch. In this case you may have decided on the general parameters, but have not built the brand out across the various media platforms such as web, print advertising, business collateral, etc...

B: You already have an online presence but it has gotten stale or out of date. Sometimes it's just neglect, or the difficulty of making the updates or the website has stopped producing results and has been lowered in the priority list. You may have a website that has been around so long that, while the general concept and design may be nice, technology has advanced over the years and your site may seem antiquated or lack the functionality that today's users have come to expect.

Although we develop sites on a number of popular platforms such as Wordpress and Symphony, we customarily build (and recommend) websites using the dynamic database-driven CMS (Content Management System) Joomla - a robust open source system with a rich architecture and a vital and active support community. Joomla also integrates the latest security and web optimization features. The use of a CMS can add a world of new possibilities to your web experience both as an administrator and an end-user. Gone are the days of making tedious updates by hand using text and FTP driven site managers such as Dreamweaver or Contribute (or worse, notepad and Fetch!). Now site changes can be done via any computer, anywhere in the world, via a browser based interface connecting to the "backend" of your Joomla site.

We can also develop your site using less elaborate tools such as standard html and PHP - suitable for many small applications such as "brochureware" sites with few pages and a low need for updates. Additionally, some server environments may be restricted to the use of these methods. If you have a legacy site in need of some TLC, drop us a line - we'll take a look and see what we can do to help!

See some examples of our work here.