Who are we ?

The Complete Information Technology Company

Storm IT Solutions Limited is a professional IT, Web Design & Hosting Company based in the East End of Glasgow. We have been established for 5 years and during this period have successfully helped both new and established businesses from all over Scotland and the UK optimise their presence on the web.

What do we do ?

IT Services, Web Design, Web Hosting, SSL Certificates

We offer a complete bespoke web design service and can guide you through the process making each site as individual as your business.

We pride ourselves with our ability to mix the latest web technology with artistic flare and functional design. We cater for all budgets aiming to offer a good value, jargon free, friendly service to suite all your business needs.

We can offer a complete service from, carbon neutral web hosting, bespoke software, graphic design, ecommerce, database and content management systems as well as search engine optimisation.

We are always happy to answer any questions you may have either by phone or email.

Web Design Glasgow

Various Aspects of a Well Designed Website

There are many aspects of web design Glasgow internet marketers either tend to ignore, or fail to appreciate. If you have any form of online business you will likely need a website. Whether you are offering a product or a service, you want your offering to be found by people searching for what you provide, and a web presence is essential to achieve that.

That presence could be a blog, a Squidoo lens or even a page on a social network such as MySpace, but most people opt for a more traditional website. This can be a regular style of website or something more modern such as a Joomla site, but it should look attractive enough to entice visitors to stay with it once they have found it.

You could compare your website with a mall store. Would you walk into store that looked dingy and untidy, and where it was difficult to find the products you were seeking. Of course not! Were it brightly decorated, however, with lots of signs indicating where you could find the various products, and a well sited checkout that you didn’t have to hunt for, then you would likely have a browse round it.

A website is just like that. It has to be designed in such a way as to attract visitors, but it also has to get the visitors first, and that is another aspect of web design Glasgow webmasters should be aware of: search engine optimization or SEO in short. Let’s have a look at each of these in more detail – design and SEO.

Aspects of Web Design Glasgow Webmasters Should Consider

There are several aspects of web design that can be used to enhance the experience of visitors to your website, and persuade them to remain on the site. Statistics show that 60% - 70% visit for less than 30 seconds, although many of these will be bots and link-testing software. Remove these, and the average is 5 – 7 minutes. You also want them to return to it when they again have the need for your products. The major design elements are:

  1. Graphics.
    Without a doubt, graphics are the number one design feature that any good web page must have. There are two types of graphic:

     

    1. the heading, which should relate to the theme of the site where possible, and appear on every page to give a sense of continuity to the visitor, and
    2. incidental graphics relating to the product and other aspects of the site, such as a prominent guarantee seal, perhaps a checkout graphic and also clickable graphics that link to products or other web pages on the site.

    Without good graphics a web page looks dead and nothing puts visitors off that a page that is nothing but a mass of text. The graphic is the initial eye-catcher – the bait – that keeps them on the page long enough to see and start reading the content. It should not, however, overpower the page.

     

  2. Content
    Every web page should have textual content that offers the visitor useful information on the theme or niche of the website. This should be sufficiently interesting to keep the visitor on the page, and end with a link that they have to click to proceed. This link should be additional to the normal site navigation.

     

  3. Navigation
    The navigation should be organized in such a way that the search engine spiders scan the text before hitting the links that will lead them from the page. This can be done in a number of ways by means of CSS or HTML tables. The link at the end of your article should take the reader to a page relating to theme of the article. This can be an expansion of the article or the sales page of a product or service that you are selling.

    Your internal linking strategy should be carried out in such a way as to maximize your internal PageRank points for your more important pages at the expense of those with less importance. Each page starts with a Google PR of 1, and then changes according to the number of links into it, and also the number of links leaving the page it links to. Basically, every page should link to your home page, with the other links from it kept only to those that are essential. Do not link every page to every other page.

     

  4. The Product
    Your product should be prominently featured, with a link to buy or to checkout beside each product. It is also productive either to make the product graphic clickable to purchase, or to provide further information on it.

     

  5. Other Factors
    There are other factors involved in good web design Glasgow web designers should be aware of. One is the ‘squeeze page’, a page designed for no other purpose than to collect the email addresses of visitors. It should contain a form requesting the first name and email address as a minimum, and perhaps offer something in return for these details, such as a free course, report, newsletter or eBook.

    Details should be collected, the lists collated and gifts sent out by means of a good autoresponder. Many web hosts provide one, and they are also relatively inexpensive if paid monthly.

    The newsletter or free course is a good option, because both allow you to keep in contact with your visitors. Don’t make every email a sales letter though, and don’t even try to advertise your products until at least the third email. They will then have less reason to believe you to be a spammer, or simply trying to sell something.

    People respond much more positively if they believe that you are genuinely of help to them, without pushing your products with every communication.

    Other essential pages are the ‘Disclaimer’, ‘Contact’ page and ‘About’ page. You could also make up some questions and answers and publish these on a FAQ page. That tends to attract people. With regard to a Contact page, visitors feel more secure if you give them more than just an email address: they tend to respond well to a phone number, or even better, a physical address. A good guarantee, prominently placed, also instils confidence. Many buy just because of the guarantee, yet very few invoke it, so it is a good sales tool to have on your site.

    “You can’t lose with a guarantee: if you don’t like the product you get your money back, so you can’t lose. It’s a no-brainer!”

    These are the main factors on web design Glasgow ecommerce business owners should be aware of, and here at Storm IT Solutions we can incorporate all of these into your new website. You should not only be able to attract traffic from good search engine listings, but also keep them there when they arrive: the latter is the major part of the battle.

    At Storm IT Solutions we aim to offer a personalized web design service offering the most up-to-date technology.

    For examples of our work please browse our portfolio.