What's your website done for you today?

The MorganAlley Websmithery

For over six years the MorganAlley team have been quietly creating and developing websites for customers in various ways. We've done initial design of new sites, re-designs of existing sites and adding functionality. What we specialise in, though, is taking existing websites that are not much more than a pretty picture with a phone number, and adding functionality that makes them useful for you. This might be simply adding our superb content management system to it so that you can create all the pages you want to, to adding blogs, image management, resource booking and calendaring, and tools to help you do more sophisticated marketing for the 21st century. Some of the things we've done for clients are:

• Website 1 - The client had managed several websites for their community for years but when they needed to take a new board game online for the Discworld community (a huge community around Terry Pratchett's Discworld book series), they were quoted a requirement of 2 years programming and £2million. We managed to produce the first release in 3 weeks for significantly less and, as an added bonus, were able to build the largest online Discworld community for them in less than 2 years.
• Website 2 - For a little over half what an educational company in the USA paid for a 5 page static HTML site, we were able to build a fully content-managed site with taxonomical content categorisation that makes it easy for the site owner to manage a large amount of content. Added to this was a hierarchical access control system that allows some usrs full access and other users tiered access based upon their role in the organisation. Additionally, untrained users in the field, on low-bandwidth Internet connections in China and elsewhere can update the site easily and often. The company now saves thousands per year in staff costs by being able to manage personnel communications through their website.
• Website 3 - When the owner of a local venue came to us in the midst of a re-brand, we worked with her to develop a look and feel with a wide range of functionality so that she and her staff could manage the online presence themselves. The result is the definitive jazz club South of the river with a search engine presence far surpassing much longer established competition.
• Website 4 - A large national charity commissioned a website to present the activities and updates of a programme they jointly ran with Her Majesty's Dep't for International Development (DFID). The original website wasn't much more than 12 pages with a blog attached and more functionality was needed. MorganAlley quickly pulled all of the existing static and blog content into their content management system then set about adding loads of extra control and admin functionality, moderation control workflow to allow external personnel, and third parties, to submit content, integration with major social networks and WCAG accessibility upgrades. The final product cost less than half the original site yet easily yielded ten times the functional capability, increased productivity by a factor of 3.75 and allowed non-technical staff to update and manage the site with less than a half-day's training.

Our Design Principles

Our sites differ from some forms of traditional web design in several significant ways that benefit you directly:

1. All of our sites can be easily maintained, even by webmasters with minimal technical skills. If you can send an e-mail, you can add a page to your site - easy as that! Our systems make it easy for webmasters and site owners to add content very quickly and easily.
2. We include website add-ons such as blogs and forums, built in to all of our sites, that are easy to manage and use. This is new to some webmasters but is a good thing because it humanises the site and make's it attractive to search engines.
3. Our sites are built from the beginning to be easily accessible by people with various disabilities. They are logically arranged so that a person using an accessibility browser will be able to find the content they're looking for quickly and easily. We don't believe people with disabilities should be treated as second class on the sites we put on the Net.
4. A superb side-effect of building in accessibility the way we do it is that the site structure and content (the fundamentals) are optimised for search engine indexing from the start. This, along with writing good content, are the most important factors in getting good search engine results.
5. When the time comes for a new look only a couple of files have to change to give the site a completely fresh look and feel. No huge, expensive and risky operations that take months.

Importantly we don't use a "cookie-cutter" approach to the sites we work with (as you can see from our testimonial sites above). We realise websites come in all shapes and sizes. Some folk are ardent DIY'ers, others need an all-singing, all dancing e-commerce site with bells and whistles. We have experience with, and can help with, both of those and most in between. So does your website help you do business or does it just sit there looking pretty? Drop us a line and let us have a chat about how we can help out. We can almost certainly make your website useful for you.