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We pride ourselves on the effectiveness
of our websites and marketing collateral

Not only do we care how our client’s websites look aesthetically, we also care deeply about how effective they are in giving our clients a clear return on their investment. This is why, for all of our projects, we recommend usability planning, including user profiling, sitemaps and wireframes.


Our process starts with us sitting down with our client and understanding their business – including their short and long term business goals, users, competitors and services/products. Using this information, we can then accurately determine our client’s marketing aims. We then consider the website as part of the overall strategy and determine how it can work best with a client’s search marketing and email marketing, and as a destination page for other marketing activities too. The more thought out and useful we can make your website, the more effective and productive it will be.

We look to filter your users down to no more than 5 main user types. This means that we can structure your website clearly and concisely. If you aim to cater for more than 6 users, we have found that your site can become cluttered as it attempts to be ‘all things to all men’.

From the analysis of these user types, based on both the company’s goals and the user goals within this, we can create a sitemap (showing all the pages of the site and detailing basic functionality) and the main template wireframes (which will itemise the navigation, content and promotional structure for each main page type, and also go into greater detail on how each of these will function).

One of the benefits of this process is that the client can be sure of the effectiveness of the site before any design work is undertaken. It’s much easier (and cheaper) to edit and debate around a wireframe, rather than a multi-layered and fully designed Photoshop file. Once the wireframes are signed off, then the design can begin in earnest – and it also helps us to provide the designers with a concrete brief and structure around which to work.

As you can see, we really believe in this process. There’s a lot to it, but it’s valuable. In our opinion, this is the ideal way to prepare for the start of the web design phase.

WEBSITES

As a London-based web design agency, we specialise in building websites of all sizes and purposes – from brochure websites to promote your services, e-commerce websites to sell your products, micro-sites to promote a new brand, social media websites, or animated Flash or video components to add some additional interest and dynamism. We start the process with in-depth planning and analysis to ensure that your new website not only looks great, but also gives you an exceptional return on your investment. We can also offer full content management to enable you to update your website too.

We have a team of highly accomplished London web designers, who have advanced industry knowledge and have completed many successful websites.

Once the vital planning and usability phase is complete, we can start to design your website. The aim at this stage is to create individuality based around your brand through cutting edge web design. Your website will visually make you stand out from your competitors, aid your customers’ journey through the site and help to re-enforce the core values of your business at each step.

 
Finally, once the design is approved, we will build, test and go live as soon as possible so that it can start working for your business. We can even take care of hosting or buying your domain name.

HOSTING

Your website will need to live on a server and if you don’t own your own you will need to hire space from a hosting company. We offer fully-managed Linux hosting that will be suitable for any website we create and also provide you with email addresses to give your company a professional image. We offer three hosting packages with varying amounts of space and bandwidth and we can help you choose the right hosting package for your website. 

For further information, please visit our hosting site: http://www.highergroundhosting.co.uk

Website hosting is definitely something you want to get right. The perfect package will make sure that your website can handle the traffic that is diverted its way. This includes users simply browsing its content but also making sure that the website stays live and functional if users are frequently downloading any of the content you make available to them.

 In addition to providing for the users of your website, selecting the correct type of hosting also ensures that your emails are looked after, which is especially important in this day and age where business often relies heavily on communication by email.



However, selecting a suitable hosting package doesn’t need to be difficult. Higher Ground Hosting offers three comprehensive hosting packages depending on the size of and expected traffic to your website:



 
• Bronze (100MB space, 1GB bandwidth, 25 email addresses)


• Silver (500MB space, 3GB bandwidth, 50 email addresses)


• Gold (1GB space, 7GB bandwidth, 100 email addresses)



Each package also includes the purchase of your selected domain name, and of course that all-important support in setting up the hosting and uploading your website files.

ANALYTICS & TRACKING

One thing we insist on is the implementation and undertaking of analytics, and the thorough analysis of a website’s performance. This is in terms of traffic volumes, user behaviour, and in achieving the client’s goals (for example, generating new leads for their sales teams).

We use Google Analytics, a powerful website tracking tool, to monitor our own web traffic. We offer Google Analytics setup for your own website, and also offer advanced tracking setup to give you an overview of how you can use these statistics to dramatically increase your website traffic. As a marketing agency we can help you to establish where your visitors are coming from, what they are typing into Google to find you, and we can even track their activity once on your website.



The easy-to-use Google Analytics dashboard offers information about the number of unique and returning visitors, the country the visitors came from and how they found your website, how long they spent on the site, which pages they viewed, and it can even tell you which internet browser they used to view them. Furthermore, the website overlay feature allows you to track the links and tabs visitors click when travelling through your website.

 This detailed information can be instantly used to make informed decisions about the user’s journey through your website; we can then use that information to tinker with the structure and design of your site until it’s perfected for your customer base. Imagine the benefits of knowing exactly where to place information, or the call to action button you require the visitors to click on.



Find it all a bit too complicated? No problem – we can spend a few hours with you and explain it all in more detail, so you can make the most of the information you can gain access to.



Once the account is set up, you can either take control of the information review or campaign management process yourself or, alternatively, Higher Ground Creative can manage this for you, and simply keep you updated with recommended approaches based on these user statistics.

INTRANET

Intranet systems are a platform to securely share any part of a company’s information or network operating system within that organization. They can host multiple private websites and constitute an important component and focal point of internal communication and collaboration. We have worked with a variety of clients on their intranet systems, successfully providing them with a digital arena to learn, organise and communicate.

In all instances, the projects were to aid workflow internally – and we can do the same for you. Maybe you need your internal operations staff to have access to the right ‘up to date’ documents to send out to clients, or your sales staff will need to be able to download presentations on the move? There are so many reasons why you’d need an intranet, so why not call and see how we could help.



At Higher Ground, we employ our standard unique usability approach for these intranets, as we would for your customer facing websites – it’s just the users we’re now designing for are employees, business partners and suppliers. We look at what they need from the intranet system, what you need from the system and also suggest some improvements and added applications and sections which we feel may be of benefit too. Following this, we work with you to finalise the sitemap and wireframes, and then go onto the design phase, and finally build and deployment. 

You can then judge for yourself how well this is working by using our free analytics package and also from user feedback, which we can also organise.

 Get in touch and we can have a chat to see if this may be right for you.