Are you setting up your first web site?
During the previous few years, it became generally accepted that any company worth its salt would have a website, even if it consisted of a single page with some contact details. If you have business, society or hobby that you would like to put onto the Web, then where should you start?

The first matter is to establish which of the following three categories the site falls into:

1: A brochure site. If your site is simply intended to give yourself a presence on the web or to showcase your goods and services without any customer interaction, then this is the kind of site you need.

2. An e-commerce site. This is the most common form of interactive site and best suited for those who operate mail order sales. You can set up an e-commerce site quite cheaply using a package, i.e. an off the shelf piece of software. However, if you want to tailor your customer's experience or have quite complex specifications, then a bespoke e-commerce solution would be better for you ensuring that you obtain exactly what you require with your own personal branding.

GB Web Solutions can build any site that you require and, where the information is sensitive, e.g. credit card information, we offer the comfort of secure "https" sites that use state of the art encryption. If you really aren't sure what you want, then give us a call and someone will come and discuss your website with you. There's no charge for any initial consultancy.

Why Do You Need To Plan A Website?
A basic website might consist of as little as a single page or perhaps a few pages all linked off the front page.

Sites of that size don't really require much planning but what if you sell many different products or services? How do you give your customers the information they want whilst leading them to a sale or initial contact with you? How do you present large amounts of complex information in a manner that makes it easily digestible?

As well as helping the customer around your site we also build site maps, which can save a lot of time for customers who know what they want without having to cram your front page with a list of everything you offer.

Why Would You Want To Test Your Website?
It's a great irony that the World Wide Web was intended to be platform independent: that is, any website would look and behave the same way on any given machine with any browser. Your site might look great in the latest version of Internet Explorer running on a Windows machine but what about on an Apple Mac or a different browser like Netscape, Firefox or Opera.

Understandably most small design companies only have a few machines and these are commonly a single build, e.g. they are all PCs running the same version of Windows and same broswer. At GB Web Solutions, we have a full test lab with a wide range of machines, operating systems and browsers. Naturally we test the sites that we develop on these platforms but we are also happy to carry out testing for sites built by other companies.

Is your website suffering from neglect?
Time flies and the website you set up a few years ago, which was then state of the art, might well be looking a bit tired now compared with your competitors'.

We can help you either in overhauling and modernising your existing site and perhaps adding some new functionality to make the site of more use to you and your customers, or by helping you to develop something completely new.

You might not be aware that search engines value websites that change regularly very highly, so if your website has been EXACTLY the same for the last few years, that might go some way to explaining why you have unsatisfactory listings on Google and the other popular search engines.

If you have an active growing business, there's no reason why your site shouldn't be changing regularly. We can set up parts or all of your site so that you can easily make changes yourself, meaning that your site will be fresh and interesting for your customers and far more attractive to the search engines.