Web Design & Development Services
If you’re looking for an established and experienced website design and development partner, then you’ve come to the right place.
SG has been designing and building websites for clients for over 20 years.
It’s a big part of what we do, as a creative marketing agency working with a wide range of clients – large and small - from our offices in the heart of Bristol.
Websites that help businesses to grow
We work in partnership with our clients to create websites that achieve real results. We tend to work with ambitious businesses, both emerging and long-established, who need their websites to work hard for them, and help their enterprises to grow.
We do this by:
- Knowing who your customers / clients are and what they want
- Understanding your objectives / KPIs and planning the site accordingly
- Studying the landscape and what your competitors are doing
- Good UX and UI planning
- Presenting quality content in key locations to interest and engage
- Helping you create valuable, shareable content that will keep the site constantly up to date
- Featuring well placed, tactical, appropriate and actional calls to action
- Using strong creative to draw in visitors and attract them to content
- Mobile first design and build
- SEO is built in from the start
However, we don’t just focus on the hard stats. These are important, and we know that ROI is king. But we are also a marketing agency, so we place equal emphasis on brand and communications objectives. We make sure that every new website tells the world about the business, their brand, and their purpose, generating real, engaged interactions with people who will become valuable future clients and customers.
Bringing brands to life
Our websites tell brand stories. They give brands a place to live and breathe online. They communicate purpose. They make the promises, and show the evidence. They create content-rich hubs which inspire and feed ongoing marketing campaigns, digital, social, OOO, experiential and offline.
Most importantly we create works of passion and purpose.
It is too easy to reduce digital marketing down to facts and figures, hits and click through rates, and create pages of content that work for Google but do nothing for the living, breathing website visitor, and which, in some cases, actually undermine brands. We strike the difficult balance between functional, effective, successful sites, but which also showcase your thriving business’s unique products, services, values and purpose, and which engage and inspire customers and clients.
Creative technical expertise
Good web design is critical to the success of any new website. Designing for web is a particular talent, and every member of our creative team is experienced in making websites look equally beautiful and working perfectly on mobile and desktop. They understand how to create web pages that draw the user to the key areas of content and encourage key actions, optimising site usage and goal completions without compromising on beauty.
We have an established team of web developers across a range of platforms in our regular agency team, and choose from them individually for each project, depending on the type of site and the client.
We mostly develop in WordPress and Umbraco, which have excellent user-friendly CMSs (content management systems) but we also work in PHP, Magento, Shopify, Squarespace, and any other platforms or languages as and when needed.
Our developers are experienced in creating or integrating data feeds for websites requiring database search functionality, which can be seen on several of our property websites, including Alder King and Burston Cook
We also have experienced UX and UI designers for larger scale and more complex projects where user journey mapping and AB testing (for example) are required.
SEO and search perfection
All our websites are set up with the essential SEO features and functionality in place. We also have a dedicated team for ongoing, tactical SEO programmes, for both existing and newly created sites. Effective SEO is a commitment to ongoing activity, as business objectives and Google’s algorithms change regularly.
How do we ensure success?
It’s a good question. And we answer it with another question: What does success look like for you? It’s definitely not the same for everyone.
So always start by setting objectives and making sure that the team delivering them for you are the best people for the task.
Excellent client reviews
We value nothing more than hearing what our clients say about us. Luckily, they have nothing but good things to report about our website design and development services.
It probably helps that we’re a stable team of experienced marketers, who are confident in managing website projects. Our organised approach makes projects run smoothly and reduces stress for clients, at what can be a hectic time. We keep in regular contact throughout, with update calls and meetings, and an open communications style that ensures everyone knows what’s going on, and what’s required of them, at all times.
Apparently, we are quite nice, too!
Avalon Planning
Affordable websites
If you’re looking for a low cost, affordable website for your business – perhaps you’re a small start-up business, or a charity – we can help.
We have developed a different approach for smaller, less complex sites. By changing how we design and build the sites, and how we manage projects, we can offer a low-cost website design and development service to meet even the smallest budgets.
Contact our team to find out more.
FAQs
Understandably, this is one of the first questions we’re asked.
Lack of clarity on costs is one of the most common complaints from people who’ve had bad experiences on website projects.
We avoid this by being completely clear about costs from the outset.
We start by taking a very detailed brief on what kind of site you want to create. We then provide a fully costed proposal setting out exactly what we recommend, based on your needs and what we think or know to be an appropriate expense level.
Before we begin working together, we finetune and then agree this in a detailed, costed proposal. This forms an agreement between you and us, and we guarantee to stick to the agreed project cost, unless the terms of the project are significantly changed.
Ultimately, though, the key to keeping projects on budget and on time, is excellent project management and a strong, collaborative relationship with you, the client.
Success criteria aren’t the same for everyone, so we always start by establishing what you want your website to achieve – which could be enquiries, page views, longer user journeys, purchases, enquiries, downloads of assets, views of videos, or being seen on Google for priority search terms. It’s probably a mix of the above. From this, along with a good understanding of your business and marketing objectives, we can plan a site to meet your needs.
Then it’s down to hands-on, proactive project management, regular contact with you, the skills of a talented team, and actually, it’s also about you doing your bit, providing decisions and content at critical points. But don’t worry, we’ll make sure you know what you need to do and by when!
Top class project management is critical to the success of all website projects. We place great emphasis on this, and the amount of time and resource we allow for depends on the scale and complexity of the project. But we never underestimate the importance of project management and so we don’t skimp when we scope out the project.
It’s also why we have a highly experienced and dedicated client team in place, who are motivated by client satisfaction and project outcomes.
Whether you’re a capable website project leader, who knows what they want and just needs a competent team to deliver it, or someone with limited website knowledge and experience needing more advice and guidance, we can give you the support you need.
And we know from experience, that no client has any time to spare, so our tried and tested no-nonsense approach will make sure you get what you want, when you want it; promises kept, no balls dropped.
We value nothing more than hearing what our clients say about us. Luckily, they have nothing but good things to report about our website design and development services.
Apparently our structured, organised, supportive and responsive approach takes the heat out of what can be a stressful time. And we are quite nice people, too! The websites we produce speak for themselves.
If you’re looking for a low cost, affordable website for your business – perhaps you’re a small start-up business, or a charity – we can definitely help.
We have developed a different approach for smaller, less complex sites. By changing how we design and build the sites, and how we manage projects, we can offer a low-cost website design and development service to meet even the smallest budgets.
There are thousands – tens of thousands – of WordPress templates, and sometimes using one of them can be the right solution. Usually, if a client has a very limited budget or if they don’t want to have much creative design in their site. We can work with templates, and customise them to ensure that we still produce a distinctive site.
But most of our sites are bespoke builds, whichever platform we use. This way, we can ensure that the design, structure, page layout and functionality is exactly suited to your needs and brief. We can also control all of the code, and keep it clean.
However your site is built, we will quality control it to ensure it’s individual, secure.
We can absolutely help with hosting, we invest in secure and robust servers to ensure your website is in a safe and responsive space to ensure you get the best results out of your new website.
We include SEO practise with our new website builds, however, to really ensure you are ranking the best have a look at our SEO service here to find out more about how we can get your website ranking.