Websites that deliver. For your customers (& your team)

Beyond striking design, strong branding and great customer experience, what are you looking for from your new site? Your website can be so much more than an online brochure. We love the opportunity to inject ideas and share experience to make your site deliver greater value; it may be functionality within the site which links to your main office systems and helps customers find the information they need. Or it may be to accept payment for services. Or a login area where only your customers can access specific information. Making the most of online brings efficiencies and real time advantages. 

Sites users love

We like to hold our customers hands, when they need it and value it, with an eye to making every visit to your new site productive. Naturally we'd like your visitors to recognise a beautifully designed site but more than this we'd like them to be drawn to delving deeper, honing in on the information they came for and then thinking that yours is a business they'd like to deal with. This means we make navigation and usability intuitive and check during the project that real users naturally follow the site navigation. We need to think carefully about content. Too much too early and visitors can lose the will for more.  Too little is inexcusable and they're off to find it elsewhere. Other turn-offs? Poorly written copy or brazenly written to attract Google et al more than the people you really do business with. And how about real photography? In our experience professionally taken photos are such a sound investment and at a stroke add trust and realism to your site.

The right CMS

It's great to see a website updated with fresh content. Put it a different way, it seems criminal to leave your site dormant, collecting cobwebs. It helps to have a content management system (CMS) which encourages updating because it is intuitive and makes it easy to keep the site looking smart. We've always regarded providing a suitable CMS as a pre-requisite of our service. We have a select suite of options, including WordPress and Drupal. Each has its own merits and the right choice is influenced by your requirements both now but also in the future. We always share our thinking on options and whichever the preferred route we make it our business to tailor the admin area to make it very usable for you and your team.

Of course, for websites with special requirements there is occasionally still a good case for having a custom-built CMS. We pride ourselves in the uasability and longevity of our bespoke websites and systems.  

At the other end of the specrum you may decide that your website would benefit from no CMS at all so that our team can hand craft each page to give it an extra special look. 

Something special?

This is where working with Orphans really scores. You need functionality which is that little bit different and certainly not 'off the shelf'. We can help. It might be the way you would like to display products. Or a stockists map you want to integrate with your back office system. Perhaps you need your site to be multi-lingual. Or to produce on the fly PDF leaflets from data updated in the CMS and presented on the site.. 

We like these challenges partly because we have very skilled developers. And partly because we see the benefit of functionality which adds value to your services and sets you apart from your competitors. If you have a great idea, share it and we'll make it happen.

Responsive. Of course

All our sites are responsive. With mobile use set to continue to grow it is almost inconceivable not to make responsive design a pre-requisite. Building a site which is as nice to use on a mobile as it is on a desktop is not without its challenges but our philosophy is to give mobile content as much attention to user experience as we give to desktop users.

Hosting & support

We can help manage your website on secure servers and have a sound record of keeping our sites open for business and out of reach to unwelcome visitors. We have multi level backup procedures and disaster recovery plans to insure against problems and downtime. We have our own dedicated servers to host websites but are also happy to develop sites for use with your own hosting arrangements providing the server meets basic requirements.

We can purchase domains on your behalf and take care of the configuration options. We will also renew your domains as required to make sure they never inadvertently expire.