CMS Scot Web Design Agency, Fife, Scotland

A quality website is an investment, not an expense.

Overview

We’re a web agency, based in Scotland, that takes care to marry effective design with reliable and secure code. Mobile has to work as well as desktop, and our web development skills are backed by deep understanding of servers, hosting, web technologies, and optimising content for both swift delivery and Search Engine placement.

We’ll take the time to learn what you do as a business and what you want to achieve online; we’ll deliver an easy-to-use site that is fully managed by us, and fully usable by you.

Read below about our approaches to design, content, custom development, and management.

Design

The choice is yours. The colours, feel, layout, fonts, type and size of page – anything is possible.

We’re happy to work from a strict set of Style Guidelines, from a vague ‘I quite like that site’, or from our own instincts.

If you have a brand identity, we’ll of course use that – if not, we’ll help you in designing one, one that works for all users, all devices.

K.I.S.S.

Usability, the way a user will see, use and navigate your site is key. So, Keep It Simple.

Site architecture, on-page structure – these matter to us, to customers, and to Google (other Search Engines are available). So rich & visually appealing, yes – complex, unintuitive, no.

The way a page and a site are structured, the architecture, these matter very much when it comes to maximising natural (‘organic’) traffic from Google.

Images

Images are one of the cornerstones of your site and web design – another is good, well written, well-edited and well-presented copy.

Image galleries come in many shapes and sizes. They can be used as ‘link boxes’ to link to pages, or they can link to a light-box that shows full-size versions. They can be a mix of static images and video, a side-scrolling video carousel.

The important thing is that images are optimised for fast loading – that’s achieved by compression, modern formats (.webp, not .jpeg), ‘lazy-loading’ and by making sure that you’re not forcing desktop-quality images down the data-allowance of mobile users!

Copywiting

And then there’s copy. Last, but very much not least.

We have writers and editors in-house, and we’ll recommend tweaks and approaches when it comes to taking your words and making them web-friendly.

We’ll also provide help and training for any users who will be adding content to your site once delivered.

! Geeky Stuff !

The detail below is the sort of information that may leave you cold, and that’s fine. But it’s the sort of detail that doesn’t show in a neat animation or an elegant gallery, it’s what lets you know that your business or project won’t hit the buffers when you need to change, improve or add something as your scope grows, as your traffic increases, and you realise you need ‘that thing’ that your competitor has on their site. That’s when you need code, not just content.

Content Management

A CMS* is great. A custom one is greater.

Many, many web designers and web design agencies will point you at a shop-window portfolio, high on eye-candy but low on detail. It’s what you, the client, needs and expects in terms of function, purpose and end results that matters, not just the window-dressing.

You need to know that your designer can design what you require, not just what their standard set-up can deliver, and that goes far beyond imaging and layout. They’re critical, of course, but when you need a complex form or a database that works with your unique requirements, when you’re selling unusual products, when you need to organise and manage custom workflows, then you’ll need a developer with experience, one that can deliver a tailor-made solution, not an off-the-shelf compromise.

*Content Management System

Hosting & Servers

Websites are stored – “hosted” – on a publicly-accessible computer (a server). The storage space, and the features that come with it, make up your hosting plan. If you have an existing plan and all is working well, then we’ll work with that.
Equally, we’re happy to help you move to a new server/host, and we’ll of course recommend a setup based on your requirements, both actual and projected.

We work with dedicated servers, shared hosting, VPS hosting, and all of these can be through ‘bare-metal’ shell access, or with a management layer in between – cPanel, WHM, Plesk, ISPconfig for example.

We’ll help – or fully manage – with email setup, webmail setup, FTP setup, we can register domain names, manage your DNS, and we’re happy to manage your updates when it comes to the likes of WordPress or other CMS platforms.

Integrations & APIs

Another area where ability and experience may not be visible on the surface is that of connecting with ‘other’ systems, from payment gateway providers to add on services such as Live Chat, to complex inventory, shipping and ordering configuration.

You may not need integration, typically via an API (of which there are many types) in early stages, but when a potential partner or value-adder gets in touch and says something like “just put us in touch with your developer and we’ll get you hooked up to our API” then cracks may begin to show. Your site will grow, your services and profile will develop, and your site will need to do the same. We’ll be ready for you.

We have this experience in house, we don’t farm out the tricky stuff – we love the tricky stuff!

Code & custom development

We work, mainly, with PHP/MySQL (WordPress and custom code), and the ubiquitous jQuery/CSS/Ajax side dishes. We develop locally on Virtualbox VM’s, pushing to staging servers and development branches as required.

We’ve been working with the CS-Cart e-commerce platform for many years, and have modified it all to meet all sorts of custom requirements, as well as integrating with Stripe and Sagepay (Opayo) for payment processing.

If you need to connect to an API or add a third-party widget, we can do that, having in the past created joined-up instances via SOAP or JSON.

Over the years we have done a lot of complex integrations with Google and OpenStreetMap mapping, both in terms of presentation and in terms of geo-location, filtering, clustering and algorithms.