ACROWEB :: Why Choose Us?

There are hundreds of website designers and builders today. So why choose us?

• Change Your Website Content Yourself with a Content Management System
• Search Engine Optmisation from the Ground Up
• Custom graphics – exactly how you want
• Value for Money – high speed, low price.

Change Your Website Content Yourself

Content (words and images on your website) is the basis of your website. It is what your customers read and hopefully digest with interest. Your content is responsible for introducing your company, inducing trust and (hopefully) selling your product(s) to your customers.

Your content also brings traffic (users) to your website. Google and other search engines index (just like in a book) your content, pulling out keywords. To a search engine, your content defines your site. They do not ‘see’ the beautiful design work and flash animations.

You need to be able to change your own content at any time. We can illustrate this with an example:

Company X sells umbrellas online.

In March 2008, a brilliant design agency finished building them an all-singing-all-dancing website:

The front page featured an incredible animation featuring the opening and closing of their top selling umbrella in the rain. The website had an online catalogue and their customers could read about their 12 different products and make purchases online. They also had an ‘About Us’ page that introduced the 5 people in the company.

In August 2008, things were going so well (it had been a very wet summer) that Company X decided to hire a new business manager . The business manager put forward a plan to introduce 3 special snow umbrellas into their product line, in time for Christmas.

Company X approached the design agency because they needed to add the information about the new umbrellas to their online catalogue and details of the new team member to the ‘About Us’ page. They also wanted to change their front-page animation to feature their new product range.

The design agency was very busy and had picked up some new clients over the summer. To make the requested changes, they gave a quote similar to the cost of the initial website build. Company X was clearly not happy with this so they decided to approach another design agency. The second design agency gave a more reasonable quote but they had to charge for the time it took to make sense of the previous agency’s site!

No matter WHAT your website, you NEED to be able to change YOUR content. Employing a web developer every time you change your content is like paying to redecorate your house every time you hoover!

EVERY acroweb website has a Content Management System (CMS). In simple terms, a CMS allows you (the company) to log in to your site and very quickly change your content. It is no harder than using a word processor or writing an email, it even has a spell checker!

Search Engine Optimized from the Ground Up

A lot of web designers come from an ‘arty’ background. They tend to like shiny graphics, imagery and animations. Because of limited number of fonts that web browsers like Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Safari use, some designers include images of text rather than text itself on the websites.

Unfortunately, Google and other search engines like Bing and Yahoo, are not currently capable of ‘seeing’ these parts of a website – imagine taking a photo of a document and trying to open it in Microsoft Word in order to change some of the wording…

That is not to say that websites can’t contain graphics and still be ‘search engine friendly’. It is just a question of finding a balance between graphics (for the user) and text (for the user and the search engines).

As mentioned above, Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines ‘index’ the text in your web pages by pulling out keywords from the content. The search engines use these keywords to define what your content is about. When someone searches on Google or the other search engines, your site will only show if it contains the keywords that the searcher has entered.

It is therefore very important to know which keywords to put into your site. For example, if your site is all about parasols (sun umbrellas), you may have written all of your content referring to your products as parasols. However, a little bit of keyword analysis may reveal that while there are 3000 searches a month (in the summer) for ‘parasol’ there are 30,000 for ‘sun umbrella’.

At acroweb, our websites are all listed on the major search engines and created to be ‘search engine friendly’ in terms of a good balance between graphics and text. We also perform some initial keyword analysis for you when building your site to make sure you are using the best words. If you like, we can take this a step further and rewrite all of your content so that it is optimized for the search engines.

If you already have a website and are wondering why you get less hits from Google than you would like, we can also provide you with a complete content and keyword analysis report

Custom Graphics – Exactly How you Want

It is very important to remember when building websites that they are looked at in many different ways. The main web browsers (Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Apple Safari and Google Chrome) all ‘render’ your web pages slightly differently. Also, iPhones, Android phones and other hand-held browsers have smaller, lower resolution screens than laptops and desktops.

With this in mind, our websites are styled individually to fit in with your personal requirements and/or company logo and colours. We then test your site on a number of browsers at a number of different screen resolutions to make sure that it looks right and works correctly.

If you are not sure of how you want your website to look, we can offer you suggestions and work with you to come up with a design and we don’t go any further until you are 100% happy.

Value for money

Because we are not re-inventing the wheel every time we build a new website, we can do it a lot faster:

For the core of the website, we use an appropriate (pre-built) content management system (CMS) like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Magento or Zen Cart. These systems are free and already have many of the back-end (the bit of the website that you see to change the content) parts your website will need. We then customize the system to your requirements and add on your customized front-end (the bit of the website that your customers will see).

This all means that you get a fully functioning website using the latest technologies in a fraction of the time and cost.

For an idea of how much it will cost, have a look at our pricing outline.

If you want to see some of the work we have done, check out our portolio.