web design london

Responsive web design is a development process that results in fluid web layouts that change based on a users screen resolution.

The concept came about to address the ever-changing landscape of screen sizes, devices and browsers and to allow desktop versions to be viewed particularly in mobile scenarios.

Essentially, a website’s structure would be changed using CSS Media Queries that would adapt the layout to suit the most common screen resolutions for desktop, tablet and mobile.

Sitefinity

Integrating a responsive design into a big CMS like Sitefinity would be extremely difficult due to their templating structure unless you restricted the freedom Sitefinity 4 + offers with their flexible layout system by creating pre-defined content areas based on a grid layout.

Fortunately, Sitefinity have released a Mobile Web Module for Sitefinity 5.x that employs cutting edge responsive design techniques that allow the same templates to be used for desktop down to mobile resolutions.

The release makes it even easier for us to create responsive websites for our clients where the content for both traditional web and mobile experiences can be managed within the same environment.

The alternative to creating the site with a responsive layout is to allow Sitefinity to redirect to a dedicated mobile page that has been created specifically for mobile devices.

Spinbox Media

Spinbox are a certified Sitefinity partner.  We pride ourselves on developing great websites for all applications using the latest Sitefinity versions and cutting edge design techniques.

Contact us today to discuss your responsive or mobile web requirements.  We will be more than happy to offer competitive pricing for your project based on your specification.

We can be reach by telephone on 01604 859441 or you can complete our quick contact form here.

When Spinbox Media acquired the JNTO contract several months ago, it was clear from the outset that a new design was needed to bolster their image and SEO strategy.

We set out to optimise their site initially increasing their traffic by up to 200%.  We knew however that to gain more traffic we would need to create more keyword rich content and maximise their existing content with better usability and design.

Using our SEO analysis software, we quickly discovered areas in which we could make an immediate difference to the website in its existing form.  Our strategy was to increase traffic and optimise their integrated training functionality and then follow up with a good design.  Thoughtful keyword analysis inspired the content selection which will help with search engine rankings.

Their new site still uses their existing Sitefinity 3.7 Content Management System.  We went through a process of reskinning their existing template architecture and creating additional pages and content.  We spiced up their front-end with jQuery to enhance both aeshetics and functionality and streamlined their member pages in respect of modular training excercises for Trade users.

The end result is an attractive website that will yield better results in SEO and increased traffic.

Their new website can be viewed at: www.seejapan.co.uk

Spin Box Digital Media have been successful to date with their adoption of the Sitefinity CMS, deploying it in a range of applications from brochure style websites to complex database driven applications.

We’re set to continue this success in 2011 as a Sitefinity Approved Partner with the advent of Sitefinity 4.0 (updated from 3.7) despite one or two major changes.

The most noticeable is that to the price, almost doubling in some cases. Initial reactions to this are understandably reserved (“What the..?!”), but when you drill into it, the functionality and power on offer in Telerik’s latest release is quite honestly amazing and brings Sitefinity more in line with its true competitors.

The new release delivers a next generation web content management system that empowers you to create compelling websites that drive your business and engage with your online community. Everything in Sitefinity 4.0 is developed for efficiency, productivity and interactivity.

Workflow options have been improved, considerably helping large organisations manage their publishing process. Google Analytics are now built in helping with the statistical analysis of your sites performance.

A notable addition is the ability to configure Custom Data Feeds as either an import or export. This will enable content to generated automatically using external content such as RSS or Blog feeds.

Ultimately, at Spin Box, we have at our disposal a powerful, multi-functional development platform that can accommodate any project requirement. Well done guys!

We look forward to another fantastic year doing what we love- Web Design!

A common question asked to most design agencies is "Who much does a website cost?".

A question which is far too vague to answer without a brief or consultation with a client, or a requirements analysis, however a question which has never yielded the answer... "umm.. about £100,000,000 should cover it"... i think most of our clients would of slapped us!!

However with the Conservatives in spending cuts over drive, and an open announcement that the government would be cutting budgets on government websites, i'm sure that most people were thinking, how much could they save? as a websites can cost a little, but not millions for sure!

Government Website Metrics PDF Download

Well, Spin Box has found that the government does spend an amazing amount of money on website development, and surely an overspend to agencies who get given blank cheques to build poorly designed and low functional websites which we are now forced to use. The COI have issued a report detailing the breakdown of central government websites, their costs and statistics

A breakdown on conformance testing and accessibility has been provided also, however looking at the websites listed in the report, we think that the government need new testing tools, as very few government websites conform to WCAG from W3C in our opinion.

Spin Box web design company have always believed that a website should yield at least a 200% ROI in the first year at a minimum, which is based on simple brochure websites. However with complicated database systems, this should reduce business costs dramatically and increase productivity, and in the case of the government websites, fully automated systems which have been popping up, should see a reduction in staffing costs, reduction in user support & education and reduction in time and processing errors.

Have a look at the report and see how the government has managed to spend about £130,000,000 on websites which you probably use 4 times a year!

Government Website Metrics PDF Download

For many years, we have been looked down upon, ignored and thrown to the side like an old teddy bear, by potential clients and the blue chips of the UK for our online marketing and web design services. 100 page tender proposals have been tossed aside, some of the most creative graphic and brand design not even looked at.

Why, are we that bad? Have we failed to deliver? Is someone tarnishing our reputation. The answer is a clear and precise NO.

There has been only 1 true explanation to this, Spin Box offices are not based in London and do not hold a 020 telephone number!

A surprising and shocking explanation, where many people have said clients could not be so fickle. However it has proven itself on many sad situations in our history.

So we wanted to explain the benefits on not being a London based web agency, as opposed to the negatives which seem to crop into many potential clients minds.

Pricing & Cost

The first and foremost is Pricing and Cost of website design and development. As we are not located in Central London, we are lucky enough not to be paying £5000 a week in office rent, nor be paying a £35,000 salary for a receptionist, these HUGE cost savings do cut down our overheads which in tern help determine our web pricing we provide to our clients.

However, this does not mean we are cheap, we do tend to be on the pricey side. We pride ourselves on our work, and we take great effort and invest in a lot of time, as well as ensure we have great people working at Spin Box, so when it comes to cost and pricing we are competitive but do really provide value for what you receive in return.

We want to work with clients who take their investment seriously, so if you spend £20,000 with us on your online strategy and website, then we expect you to see a return of £100,000 at the minimum in the first year. But we do want clients that are prepared to invest in a great service and product, so for potential clients on a low budgets, we are afraid that Spin Box might not be for you.

We are never far away

Second Benefit is we are never far away - Our business and services are digital, which allows for geography free trading. Lucky us could be working from a beach in Dubai, but we are only 1 hour from London Euston, based in the centre of England in Northampton.

What we do always like to do is visit our clients, to ensure that your time is not wasted in travel. But more importantly, if we see you at work in your environment, it gives us a better understanding of you, your business and the right solutions that we should be developing for you. So if you need to sit down with us and work through designs and strategy, we would be with you just as fast as if travelling across the centre of London.

Face to face meeting in our opinion is very important, to understand each others objectives and goals as well as getting to know someone is critical in building the right solutions and executing them successfully. As digital as our world is, we always put personal meetings as a priority with our clients.

If you fancy a day out of the big smoke, then we are only 1 hour away up the M1 or on the train and would be great for you to visit us too and get to know us better also.

Facebook has provided an amazing platform for marketing potential for business, bands and government departments around the globe. But what has Facebook, the big boy of social media achieved in the 6 years since its birth.

Here are some amazing statistics compiled by www.website-monitoring.com. The graphics is thanks to them as well as the post by http://www.digitalbuzzblog.com

It seems every website and every client is more concerned about hits and traffic, especially about SEO and organic listings in Google, than they are about design.

So our blogs seem to concentrate on SEO, a few hints and tips, more so about what Spin Box can offer in knowledge and service to get your website more traffic.

But we want to remind all and promote to our clients and potential clients, that SEO is great to get traffic, but your website must look and function amazing if you want to convert all of that web traffic to leads and sales. Design is key, or web design is the key word... so lets get the basics right before pumping time and budget into an SEO campaign.

But so you know what gets the search engines ticking and your website up to the top, we have provided the top 5 ranking factors for SEO, and combined with Googles Do's & Don'ts something that we perform and see results for our clients:

Top 5 SEO Ranking Factors

Taken directly from Google, we though this information should be spread to all interested. It gives a breakdown of the DO NOT's from Google in terms of quality of a website.

There are many tricks and loop holes that developers and website owners try to exploit to increase SEO rankings, as a website that lists on the first page of a Google search can see some amazing results. But to ensure that your website does not loose it's ranking, and to help increase your ranking, here are some very hand things NOT to do when building your website:

Quality guidelines - basic principles

Social Media exploded in 2009, with Facebook having a firm grounding already, Twitter's celebrity endorsements saw the micro-blogging site hit the big times.

But Social Networking has been around for some time and quite a few versions of them too, from MySpace, Bebo, Flickr, the list goes on, but 3 of the main networks that have grabbed the attention of the corporate's and engaged in online marketing that hasn't previously been seen are Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

So is it really a marketing gold mine or just a passing Fad like MySpace was?

Well calling MySpace a passing fad might be a bit strong, the networking site is still going with a good 60 million active members, so it shouldn't be ignored, however the flip reversal it has had in comparison to Facebook over the past year is why MySpace is not being considered as an investment area due to Facebook more than doubling MySpace users, where as it was the other way around end of 2008. Facebook growth has been staggering, doubling its numbers within 6 months and estimating 250 million users at the start of 2010.

Twitter on the other hand seems not to tread of Facebook toes so much, but are now being linked together by 3rd party Apps, and even Facebook Apps. Twitter no estimating 1.2 billion tweets at the start of 2010 is staggering!

So why and how is all this useful to corporate?

Its not so much about the direct Social Networking the corporate can undertake through Facebook and twitter, we're pretty sure they don't want to share their photo's of ex-girl friends or be messaged by the old school bullies, but the true benefit of social networking is how content can get generated on the web, through your network, and how this content gets pushed to users and potential customers that could never be reached before.

The network of socialising, allows your content to be passed to one person, who in tern passes it onto their friends, and the pyramid of data transverses faster than wildfire. Create topical, interesting content, and you will be astonished the power social networking has. Have a look at the 2009 UK christmas number 1, all because of a Facebook campaign, made Rage Against the Machine surprising number 1!

The other benefits which are to be embraced

Connecting with customers and potential customers! The social networking game has allowed the next generation of customers engage in ways which haven't been open before. Complaints, enquiries and wanting to find out more about a company, can now be directly engaged by enabling key personal at corporations to communicate directly with end users. The human need for direct face to face interaction is now being bridged with social networking, where the over 50's are embracing the web through computers and the next generation is logging on through mobile devices.

Our Opinion

The online marketing strategies of corporations and small businesses, should use the power of social media to generate traffic and content across the web. The risks of not being able to control the content will always exist, however when managed with right procedures, the return of investment and increase in raw profits and sales can be mind blowing. In 2010, Pepsi removed their Super Bowl sponsorship budget and spent it on social networking and online marketing instead... the market leaders are leaders for a reason.. because they are first ones to embrace new tech!

So what is SEO or Search Engine Optimisation?

Well as Wikipedia says,

"Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results as opposed to search engine marketing (SEM) which deals with paid inclusion. Typically, the earlier (or higher) a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine."

Of course, this simply means, the higher your website ranks in a search result, the more visitors your website is likely to have. So much so, research has shown that people rarely go beyond the top 30 results listed from a search, which is only the first 3 pages based on the standard default 10 results listed per page. In fact, the top 30 results get over 90% of search traffic and the top 10 results receive nearly 80% more traffic than those from position 11 to 30. So getting on the first page of a search can make a huge difference to your website and business.

So which Search Engines should you target and why?

Well Google is a household name as much as Microsoft and the stats from statcounter.com show this too.

With Google commanding just over 90% of all searches in the UK, the focus is definitely on Google rankings. Google has provided the general DO's and DON'Ts for web developers to follow when building a website and this is the core building blocks to good SEO practices. At Spin Box, we have made compliance standards our core fundamental and ethos for all developments.

But building a well coded website is only the start of SEO and does not guarantee top 10 results. There is a lot more it and get it complicated. The good news is, if you follow guidelines for Google, you are 99% following guidelines from other Search Engines such as Bing, Lycos, Yahoo etc, so you don't need to double your efforts.

What is the Key to Improved Search Engine Rankings?

The technology which defines where your website gets listed in a search is all to do with information captured by "Spiders". Spiders are programs that crawl the web, jumping from website to website through hyperlinks, collecting data on the content they read on a website. They take this data back to the search engine and log it. So the more information they have about your website or about your business from different sources, the higher the search engine will rank your website.

But the spiders are clever, so be careful! Many developers have tried to trick the spiders by flooding content, hidden keywords and duplicated websites, and so the search engine such as Google, have build rules that if they detect this "cheating", they will actually punish your rankings and drop them down very quickly!

But the multiple sources and links to your website, is one of the oldest and still one of the strongest ways to improve SEO rankings. Having other websites linking to your website, so a warning to the wise, be careful of cowboy SEO providers promising top 10 results in a short period of time, they are lying! SEO is an art, and like every masterpiece it takes take, costs a lot along the way, but the end result yields amazing returns.

What you can check Google has on you?

In Google, by adding a keyword before your search, you can change the results and receive some interesting information. Try the following keywords, after the colon (:) enter your website address or a specific URL in your website:

Link: all websites that link to you that are indexed in Google will show

Site: shows all pages in your website that are indexed by Google

Cache: Shows you your website as Google See's it

Want to see more details?

Google has build some great tools to help you see your website performance and combined with some knowledge, well a lot of knowledge, you can change your website to improve your SEO rankings. Some web developer tools are available, but Google Analytics is the big daddy on providing information about your website in terms of how people are using your website and how your website is performing on keywords.

More to come on SEO with some free hints and tips, as well as a look into what Analytics has to offer and every growing need of SEO! But if you want to undertake a full SEO campaign, have a reasonable budget and want organic/ natural listings near the top and understand it will take a little time, please contact us using the contact page or call on 01604 521220.