WEB DESIGN

Digital work that works

Of course your website should look amazing. It is after all, the digital shop window of your brand. Where you show your wares to the world. But it’s only of any real use if it actually converts all those curious visitors, who come to it via mobile, tablet or desktop, into paying, enquiring, interested customers. We’ll build you a powerful, intuitive, accessible site that looks great but also drive your sales and enquiries.

Good brand design means better web design

Our website design for your business is based around communicating, persuading and presenting an irresistible call to action. When we create a website it simply has to deliver a return on investment for clients, driving business leads, sales and enquiries. It’s not enough that it’s design eye candy or is a joy for our creatives to work on. It has to be the primary tool to build your business.

We start with your brand workshop.This creates the foundation of your brand strategy and your web design. What your brand will look like as it lives online. We then carry out intensive competitor and market research, which informs what the navigation, structure of the site and content will be. Using wireframes we create a smooth, seamless user journey.

Creating convincing content

Relevant, real, engaging content is the key to your site’s success. Well written, deep content that meets the needs of both your users and also search engines. The quality of your content will affect where you appear in the rankings when people search for your products or services. We can work with your in-house team to create compelling, convincing content or you can use our team of writers.

They can help you get your content to flow across your site, building up towards deeper specialised pages, with more text than the homepage and landing pages. This text content should tell your brand’s story. It should compel customers to engage with you and your services. Keeping a human, real tone of voice (important to remember you’re interacting with real humans at the end of the day), whilst also pleasing the bots and keeping you ranked highly within search engines.

Complete, cost effective content management

When we create and publish your site, we mainly use the WordPress and MODX open source content management systems (CMS). These are powerful, usable and cost effective solutions for managing your web content. And they’re also cost effective when it comes to developing and the creation of new features.

Best of all, they put you in control of the content of your site. You can manage your content from any browser based device, and from any location with a web connection. We can provide you and your team with the training to do this and a manual on how to use the CMS for your site.

Designing your website

 

During the web design process we create design files using Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. These are then translated to your site within your content management system. The web technologies we use include HTML5, CSS2/3, JavaScript/JQuery, JSON, Ajax, PHP, MySQL, Apache and NGINX.

We have produced bespoke user interfaces for a variety of digital products taking advantage of our expertise in user experience design and UX. This involves designing and creating HTML, CSS and graphics to be implemented by our technical team. Communication skills, attention to detail and a full understanding of the business and digital product to be managed, are all essential.

An effective website that converts customers also has to deliver a prime user experience over multiple devices

Interested in what we can do for you – Get in touch today

Usable, accessible and fast!

Once a website is built it’s then user tested. Elastic use services including WhatUsersDo and UserTesting to fine tune sites and perfect the user experience based on the business sector and purpose.

Websites are also fully tested for technical, usability, accessibility and speed issues using tools including SortSite, BrowserStack and Google Webmasters Tools. Once a site is launched it’s continually monitored for performance. We recommend that clients set-up a maintenance plan which ensures their site continues to deliver perfectly.

Ecommerce and transactional

Elastic has strong experience in ecommerce and transactional web solutions including Shopify, WuCommerce (WordPress), Foxycart, Supercontrol, Eventbrite and Volusion. The online booking system Supercontrol was used for the property booking site Crabtree and Crabtree. This was integrated with the ModX CMS and has been very successful.

We have used Shopify a number of times to produce transactional sites, the last being to run ticketing for the Scottish Low Carbon Conference. Eventbrite was used to produce event based solutions for Resourcing Scotland’s Heritage. More recently, Elastic produced the user experience for Edinburgh Business School’s economic simulator product. This is an educational tool, part of their MBA programme, which allows the students to control the UK economy and test out their economic knowledge. Allatus provide business management information and analysis for organisations through a product and digital user interface designed by Elastic.