Websites

Websites

Introduction

If you are thinking of commissioning someone to design a website, you have probably already discovered that there are plenty of people in this market, offering all kinds of services at all sorts of prices! So why choose Cyberporte?

Websites that work everywhere

We are committed to following industry standards, principally those of W3C. In English, this means no 'best viewed with IE v6.23a' messages, no nasty surprises when using a different browser. And that means more visitors and happier visitors.

Content-first websites

Our aim is for visitors to your site to say 'What a great product!' rather than 'What a neat site, I wonder who designed it'. Like any shop window, a website should be transparent: it should help visitors to see what you are offering, not get in the way.

Well-structured websites

Ever had that experience of wandering through page after page of a website, hoping against hope that the next click will take you to the information you wanted at the start? We work with our clients to organise the site so that visitors can find what they are looking for, and design each page so that the navigation options are clear.

Interactive websites

Our background in programming enables us to offer a wide range of interactive options, from a simple contact form or guestbook to a complete database solution.

Websites you can update yourself

If you want visitors to return to your website, you need to offer them something new each time. Creating new pages by hand and updating all the links can be time-consuming and error-prone. We can offer a range of solutions that enable you to add or alter content via a simple web page interface.

Some examples of our work

Living With Technology magazine, using php for the contact form and php/MySQL for the glossary.

The French part of the A Rocha website, using Perl for the contact form and SSI for the menus and the 'flash' box top left (click 'reload' a few times to see how it works).

Biblical Patterns of Evangelism Today, an online book in a format that is easy to print and download, with 'click to enlarge' photos.

Prices

This depends almost entirely on the amount of work involved. For a basic 'calling card' site with a few pages of text and a couple of photos, the price can be as low as £35. Interactive and database-driven sites tend to be more expensive, but are cheaper to maintain (especially if you do the maintenance yourself!) You can reduce costs to a minimum by providing us with the text and images in a convenient format.

FAQ

What do I need to give you?

It depends how much you want to pay us! Ideally, you provide the text in machine-readable format (plain text, .doc...) and the photos as prints, slides or good-quality scans -JPEG for photos, GIF or PNG for lineart).

What sort of layouts can you do?

People come at website design from many different angles. Our background is in IT, with some experience of DTP. As a result, we tend to produce "content-first" sites which are fairly simple graphically, often with an interactive element. One advantage of this approach is that our sites tend to work better on older and non-Microsoft browsers than those produced by packages such as Dreamweaver.

But I want my site to look nice!

Website beauty is very much in the eye of the beholder: judging from the most popular sites at present (eg http://www.amazon.co.uk, http://www.bbc.co.uk), the trend is towards relatively simple layouts that get the required information across in the fewest possible mouse-clicks.

The list of sites above should give you an idea of the kind of work we do. If you have a particular idea for a design, send us a sketch and we will tell you how close we can get.

What about Flash?

We don't do Flash ourselves, but, if you want to incorporate an animation into your website, we can get Flash clips produced. If you want an all-Flash site, we are not your people!

Do you have to host the site?

No, although it would be very helpful to have FTP access to whatever server will host the site. If this is really not possible, we can send you the files by email or on CD-ROM. Note that some technologies such as PHP, Perl, SSI and database back-ends may not be available on all servers.

Does the site have to say who designed it?

No. We generally work on the basis that we will link to sites we produce that link to us, which generally means more hits for everyone, but this is not compulsory.

Will you do any kind of site?

We don't do 'adult' sites or (knowlingly) anything illegal, eg bootleg music or software downloads. Also, we reserve the right not to use material that we consider to be offensive. But that leaves quite a lot of sites that we will do: so far, our customers include a French political party, a Swiss firm of surveyors, a company manufacturing beauty aids and an international missionary society.