Web Design & Development. FAQs

We take the design process of a new web project very seriously. Our approach is to plan and map out what is required and how that comes together with a user journey through the pages and site. The first step is to create a site plan, and from there we create basic wireframe layouts of key pages. We then move on to the full graphic design process. We have written an in-depth guide that discusses our approach to design projects which you can find here.

This really depends on the complexity of the project. For a fairly standard corporate website, the overall planning and design process would normally take two weeks to complete. For a larger scale build with some complex functionality, it may take three to four weeks. As part of providing you with a quotation, we break down the total working time requirements and delivery timescales of each aspect of a project.

Planning the content and website structure of your content is hugely important and can have a big impact on both how your users navigate and use your website, but also how search engines find and rank your content. As part of every project we undertake, we produce a full site plan which includes consideration as to how content will be placed and structured.

A wireframe is a basic layout document, a bit like a design but with lines and boxes instead of pictures and content. We use this kind of format to help us map out and structure the page, taking care to ensure that content will then be presented in the right way to meet the user’s needs.

This depends on your requirements and how many different or unique templates your site may have. In many cases the same template layout or styling is used on various pages, so there often isn’t a need to produce a design for each page. For a typical corporate website we would produce two or three full designs. Our team will work with you to highlight the key sections and pages of your site and discuss which you would like to see fully designed before we start coding.

Yes! Mobile traffic is increasing year on year and peoples browsing habits have changed massively over the last few years. Depending on your requirements we can produce a full mobile design for each desktop design we produce. 

Design is very subjective; we understand that and respect our client’s opinions not to like what we have produced. It doesn’t happen often, but if you really don’t like the approach we are suggesting then we would revisit what we have done and make changes to bring it in line with your expectations. Part of the reason we produce a full site plan and wireframe layout for key pages is so that we are all on the same page about what will be produced. Should the final designs then just not hit the mark style, colour or graphic wise, we can easily address that.

We consider the design phase to be complete when you have signed off the designs we have produced and given us the go ahead to move the project on to the development phase. You can read more about the overall design process here.

This is a tricky one. There are pros and cons to both a custom system and an open source Content Management System (CMS). With a custom system such are ours the benefits are that it’s mostly ‘unknown’ so there aren’t groups of hackers looking to find exploits. It also has the benefit of being something we can tailor to your business and needs. On the other hand, a system like WordPress has a lot more DIY things built in and access to many plugins which can add new functionality to your site. The other factors to consider here are moving your site. If you want the ability to move your site between web hosts, then an Open Source system such as WordPress would be the best bet, whereas a custom system is often locked to the developers hosting, to protect the codebase.

If you are having a corporate website or ecommerce shop, then WordPress is often the best way to go. It offers a number of excellent features that make updating your website really easy. Our team always ensure we structure WordPress to give you access to update as much content as possible in the easiest possible way.

If we are building a more complex system, such as a property database or a recruitment portal, we would recommend our own system. A platform like that would be quite data/database heavy and as such, a lighter code base can often mean significant performance gains over an Open Source system which has to cover a multitude of options.

If you would like more information about either our CMS or how an Open Source system could work for your business, please contact us.

This really depends on the kind of project we are undertaking. For a standard corporate website with fairly limited functionality, the overall development process would take between two and three weeks. However, consideration should also be given to content. If our team is writing a lot of content for your site, this can extend the lead time. Likewise, if your site is content heavy it will take additional time to populate the website, if we are required to do so.

For a more complex system, the timescales do start to increase as the amount of custom code required increases to meet the needs of the site. Our team will always give you a clear indication of both the development days required for your project and also the overall timescales to meet certain goals throughout the process.

Our team are highly experienced in developing PHP based sites and applications. We tend to work with SQL or mySQL databases and also have in depth knowledge about HTML, CSS and JavaScript. 

We take great pride in the work we produce, and we have a full set of pre-launch checks that we go through to ensure everything runs smoothly as we change from your old site to a new one. However, should you find a bug or problem with your site post launch then our team will produce a fix as quickly as possible. We prioritise bug fixes over all other work, so you can be safe in the knowledge that if something was discovered, we would drop everything to find a quick solution.

Cross browser compatibility is ensuring your website looks and performs consistently across various browsers, for example, Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari and even Microsoft Internet Explorer or Edge. We test every website on the most recent versions of the most popular browsers, but also ensure we create code that is backwards compatible for older platforms.

Yes, ensuring your website layout scales and morphs for small screen sizes is a key part of what we do. We use a technique called responsive design which makes certain that your website will reposition elements to ensure a nice layout on devices from small screen mobiles right up to large laptops and desktops.

We provide a flexible approach to working with our clients. If there is a small change or two to the original brief or you need an extra section we hadn’t planned for, often there would be no additional charges and we would do our best to include this within the time scales and quotation we had originally agreed. If the changes were on a larger scale then we would work with you to plan out the new approach, time scales and the budget required to meet your new objectives

Great! Evolving a website or solution post launch is key to ensuring you stay relevant and meet any changes requirements your business or customers may have. Our development team will work with you to understand the new functionality. This may include additional design or planning work as well as any development required. As with any project, we would provide a full quotation and time scales so that you knew what this update would cost. For clients who have lots of ongoing functionality or support requirements, we can agree a support contract which would ensure you receive guaranteed development time when it was required and at a discounted rate.

Our marketing team love writing content. We often write all the content for our clients websites, or in other cases we help to optimise existing content for readability and search engine purposes. 

You can, but you really shouldn’t. Duplicate content is not approved of by Google and other search engines, and there is also the issue of plagiarism and the legal issues that come with that. We always recommend that our clients produce unique engaging content for their site, either themselves or by using our content writing services.

Of course, our team are experienced in finding both paid for and royalty free images to use on your site or within your content. We have access to a wide range of platforms that offer both paid for and royalty free images. 

Content written by you or us, for use on your website is owned by you. It was created for or by your business and regardless of how or where your website is hosted, you retain full ownership of your content. If you plan to use an external copyrighter you should check with them that you will own the content that they produce on your behalf.

Images are a slightly different matter. If you or we have taken the image, or produced the graphic for the website, then you retain full ownership and usage of that. If, however, you have purchased an image to use on the website, then the copyright of that image is usually retained by the photographer or website it came from. Images purchased online are often subject to a usage agreement. Please be sure to check all terms and conditions when buying images online.

Content optimisation can have a couple of meanings. If the content is being optimised for search engines, then this involves ensuring the content is a in a search engine friendly format, with key phases or words included to ensure the search engine knows what the content is talking about. For example, if you had a blog about red shoes, you would want to include various terms and references within that content that refer to red shoes.

If the content is being optimised for users and readability, as is often the case where content has been written by someone without good content writing skills, then this process would involved ensuring the spelling, grammar and structure of the content is accurate and as user friendly as possible.

We develop using the open source platform WordPress for a number of reasons. It is very well supported, and there are a huge number of plugins available to add functionality to your site. We also find that of all the open source systems out there, it is the most user friendly and offers us the best possible development environment for the kind of projects we are often involved with.

There are some… WordPress, being so popular gets a lot of attention from spammers and hackers. Thankfully the support behind the scenes is very good, so fixes are quickly rolled out should a vulnerability be found. This, however, does require your website to be updated with the latest versions of the CMS and plugins when updates are made. For every site we host, we regularly check for and perform any updates required as part of our Managed Hosting agreement. If your site is hosted by another host, where you are left to manage this yourself, then problems can arise as code is often left as it is and not updated when required. We also think that password security is a key element to securing your site. If your CMS password is very simple, this adds massive risk and provides hackers easy access to your website CMS.

Yes, one of the main advantages of an open source CMS over a bespoke one is that you can move it around between hosting companies if required. If you would like to move your site to another host we will provide you with a full backup of the core files and database required to get you setup with a new host. If you would like to move your WordPress website to our Managed Hosting environment, please get in touch with our team.

We developed our CMS to offer an alternative to the open source systems on the market. Initially it was developed to help with a large project we were involved with that required a much cleaner codebase than you tend to find with open source systems like WordPress. From there we developed it further into a fully functioning CMS which offers a cleaner, lighter approach to website content management.

Unfortunately not. As our CMS isn’t open source we have to protect our codebase and intellectual property. Allowing our CMS to be hosted externally would potentially cause issue with copyright. Whilst we retain our CMS and its code, you still retain full ownership of your content, images and the HTML that is output by our system. So if you really needed to move your hosting elsewhere, this could still be achieved, but it wouldn’t include the CMS that manages that content.

This really depends on the project itself. If your site has large data requirements or you need something complex or specific then it might well be the solution you have been looking for. Please speak to our team about your requirements and we can help understand your project and which platform would be best for it.

The cost of development is down to the amount of time involved in setting up the CMS to allow you to manage your pages, content etc. and to then output that to the front end, public facing website. There is no additional charge for using our system and if we were quoting for the same kind of build/outcome on both, the price would be the same. The differences come when the project complexity increases. For something more complex you will often find our team can produce this quicker using our own system, than working with something like WordPress.

In 2016 we moved our entire website hosting portfolio over to Amazons Web Services (AWS). They provide a superb platform which offers us a number of excellent features. We wanted to entrust our hosting to a stable organisation where we could rely on excellent levels of support, if required. The type of services available to us through AWS mean we have been able to setup an infrastructure that supports our needs really well and provides us with peace of mind with regards to failovers, backups and security.

We charge £150 + VAT per year, per website we host via our Full Managed hosting solution.

Clients who have had a site built with us get 12 months free hosting and support. Also, clients who have ongoing marketing services with us get free hosting while ever those services are active.

Our hosting solution also includes full updates to code and plugins when required as well as full backups and failovers should something happen to part of our infrastructure. 

We offer a Fully Managed hosting solution, which essentially means we take care of everything for you. We don’t provide FTP access or a management control panel like you get with many web hosts. We find our clients like that we take care of everything.

Our complex and state of the art hosting infrastructure, which is hosted within Amazons Web Services, has been designed to ensure sites are quick to load, fully backed up, and that should one of our servers go down, there are others ready to take over. If you would like to know more about our hosting setup, please contact our team.

We copy content and data over to an external backup source every few minutes, ensuring that if the very worst did happen you wouldn’t lose much, if any, data. Most hosting companies will leave you to worry about backing up your site and content yourself. Our fully managed solution ensures this hassle is managed for you.

Our platform has been designed with scalability in mind. Should your site become really busy and require more processing power, additional servers will be added to ensure we can cope with the loads. As we host more and more sites, our platform is growing all the time. Our aim is to ensure there are no performance issues for any of our clients and our platform will continue to scale as required to meet the needs or sites we host.

With so much choice in the email hosting market place, we wanted to ensure that the service we used for our business, and that we recommended for our clients, was one that had total faith in. Rackspace, in our experience, offer some of the best customer services of any large scale provider we have dealt with. We have tested a number of competitors over the years, and always come back to Rackspace for their excellent prices, services and superb support team.

A basic IMAP or POP3 mailbox costs £2 per month, plus VAT. If you are working with us on a web or marketing project, we are more than happy to help setup your Rackspace email for free. The costs for each mailbox are then just passed on at cost.

A Microsoft Exchange mailbox costs £7 per month, plus VAT. If you are working with us on a web or marketing project, we are more than happy to help setup your Rackspace email for free. The costs for each mailbox are then just passed on at cost.

SF Media can manage your email service, via Rackspace and take away the headache of setting up and managing your email accounts. As part of our service we help setup your mailboxes and take care of any ongoing management issues you may have and also whether you require any email migration to take place from an old provider. If you would like further information about this, please contact our team. 

We have been using Rackspace for our business email since 2011, and during that time we have not experienced any down time whatsoever. We have also recommended Rackspace to a number of our clients and, again, have not heard of any down time. 

Rackspace have automatic backing up of emails going back to a maximum of 14 days. So, should they suffer a large scale server failure which affected your data, all would not be lost. They would have the ability to restore your mailbox to a point within the last 14 days. This, however, would only be the case if they suffered a major failure. If you deleted all your email by mistake, you would require an additional archiving service to help restore that for you.

Their email archiving service runs domain wide for every mailbox on your account. This costs a few pounds per month and gives added peace of mind that all of your historical emails are backed up via a separate service, should the worst happen and you delete your data.

We do not have a preferred registrar for domain names. We have used a number of different providers over the years and use GoDaddy for most of our domain registration. We find GoDaddy and 123-Reg to be fairly reliable and well priced. There are, however, many to choose from and plenty of websites offering in depth reviews on the services provided by these kinds of companies. If you would like us to manage your domain name as part of a project, that is no problem, just let our team know and we will register and take care of your domain name management as part of the project.

Of course, if you need to move provider just let us know and we can discuss what is required and help with any technical aspects involved.

This is something we get asked a lot. Our view is that you should have one main domain name for your website. Buying multiple domains and pointing them at your website will not give you any advantage from an SEO point of view and may cause brand confusion with your clients if you advertise different names. You should never run your website on more than one domain name as this will cause serious duplicate content issues with search engines and could seriously impact your ability to be found. If you do own more than one domain you should also redirect or forward these onto your primary domain.

There is an argument to buy different extensions to protect your brand. For example, we own many different variations and extensions of SF Media, this was done to protect ourselves from other companies who may wish to trade with a similar name. There is, however, a cost implication of doing this, and with so many domain extensions available now, knowing where to draw the line is quite difficult. Sometimes our guidance on this changes depending on the kind of business you operate and the kind issues you face in your market place. Please speak to our team if you would like any further information about protecting your brand via domain name.