Web Design and Development
Developing a Website which Appeals to Your Target Audience in Export Markets
A compelling website and good design is key and appeals to your clients, but working with web agencies can be hard work. We help work with your chosen agency or indeed help you select a suitable agency, so a solid international site can be built.
When we chose the focus of our business, this initially did not include web design and development. This is still largely the case, because we believe it is important to focus on a defined set of core competencies and also because we like words more than pictures and don’t see ourselves as designers.
However, of course web design and development is closely related to website localisation, so there there are certain ways in which we get involved in web design and development, in particular:
Advisory role in website design and development
With a solid background and experience in IT and web technology, we understand the key aspects of web development, the web development cycle, the importance of a good information architecture, the problems that can occur and the potential and limitations of web development.
As such, we often work with clients in an advisory role, with their internal development team or with their chosen external design and development agency.
This is particularly important with international websites, where special issues have to be considered, also with view to international SEO, where, as we come to learn, only very few agencies have the relevant experience and additional advice is needed.
For our clients, the benefit of this arrangement is that they have an independent expert on board who can provide additional advice, adds special expertise in relation to website internationalisation, and keeps a close eye on ISEO from day one of the development project.
Web agency and web platform selection
In a number of cases, we have also assisted clients in selecting the platform for their website / ecommerce store and or selecting the agency to work with.
Using our consultancy experience, we have approach such projects in a systematic way, working with the client to develop and prioritise requirements, evaluating and vetting systems and/or agencies with regard to these requirements, and providing recommendations on best choice of platform and/or design and development agency.
The focus here, as in working the agencies, is be an independent expert and support our clients’ needs. In addition, we like to enable clients to be as self-sufficient as possible, i.e. work with platforms or systems that give some control back to the clients and thus minimise the need to outsource change work after the site is built. We believe this is important, not only from the point of view of the client’s budget, but also as in marketing it’s important to be able to make changes, develop campaigns etc. quickly – and the website should be developed in such a way that clients can do some of these tasks easily themselves.
Small-scale website development
We are big fans of WordPress and the flexibility and control WordPress offers and the tools available for the development of international websites. As such, we sometimes work the clients on small-scale development projects, using existing WordPress themes and adapting them to their requirements. We have built multilingual sites in this manner (including this site) and sometimes this can also be useful and quick way for building what we call mini-sites, i.e. subsets of sites for an export market, e.g. for trial purposes, where a client first wants to tests the market without spending excessive amount of money.
