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Web Design at STAR Digital

Northampton Web designers specialising in search engine optimised web design to ensure that your website has a good chance of ranking well in the search engine rankings. We also make sure that your web design is optimised for the XML Sitemap protocol and is fully functional and easy for web users to navigate. We take customer service seriously, you'll always be contacted by an account manager who will look after you throughout the process of web design. Being based in the Northampton area our web design is cost effective whilst being highly creative and well designed. All of our web designs come with pre-installed Google Anlytics to make it easy to understand who is visiting your web site and which search engine keywordfs are proving effective.

Content Management Systems at STAR Digital

We can build outstanding web design using the Joomla! content management system, an open source and highly cost effective web content management system (CMS) allowing you to mangae and update your website content easily and effectively. The CMS is based on a PHP platform for which we offer full and expert web hosting, meaning that we can integrate your website with online directories, calendars and booking systems, postcode lookups and databses. Add to that our web desig skills with cascading style sheets (CSS) and you'll see just how creative we can be with Joomla! CMS. All of our Joomla web design builds are delivered to customers compliant with the W3C guidelines for XHTML and CSS. We also work with corporate companies on web design using the Activedition CMS system where appropriate.

e-commerce at STAR Digital

When building e-commerce websites we make sure that usabilty and functionality are combined with great web design and integration with the popular merchant processing systems such as Paypal Express, Google Checkout and SagePay. We also understand the importance of usability for the estore or shop owner and make sure that managing stock, processing orders and online merchandising are easy to achieve. Our ecommerce websites are built with on page search engine optimisation and include fast web hosting.

Internet Marketing at STAR Digital

We know how to help you get your website seen by searchers and prospects. We can provide on-page and off page search engine optimisation services for your website to generate internet leads or provide a platform for e-commerce transaction processing. We deliver on paid search PPC tactics to appear well in Google Adwords, Yahoo search and Bing. We provide hihky creative, well designed HTML email marketing services for clients with full reporting for every broadcast.

Web Design & Development Northampton

There are a number of ways to build a well designed website that is both interactive and fully featured. Below we have outlined the methods commonly used to construct and complete a website at STAR Digital

Web Design

The main reason for commisioning a website design and build is to satisfy a marketing need. In most cases to raise brand awareness, generate web leads looking for products or services, take payment online for products or service with an e-commerce website, generate subscribers interested in your products or services, or for charities to appeal to donors. Your website design should be appropriate for your audience, the tone and voice of the web design is important as is the web usability for vistors. Website navigation needs to be clearly designed and easy to see. Web design colour schemes should have enough contrast in them for the visually impaired and all images on the website should be labelled with easy to understand 'alt' tags to explain what they are to visually impaired web users. As web designers we have a responsibility to make sure that we understand your brand and product offering and convey that through the web design in a way that is attractive to your prospects and visitors and never deters them from exploring your website fully. There are many forms of web design on the internet today. Simple HTML websites known as 'brochureware' through to database driven content managed websites (CMS websites) using PHP, ASP or .NET technologies, through e-commerce stores based on ePages or Magento, and Blogs (internet weblog) built on WordPress or Joomla! right through to internet masups using Twitter and Facebook or You Tube and Google Mpas. The possibilities are endless!

Web designers at STAR Digital use many different techniques when building a website and they may include any combination of the following techniques;

• Hand drawn design - often used in client meetings to convey a concept or idea and provide a visual basis to the discussion
• Adobe Photoshop - Used to generate web design mock-ups and visual elements for the web design
• Adobe Illustrator - Often used for generating full layout web design mock-ups and excellent for logo design and other web design elements
• Adobe Flash - Used to provide animated sections within the web design using the programming language Actionscript
• Adobe Dreamweaver - Tool used to make up web pages in a WYSIWYG environment. Useful at the beginning of a web design project to develop web design layout
• Hand Coding - Preferred method for puducing semantic markup of XHTML and CSS for highly creative web design
• Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) - Used to control the layout of a website design, where all of the elements are postioned on the computer screen in relation to each other. OFten we refer to the CSS as being separated form the XHTML content to provide 'semantic markup' that adheres to the W3C Guidelines for web design

Web Development

Once the basic designs for a website have been completed and signed off by the client we move into a stage known as web development. This can be as basic as converting the designed elemtnsinto XHTMl and CSS using a tool such as Adobe Dreamweaver, or it can involve the creation of a series of 'skins' used to overl;ay a complex database driven web content management systems (CMS) or e-commerce web design.

Web development can often be completed by the web designer that put the original web design mock-ups together, or by a seasoned professional web developer who understands the major internet programming languages and can create customised web design coding. Some of the programming languages used in web design are outlined below;

• HTML - Hypertext markup language is the primary language for the web
• XHTML - is a family of XML markup languages that mirror or extend versions of the widely used Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), the language in which web pages are written.
• Firefox Firebug - Used to understand the effect of cascading style sheet changes to a live web design layout
• Javascript - Web programming language used to control elemts such as forms, graphics, navigation and animation in a website design
• PHP - a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML
• ASP.NET - a web application framework developed and marketed by Microsoft to allow programmers to build dynamic web sites, web applications and web services.

Open Source Web Design Software

STAR Digital use open source software for web design as it offers excellent stability, support and cost effectiveness for our clients. Open Source means that the software is licensed using the Creative Commons Licensing porotocol and is developed by teams of designers and devlopers globally for free. We use a number of open source web applications to deliver highly creative web design solutions for our clients. Our web hosting is fully optimised to cater for the web design software shown below;

Joomla! - The open source web content management software package for compliant extendable web design based on the PHP programming language. Very search engine friendly when properly configured, can incorporate bl;ogs and e-commerce as well as a huge amount of plugins and extensions to make your website more feature rich and interactive.

WordPress - Open source Blogging platform based on PHP, very easy to use and search engine friendly. Can be used for fully functional websites as well as blogging. Lots of dedicated plugins available to make Wordpress more interactive.

Magento - Our preferred open source e-commerce platform. Feature rich with just about everything you could possibly need for an e-commerce website design. Also available as an enterprise level licensed solution for corporate customers.

In addition to the open source web design software packages STAR Digital also have strategic partnerships in place with licensed software providers such as Activedition CMS and Epages e-commerce and Digipage.

Cross Platform Compatibility

Ensuring that your web design workls on all browsers is very important. STAR Digital's web design team will test all web design builds on the current main browsers, Internet Explorer 7/8, Firefox 3.x, Safari 3.x, Opera to ensure that they display correctly. We will also test sites for compliance with older browsers back to Internet Explorer 6.x and employ CSS 'fixes' or 'hacks' to help modern web design content display correctly in older browsers.

Web Design Compliance & Web Standards

W3C, the worldwide web consortium, is the primary governing body for the web and provides design agencies such as STAR Digital with a set of 'best practice' guidelines to work to when creating websites and web design for our clients. The W3C validators allow web designers and devlopers to check that their code is compliant. STAR Digital delivers all website designs to its customers as W3C compliant for XHTML and CSS.

Our experience shows that websites designed to the W3C guidleines can benefit from;

• Faster loading due to the use of semantic markup
• Better search engine ranking
• Cross Browser compatibility

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