Web Development
Websites, Microsites and Landing PagesWe pride ourselves on excellence in web development, from a campaign landing page, to interactive microsite, to full-blown website.
Every marketing campaign needs an online location for campaign materials, to record interactions and to drive engagement towards the final goal.
At Glastonbury Marketing, we understand the need for fast, secure and engaging web pages at all levels. No web development job is too big or too small for our highly skilled team.
Full Website Development
We feel that websites should evolve over time, it is less appropriate to rip-and-replace a whole site unless there is a dire need. A remarkable amount can be done to ‘reskin’ a website – updating layouts, styling and imagery.
This process can work in tandem with performance modifications and conversion rate optimisation, resulting in what feels and performs like a new website. Furthermore, this avoids the time (and cost) of a full rebuild.
If you require a full build/rebuild of a site, we start with a requirements gathering exercise. This ensures needs across all aspects of the business are taken into account.
Secondly, we draft a functional specifications document; matching website functionality to business requirements. From this, we generate a technical specifications document and then a project plan with milestones for key delivery points.
We develop with agile or waterfall methodologies to suit each client’s tastes and budget considerations. We deliver on time and within budget, always.
Not just full websites…
Campaign Microsites and Landing Page Builds
When a small site is required, we often suggest WordPress as the CMS of choice – allowing for rapid development at a low cost.
We are equally as happy building microsites and landing pages as offshoots from larger corporate websites, using the native CMS. Alternatively, we can help you pick from any number of alternative CMS platforms, or even flat HTML if no content administration is required.
CMS Choices for Website Content Management
Does Your Choice of CMS Matter?
This is a topic worthy of a dedicated page for discussion. However, our belief here is that CMS options and related ecosystems of plugins have evolved so much in recent years that your choice of CMS is now far less critical to the success of your website.
For most businesses, the most important consideration will be who is using the CMS to make changes to content on the site. Furthermore, whether there need to be layers of review and approval hierarchy in the workflow for content editing and creation.
CMS Considerations for Enterprise Businesses
For larger businesses, where there are whole content administration teams, it is often worth considering a more template-driven approach to website administration. This approach keeps content layout and styling on track and prevents odd looking pages diverging from the agreed brand layout.
Solutions like Sitecore, Kentico and Drupal offer a great deal of control over who in the team can change what. On an enterprise grade CMS like these, detailed workflows can be set out, so content changes need to be reviewed and approved before they are pushed live. All changes would be made on a staging version of the site. Subsequently, after approval, they would be pushed to the live site.
However, we have built staging and workflow solutions for WordPress, enabling it for use in a similar manner for enterprise scale deployments.
Low-Cost, High-Speed Web Development
In today’s high-speed world of business, it’s often important to work in an agile and iterative fashion. For projects where the site is expected to evolve rapidly before a final design, structure and functionality is agreed, we would recommend doing this all with WordPress. This allows low-cost, high-speed development – ideal for agile projects.
In some cases, WordPress may work well as a final CMS. However, it’s not uncommon for us to develop in WordPress initially and switch over to more formalised and structured CMS – e.g. Drupal or Kentico for the final CMS. This can all be done seamlessly, with no interruption of website availability for users.
Personalised Website Experiences
As we learn more about our audience through their interactions with the website and associated content, we may want to deliver a more personalised experience via the website. Marketing automation platforms provide a central hub to record preferences and define how tailored content can be served to match these preferences.
Sometimes this will be the result of explicit user actions (e.g. requesting to see content about a specific set of topics, but not others), but other times this personalisation will be automated based on deductions from previous interactions.
Website Optimisation
Website Performance Optimisation
As you have probably heard, page-load speed is a big a factor in search engine algorithms’ rankings. Consequently, on-site SEO needs to take page loading speed into account and optimise for fast loading.
We utilise many different techniques to ensure pages load as quickly as possible, from code optimisation and server-side caching to serving pages (or specific content) via a content delivery network (CDN).
Optimisation for Mobile Devices
We do not build websites, microsites and landing pages which are not optimised for display on mobile phones and tablets. Some clients may feel that it is not relevant to cater for mobile devices, but our development and testing process sets the bar as high as possible.
We believe a page should look its best, no matter what device it is accessed from.
Security, Maintenance and Ownership of Websites
HTTPS and SSL Certificates
Google has pushed for the wide-scale adoption of the SSL standard to serve sites over HTTPS. This is why you will either see ‘Secure’ or ‘Not Secure’ at the start of the website address in the Chrome browser and similar indicators are shown in other browsers.
Websites served over HTTPS have an added layer of security for any transactions (e.g. providing information via a website form). Consequently, this reduces the risks posed by hacking and phishing scams.
HTTPS is also rumoured to be factored into SEO calculations, although we’ve yet to see hard evidence of this. Anyway, all our sites are built with this in mind and served over HTTPS.
Website Security and Maintenance
We also deploy additional security precautions to identify hacking attempts. For instance, failed logins, code injection attempts and other indicators are flagged, and we lock out the source of these attacks. So far, all our clients sites are hack-free – although we register several thousand hack attempts each day on some sites!
We deliver all websites as complete, but platforms require maintenance and updates over time. We recommend allocating a small budget each month for maintenance and updates. This allows us to keep an eye on the site and tune up anything before it poses a problem.
A classic cause of WordPress vulnerabilities is website owners forgetting to keep their WordPress version and plugins up to date. Maintenance is easy and low cost; fixing when something breaks due to poor maintenance is typically far more costly and time-consuming.
It’s an easy decision to make.
No Lock-Ins
When we deliver your finished site, it’s yours. We can arrange hosting, but ultimately your site and everything on it belongs to your business.
Our approach to building websites ensures you are not locked in to our agency or specific tools we own. We work with open source and leading licensed CMS platforms, as well as best-of-breed plugins, modules and services.
Even if we build proprietary solutions for your site, these will be documented and entirely possible for you to modify internally, or by giving access to other external developers.
Get In Touch
Glastonbury, Somerset, UK
+44 747 666 2948
marc@glastonbury-marketing.co.uk