WEBSITES
Based on your business / organisational or communication needs you may need anything from a simple content website, blog, forum, shopping cart, business directory or something custom written for your needs.
I normally start with the following questions:
- What is your AIM with this website?
- Who will updated the website?
- How often will it be updated?
- Do you need to sell / take orders or receive payments from the website?
- Do you need to integrate with any other system?
- Who is your biggest opposition on the internet?
- Where (geographically) is the majority of your clients?
- Do you have an electronic database of past customers?
CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS (CMS)
Content management systems are the tools we (or you) use to update websites. Some (most) editing tool are online and require very little official training and to some extend can be used by every online user and the end results depend LARGELY on your creativity & time available.
Some of the most often used CMS systems are WordPress, Joomla!, Blogger, Drupal & TYPO3.
We exclusively use WordPress:
- Market standard
- Most often chosen by developers & designers
- Large developer base and endless options & modules.
- We have standardised on WPAstra as our template partner for developing and maintaining fast loading, mobile compliant websites & further enhanced our offering with Beaver Builder to give our website a "drag & drop" live editing capability. - NO CODING and DEVELOPMENTÂ NEEDED!
BLOGS & FORUMS
Blogs and forums are used then you wish to interact with your users and get feedback on articles you post.
With blogs:
- The focus is on the article and normally is based around a well written articles with supporting images or pictures.
- It is created by the owner / webmaster / admin person.
- Users may provide feedback on what is published.
With forums:
- The focus is on allowing the users to start the discussion or topic.
- Discussions are less formal, may or may not contain images and is less formal
- Normally moderated by admin staff
SHOPPING CART SYSTEMS
When you need to sell more that one product and users will have to "add products to a cart" in order to calculate how much the order will be the best solution is normally to run a shopping cart on your website. We use Woocommerce to manage products, taking orders, tracking stock, managing discounts & promotions and normally will integrate with:
- One or more payment gateways like Yoco, Payfast or Snapscan to receive payment by credit card.
- Integrate with Uafrica for courier services
Please contact us to discuss your website requirements