Website Services

Introduction

Do you want a simple, easy to use website to effectively describe and help you promote your business or organisation?

Do you want as little involvement in the day to day running of your site as possible, so that you can spend your valuable time on your main business activities?

If your answer is yes to both of these questions, then you have come to the right place. Here at Aardstorm we can provide you with a simple, easy to use website that is compatible with the major internet browsers and search engines. You will then be able to direct your potential and existing customers to your site from your other promotional activites to describe in more detail the activities, services and/or products of your business or organisation. You will also be able to accept enquiries and even orders through your new site. We will handle any queries regarding your site itself, and will forward other, business-related messages for you to deal with. Once your site is up and running, you will be able to request changes to its content or even design as often as you like, so that you can keep your customers informed about your activities.

The remainder of this section describes the website design, hosting, and management services provided by Aardstorm in more detail. To aid this description, our design and hosting/management services are described separately below and on subsequent pages. Please note, however, that they are only available as a complete package; we do not provide individual elements as a stand-alone service.

Website Design

Aardstorm normally provides a semi-custom website design service. That is, we will adapt a standard basic site design to your requirements, by combining standard components. You will be able to choose characteristics such as the colour scheme, style of page navigation controls, and size and style of text. Unless you specify otherwise, we will endeavour to match the style of any existing promotional material you supply us with. This keeps the design time and cost down, and reduces the need for multiple stages of a design and approval process. If, however, you require a more fully custom design, then we can provide that too; please enquire for details and a full quotation.

Our standard design process also expects you to provide most of the text, pictures and graphics for us to arrange into the page structure of your site, along with the standard components. You can, however, combine our design service with our authoring and picture services to commission us to produce some or all of the text and /or pictures used on your site. We can accept your data in a wide variety formats, both electronic and on paper or film, and will convert it as necessary for use on your site.

Click here for further details of our Website Design Service.

Website Management & Hosting

Once we have designed and implemented your new website, we will host it on one of our servers (a computer contniuously connected to the internet that stores the pages that make up your site and supplies them on demand to any internet user that wants to read them). We will also provide a link from this site to yours so that the search engines can find it. At your request, we can submit your site to the major search engines and directories, and search for other sites to link to yours to generate relevant traffic to your site and improve its search engine ranking. A further technique that can be used to improve your search engine performance is to write articles for distribution to other websites. Note that these are not advertisements but informative articles about subjects related to your website that include links to your site. You can write and distribute such articles yourself, or you can commission us to do it for you, through our authoring service.

Your website will typically contain some sort of 'contact us' feature, to allow your potential customers to ask questions about your business, request a quotation for, or even purchase, your services to products. We will endeavour to protect this facility from abuse by the automated e-mail address gathering 'robots' used by spammers, so that only genuine queries are forwarded to the e-mail address you provide to receive them. We will also provide a separate facility for queries about your website itself; we will then handle all such messages without your involvement.

During the lifetime of your website, it is highly likely that you will want it to be changed from time to time, to reflect changes in your organisation or its products or activities. You may want the content of certain pages modified, or other pages added or removed. To support this, we operate a system of 'update units', that you can purchase either as and when required, or in advance to receive a quantity discount.

Click here for further details of our Website Management and Hosting Service.