Front End

Developing websites is about understanding your end user and their goals. Once you know that, it's a case of ensuring they can achieve those goals with minimum effort and still have an enjoyable visit.

With over twenty years of building and launching websites experience, we have learned a lot along the way. Crucially we understand that no user wants to wait, they want to find what they're looking for and move on fast. Ensuring all our sites are highly optimised and not bloated with features not being used has always been one of our core strategies.

Many people simply think the front end is only about the web design, but there are many other aspects that all feed into the process of developing a page.

Reactivity

Many pages require user interaction, and those interactions may need to influence other content on the page, for example, filters or related information. We use modern JavaScript frameworks to allow us to build complex systems which can rebuild the page entirely if needed without the need to reload the browser window. Often these become Single Page Applications, but the principles can be added to traditional web pages too.

Search Engine Optimisation

Websites are in a competitive market, there may be many websites similar to your own, and although the content can set yours apart, that's typically handled via the CMS and yourself. Most modern search engines utilise the performance of your website and how it displays as a ranking factor. As a result, we ensure the website loads fast, doesn't contain too much code, is semantically correct, and uses the right kind and size of image for the device the website is being used on. For some kinds of content, we can also add schema markup to pages to better help the search engines identify key information from your page, for example, recipes or job listings.

Analytics and Tracking

There's little point in having a website if you don't know how many visitors you're getting, most users opt for Google Analytics to track page views and other metrics, but we've also integrated other systems into sites to add more in-depth analysis.

Accessibility

Quite rightly, websites should be available to all, we've worked with many clients to ensure sites and content can be correctly interpreted by screen readers, navigated by keyboard controls alone, and generally be usable for as many people with additional needs as possible. This includes third party systems that overlay the website and offer real-time modification of the page, beyond what can be achieved in the base design of the site.