Website design, CMS, SEO & web media services
Contents >>>
Contents <<<
Your one-stop web solutions provider...
- Website design
- Copy writing
- CMS
- SEO
- SEM
- Ecommerce
- Email campaigns
- Newsletters
- Media
- Branding
Standard features on ALL ITw3 websites
Probably few other web design studios offer the following standard features:
- Content Management System
- ITw3 Content Manager
- Audit trail of all content changes
- Content version rollback
- Client-editable content throughout
- In-page editing with HTML wysiwyg editor
- Integrated with MailChimp for email campaigns
- Integrated with Magento for eCommerce
- PDA compliant
- Customer focus at all stages
Price guide
ITw3 supply complete web solutions, not just websites, and all solutions therefore include the ITw3 Content Manager CMS console, providing full user control over all content and images, email newsletter integration, and eCommerce capabilities, plus email mailboxes, pop3 and webmail.
Setup charges for small business informational solutions (typically 1-6 pages) start from as little as £150.00.
For larger solutions, we'll provide a full proposal following our initial discussions which would include detailed costs for the proposed solution. As a guide, design & setup charges for most small to medium sized business solutions would be between £240.00 and £1,500.00.
Ongoing hosting and support charges are from £15.00 per month.
We can also register and manage your domain names for you from £5.00 per year per domain.
All prices are subject to VAT and exclude third party costs such as artwork and annual domain name charges.
We welcome website design opportunities in the following locations:
South East England - London - Surrey - Hampshire - West Sussex - Camberley - Woking - Farnborough - Basingstoke - Hook - Fleet - Frimley - Odiham - Crondall - Ash - Aldershot - Send - Worplesdon - Shalford - Guildford - Bramley - Hascombe - Dunsfold - Farnham - Wrecclesham - Lower Bourne - Elstead - Frensham - Tilford - Rowledge - Millbridge - Dockenfield - Godalming - Alton - Witley - Hambledon - Northchapel - Cranleigh - Headley - Churt - Beacon Hill - Hindhead - Bordon - Haslemere - Fernhurst - Chiddingfold - Liphook - Liss - Rogate - Petersfield - Midhurst - Petworth
Blue chip web solutions background
The founder of ITw3 Web Solutions, Nigel Moore, has broad IT experience in both corporate and entrepreneurial environments. Many blue chip organisations have benefited from Nigel's project management skills, attention to detail and professionalism during the rollout of many high profile internet projects, including 24/7 financial trading platforms and website projects.
With a background in web design, development and hosting, we have a flair for creating modern, standards-compliant web solutions that encompass the latest search engine friendly presentation technologies but also retain a client's brand image in all aspects of the look and feel of the user interface.
Our web solutions include as standard many features that would incur additional costs with other providers. Facilities such as audit trail for content change management, version rollback, CMS, email marketing and ecommerce integration are all standard features.
We're based between Haslemere and Farnham, Surrey, UK, near Guildford, Woking, Godalming, Farnborough, Aldershot and Basingstoke, and welcome new projects within the areas listed above, or further afield if the assignment doesn't require on-site visits, and these days, there's little reason why it should.
Breadth of capability
We can take your existing corporate design or create one from scratch, and interpret it for the website to maintain your design integrity across all media.
We have full-service capability. Creative and technical website creation competence, together with copy writing, photography, design and production skills. We quickly develop an understanding of your aims for your business, so you can use us for a whole range of business and consumer projects as needs arise: press releases, e-shots, publicity flyers, advertisements, brochures, folders, display boards, presentations, give-aways, and so on.
Hosting technology
On the hosting and technology front, ITw3 Web Solutions are powered by MediaWiki. This is an open source CMS initially designed for the hugely successful Wikipedia online encyclopaedia. It has since been adopted as the platform of choice by many organisations for both intranets and websites, mainly because of its in-built facilities for audit trails and content change management - features blatantly lacking from most other open source and commercial CMS packages.
MediaWiki also allows inclusion of templates into page content to minimise the duplication of common content such as buttons, icons, ads, banners & bulletins appearing on multiple pages. Such common content only needs changing once, although it may appear on dozens of pages.
This combination of an extremely well-proven and robust CMS with integral content change management and templates, coupled with the flexibility available for plug-in CSS skins to create brand-specific presentation layers, makes MediaWiki a superior choice for website CMS solutions.
Reliability and availability
Website availability is highest priority for any organisation. In addition to adopting probably the most robust open source CMS platform available, all ITw3 Web Solutions are hosted on servers managed by Wesh UK, a highly respected hosting operation with attention to details such as 24/7 monitoring, twice daily backups, HP web server hardware and RAID5 disk arrays.
Downtime is not a service we offer.
SEF & SEO
ITw3 web solutions are designed from the outset to be Search Engine Friendly (SEF) and Search Engine Optimised (SEO).
SEF is achieved by avoiding the embedding of critical textual content within Flash graphics or images, which renders the text invisible to search engines, but making sure static or animated image related textual content is fully readable through techniques such as CSS, javascript and jQuery.
SEF is further enhanced by ensuring the following are readily available to search robots:
- A page-specific user-editable meta description tag that summarises each page's content and will normally be adopted by search engines as the page description.
- A sitemap.xml file that will enhance the visibility of the site to search engines by defining the site structure and each page's priority relative to other pages on the site. Our websites generate sitemaps automatically from menu links and page categories thus no manual intervention is required to keep the sitemap.xml output up to date.
- Inclusion of ALT and TITLE tags on images to describe the imagery to search engines.
- Conformance to valid HTML markup as validated by the w3.org validator and accessibility guidelines per W3C Consortium.
SEO is achieved through analysis of keywords and key phrases likely to be used by customers when searching for products or services, and ensuring these appear within the content of appropriate pages.
Organic, scalable architecture
All organisations experience change, whether expansion, diversification or as a result of mergers and acquisitions.
The underlying CMS technology used by ITw3 Web Solutions is MediaWiki, as designed for the massive Wikipedia online encyclopaedia. By necessity, it is an extremely robust and scalable architecture.
For corporate website use, there are effectively no limits on the number of pages or images, length of pages, number of menus, menu items or internal links.
MediaWiki also provides automatic link integrity. This means that if a dozen pages link to another page on the same website and the destination page name is changed, all links will be automatically redirected to the new page name without any intervention from the user.
This enables an extremely organic design methodology where a website can evolve to meet the changing needs of the organisation.
In addition, MediaWiki is probably the only open source CMS that allows templates of commonly used content to be embedded in any page. This allows, for example, the introduction of new services, or the addition and maintenance of info boxes appearing on multiple pages, all with minimal administrative overhead.
Content change management and audit trail
ITw3 Web Solutions include as standard a comprehensive audit trail of all content changes, both textual and image based, by multiple concurrent editors.
A website owner can review Recent Changes, roll back to previous page versions, and even view the contents of a page as it looked at any date in the past.
ITw3 Web Solutions have customised MediaWiki with the ITw3 Content Manager and HTML WYSIWYG editor, to provide an easy to use CMS platform for clients who wish to add and amend their own website content directly.
Any organisation interested in ISO 9001 certification or in properly managed internal processes and procedures will benefit from these facilities, which are provided as integral features of all ITw3 Web Solutions.
We believe that only high-cost commercial CMS packages offer comparable change management features to those provided by ITw3 Web Solutions.
Open source vs commercial CMS architectures
ITw3 Web Solutions are powered by the following open source software:
We are therefore extremely cost effective through the use of open source software compared to commercial CMS platforms.
Any concerns that may arise about the viability of open source software in terms of support and robustness are generally historic.
MediaWiki powers over 100,000 websites and intranets worldwide, including the massive online encyclopaedia Wikipedia. More websites are hosted on Apache servers than any other web server technology. mySQL is the world's most popular open source database. PHP is the development language of choice for both MediaWiki and most open source CMS platforms and is stable and well proven.
All the software we use has communities of users and a worldwide developer network, dedicated to the improvement of the technology and ensuring that any bugs are overcome and security patches released in a timely manner, although by now it is all extremely robust. All such patches and upgrades are available to ITw3 and are rolled out to client websites where necessary.
Many of these developers are employed by commercial organisations who have adopted MediaWiki as their CMS platform of choice and share developments and extensions with the user community to further enhance the product for the common good, as do ITw3.
The resources available to ITw3 while supporting their client's websites are infinite, but the popularity of Wikipedia has ensured the underlying CMS is as robust and scalable as any.
A glance at the following staggering statistics should quash any concerns that might arise:
Statistics, analytics and SEM (search engine marketing)
All ITw3 Web Solutions are enabled by default for Google Analytics which provides a comprehensive insight into website traffic and marketing effectiveness.
When combined with a search engine marketing service such as Google Adwords, this provides a wealth of information for an organisation to assess the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and strategies geared to converting website visitors into customers.
ITw3 can setup and manage online campaigns such as Google Adwords for a modest setup fee and ongoing management charge.
Corporate branding
Should a fresh eye be required for your corporate branding we are pleased to recommend the talent and experience of Richard Pegg Associates (RPA).
Richard founded RPA in the 1970s, since when the company has been successfully meeting the design needs of companies in southern counties and around the country - from corporate branding and advertising campaigns through to websites, brochures, and exhibition displays. Clients stay for the long-term because of RPA's design quality, value, and ability to interpret a client's thinking. For example, IBM was a major client for 20 years. See their website for an outline of the company - www.rpauk.com
Client email options
Please review our Client email options guide which will help you choose the most appropriate email service for your business, whether POP3, webmail or a hosted Exchange server configuration.
Migrating from an existing website
ITw3 specialise in migrating from legacy websites in a completely seamless manner. Downtime is not a service we offer. It does mean additional effort put into DNS propagation issues, ensuring email continuity throughout, and retention of Google rankings, but we're committed to website uptime, high availability and pagerank preservation.
We only ever use search engine friendly 301 redirects, and make full use of search engine control panels and change of address utilities for ensuring seamless migrations.
Our background in hosting high availability financial trading platforms means we know how the internet works and make full use of low level TCP/IP utilities to achieve the highest website availability possible.
Once again, downtime is not a service we offer.
Probably the easiest to use CMS console available
All ITw3 Web Solutions include the powerful and comprehensive ITw3 Content Manager, based on MediaWiki, and probably the easiest to use CMS console available.
All editing is 'in-page' meaning one-click access to content changes, rather than having to locate the page in a separate management console.
Getting started guide
This brief getting started guide should help you achieve the highest ROI from an ITw3 Web Solution, by helping us to fully understand your objectives and expectations at the pre-proposal stage.
Whoever you commission for your web solution should need this information, so its a useful process to go through prior to the procurement phase, and may even assist you in writing your terms of reference.
Customer profile
To kick-off any new project we like to know a few things about you:
- Who are you?
- What do you do?
- Who are your competition?
- Who are your customers?
- Who are your business partners?
- Have you done a SWOT analysis?
- Do you have a business plan, and can we see it? …in confidence of course
Understanding who you are and why you're in business will help get the highest ROI from any website marketing and electronic media campaigns.
A comprehensive profile of your business and its objectives will help to ensure an ITw3 Web Solution will exceed your expectations.
Domain name
The theory that most good domain names are gone is a myth. Given a little imagination, many names are still available.
Brainstorm your brand and use a domain availability checker such as Wesh Domain Checker to narrow down your choices. You should be surprised what you come up with! This is something we can help with for a small fee, but is best done by yourselves over a few weeks as ideas develop.
List every domain you think of and put a line through those which are taken. Gradually you'll build up a list of many domain names which are still available.
Securing a .com and .eu in addition to .co.uk are recommended for brand protection, even if its better for search engine marketing to host your site on a .co.uk. If your budget allows, you should also scoop up the .biz, .info, .org and other derivations to ensure your web identity is protected from masqueraders. We would redirect all the unused domains to your primary website domain.
We don't recommend hosting multiple websites on unused domains to try and improve website ranking, as all websites must contain unique content, and maintaining unique content on multiple sites for effectively the same products or services is seldom feasible.
However, if your business operates several distinct brands, locations, services or product ranges, then multiple websites are an option. This can either be achieved using different domains or sub-domains such as farnham.yourdomain.com, haslemere.yourdomain.com and guildford.yourdomain.com.
Artwork & photos
The design of most websites will evolve from imagery you already have. Its very likely to be an existing logo, or photographs of your products or services.
To design a website from scratch without initial imagery is rarely viable, so if you have nothing yet, grab the digital camera and take a few shots from which a theme might develop.
Images can also be sourced from many online repositories such as Fotolia and Wikipedia Commons, providing the appropriate credits are included in a credits page.
Don't worry about image quality at this stage, as this can be taken care of later, we just need a little inspiration fuel to kick-start the design process.
Content = SEO = Content
Content is King.
- SEO = Search Engine Optimisation
- SEO = Content
- Content = SEO
Got that?
In the old days, search engines could be fooled into believing your site was important via meta keywords stuffing or link farms. This no longer works. All search engines now read your content and use that to determine how high your page should rank in response to specific search terms. Your content needs to be rich, fluent, informative and unique. That last point cannot be overstated. If Google's robots see content on your page that they've already indexed from another site, your ranking will suffer.
Search engines also use techniques such as Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) to determine if the keywords you have included in your content really are relevant to the page as a whole and not just there for SEO. So if you're selling garden hose, improve your ranking by including references to gardening and other horticultural products, so Google knows what type of hose you're into.
If your site is predominantly selling product, then unique well-written product descriptions, reviews and comparisons will get your site ranked higher than the competition.
What a lot of effort you might think. Unfortunately yes, but it will reap rewards when your site starts appearing on the first page of organic listings rather than needing expensive Adwords and other paid services.
We'll be happy to help write your content for you, or outsource to our copy writers, but just letting you know that a website without good content will never be well respected by search engines.
SEO is not a black art, its all about focusing on content.
Website design
Check out your competitors websites. Yes, really! Which do you like, which are rubbish? What about businesses in related sectors to yours - again, which do you like and which are rubbish?
Doing a little preparation in this area will provide us with an understanding of your expectations for the look and feel of your new website.
Website design variables are infinite, from square boxes to organic flowing designs, from static images, through fading slide-shows to Flash animations, from bold colours to pastel shades.
Much of the design will evolve from existing or new artwork, logos, photography and content, but knowing your particular likes and dislikes will help enormously.
So fire up that web browser and make lists of sites you like and sites you think are rubbish.
Website design is not about what we think looks good, but what your customers think looks good, and you are probably best placed to envisage what your customers will appreciate.
SEM (Search Engine Marketing)
Unless you've come up with that elusive killer product or service that everyone wants but few offer, your new website will take some time to earn its ranking in the top search engines, especially if you registered a new domain on which to host it. Expect 3 to 6 months to creep up the rankings, 6 to 12 months for that elusive first page and resultant traffic hit.
Luckily, there is an alternative, and its basically why search engines are in the business they're in. SEM is all about giving you a head start using services such as Google Adwords and Yahoo Sponsored Search.
Depending on the competitiveness of your product or service offering, you could pay anything from 3p to £1 per click to have a link to your site appear in the sponsored links section of a search engine. You generally don't have to pay for the link to appear, you only pay if someone clicks on it to access your website.
We can manage your SEM campaigns for you, or you can do it yourself, but the most important thing in the early stages of creating your web solution is to plan your site's structure with SEM in mind.
SEM revolves around search terms and landing pages, the page a user is directed to when they click the ad. You can set up multiple search terms and organise these into ad groups each with unique landing pages.
We could design a website and sort this out later, but its really good if you can consider how many ad groups are likely, and their related landing pages.
With a little preparation, SEM becomes an important enabler of your website design and content structure.
SEF (Search Engine Friendly)
Yet more web speak, but important nonetheless.
SEF is one you don't need to worry about too much unless you're planning to commission your website from one of ITw3's competitors.
So you've been offered a great website with stunning Flash content?
Maybe you've seen a great reference site with textual content photoshop'd into images and it looks stunning?
A word of warning: search engines cannot yet index text embedded within Flash graphics or images.
Many designers get around this by developing two websites, one for humans, one for search robots, and serve up the appropriate content on demand.
If you can afford the costs of maintaining multiple content sources, it can work well, until you commission some updates and the two get out of sync, and a panel of judges within Google takes a look to see if the content the search engine sees is the same as your customers will see. Any mismatch will get your site blacklisted and take months to recover. Can your business afford this?
By all means make diligent use of Flash and graphics to prettify the site, but for the foreseeable future, SEF websites need HTML based textual content.
Also consider at an early stage how those animated graphics will look on media such as brochures, flyers, business cards, etc. Digital paper is on its way, but in the meantime paper doesn't do animation so well.
Pagerank and incoming links
Aside from SEO (i.e. content) and SEF, the most important mechanism for achieving high ranking for your own website is incoming links from other well-ranked websites.
However, don't be tempted to purchase incoming links from link farms. Google will spot this instantly by suddenly seeing thousands of incoming links to your site, when previously there were perhaps only a handful. This rings alarm bells as its completely inorganic and indicates a link farm transaction.
What you should be doing is approach other website owners, perhaps trading partners, trade associations and online directories, gradually building up links to your own site.
Another solution is to join well respected forums and gently promote your services through subtle links to your website in forum entries or your member profile.
Even if your new website launch is some way off, there's nothing like planning. Building up lists of contacts now will ensure links are put in place at the earliest opportunity once the site is live.
eCommerce planning
Most modern websites will sell something online, ranging from property, cars, specific product ranges and service offerings, to marketing paraphernalia such as mugs and T-shirts.
In the planning process, its useful to know your organisation's objectives for current and future product ranges and service offerings.
The design and structure of an online sales channel needs to be future proof and understanding your sales aspirations will help enormously.
Where do we go from here?
We'll usually pop over and see you, sign a confidentiality agreement, then prepare a formal proposal.
If you've read this far you're probably very committed to getting things right first time, which is also our objective.
So we love customers who ideally have as much as possible of the above available for our initial meeting, but there's no commitment until you accept our proposal.
What if an ITw3 Web Solution is commissioned and we don't agree on the design?
All commissions include an exit clause, such that if we're not hitting the mark, you can walk away.
Thankfully this rarely happens.
ITw3 consultancy
Should you not require a complete web solution, but just some assistance with your own project, we offer professional consultancy in the following disciplines:
- MediaWiki
- HTML CSS Javascript PHP Photoshop
- VOIP/Draytek/Draytel
ITw3 Web Solutions - The Studio - Churt Lea Cottage - Thursley Road - FARNHAM - GU10 2LQ - UK
+44 (0)1428 788242 Contact us
ITw3 Web Solutions is a trading name of ITw3 Limited - Registered in England and Wales No.06347715 - VAT registration No.GB 974 3956 68