UK & Europe web design company

What is essential for your success?

A lot of our clients require multilingual sites, or ecommerce sites, however every single website we design has certain core elements that are essential to success. These are:

A bespoke and attractive design - Your site must accurately reflect your brand and be structured in a way that is intuitive and engaging. We carefully design each site in Photoshop before coding it.

A mobile friendly design - Today over 50% of internet users will be on a mobile device. All our sites therefore have a responsive design that adapts so it looks great on mobiles and tablets too, not just monitors.

A flexible CMS - The Content Management System (CMS) you choose determines how easy it is for you to edit the site and whether you're tied to a website design company if anything goes wrong. We have extensive experience with Drupal and WordPress are both open source CMS systems, meaning they've been developed by thousands of developers working together and have thousands of addons already created for them, so we don't waste our time and your money reinventing the wheel.

SEO optimisation - It's essential that your website can be found in Google for the correct keywords and we're an SEO company, as well as a web design company, with SEO consultants who speak English, French and German, and translators who speak these languages, plus Dutch, Spanish, and Italian. We understand how Google works and what's important to search engines.

Reliable hosting - We work closely with SiteGround, who provide reliable hosting and ongoing support and get great reviews. They also have data centers in the UK, mainland Europe, and the USA, which helps your website be as fast as possible to your local audience.
Bespoke website design

When creating a website we take your needs and your audience's needs into account as no two companies or industries are alike.

If you're selling bras or cars, for example, having a black, red and silver site might be perfect. If you're offering nature hiking holidays though, then this is unlikely to appeal to your target audience.

We start each project by discussing what pages your site will need, and from this creating a wireframe that determines where the main elements go. We also discuss your requirements with you and answer the following questions amongst others together:

Does the site need a header, or will a logo suffice?

What are the important unique selling points and how can we draw attention to these in the design?

What colour scheme and fonts are best?

What other images do we need to design for core pages?

How are we going to present your product or service at its best?

If it's a large site, is a drop-down or drop-right menu necessary?

Your project will then be assigned a dedicated graphic designer with plenty of experience in creating user-friendly websites that are tailored to your needs.

See sample websites we've created.
A mobile-friendly website

We ensure all our websites are 100% compatible with mobile devices and tablets, using a responsive design, rather than a separate mobile site, as this means no matter the width of the device, the site will adapt to it.

All the functionality of your site, whether a contact form, or complete ecommerce functionality will also work on mobiles, and we go the extra mile to be sure that your site will be truly mobile friendly. This includes things like:

Making sure your site is compliant with Google's guidelines (this is important for SEO too).

Ensuring the user-experience is great on all devices.

Minimising wasted space at the top of the screen on mobiles, so less scrolling is necessary.

Ensuring any expandable menus are easily noticeable and also including important links elsewhere, so they're not overlooked.

For full details of what's included, see details of our responsive web design service for mobiles and tablets.
WordPress or Drupal?

We design websites using a flexible Content Management System (CMS) so that you can have complete autonomy over your site once our work is done. We specialise in WordPress and Drupal and will recommend the most suitable CMS depending on your requirements (WordPress and Drupal are both good all-round CMS's whether you need an eCommerce website, blog or something highly customised and are great for designing multilingual sites).

While we can offer SEO services in most CMS systems, and sometimes translation too, we only offer web design and development services for these three CMS systems. We have carefully selected these because all three:

Are open-source and have been created by thousands of developers who have refined them over years of work.

Have numerous addons or modules that let you easily add new functionality, saving time and money.

Offer excellent SEO features, including easy to edit Metatags for every page, good default structures, and user-friendly URLs.

Allow multilingual web design with a shared database, so if you want separate sites for the UK, France, and Germany, say, you don't need to do three times the work, but can instead focus on creating your site once, then relatively easily translating that site into each extra language.

The CMS's allow you to easily edit and expand your site and upload new images. To see how using a CMS works, read our Drupal tutorial for beginners or a WordPress tutorial. We can also create eCommerce sites, community portals, photo galleries and interactive maps.

If you're looking for more complex functionality, then please get in touch and we'll do our utmost to help you.
European SEO to rank well with Google

Whether you're targeting the UK, France, Germany, or another country, having excellent on-page SEO is essential in order to rank well with Google, drive traffic to your site and ultimately, to generate sales.

Our web developers code sites with SEO in mind and we can provide advice on the best SEO practice for multilingual web design. This starts with whether to use separate domains or sub-domains, using the right title tags so Google can easily identify what your titles are, making sites mobile friendly and creating a fast website to reduce bounce rate. User-experience is also critical to SEO, as Google use artificial intelligence algorithms, as well as actual humans to review sites. See details of our SEO audit service to discover what other factors are important for successful SEO.

Finally Google consider on-page SEO and backlinks to be of equal importance in terms of where your site ranks, and we therefore also offer a European link building service, generating relevant high authority links from the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy or the Netherlands, as required.
Fluent translations for multilingual websites

Our talented team offer copywriting and website translation in 6 European languages, so if you're not sure what to write yourself, or want to create a multilingual website, we can help you.

All our translators are native speakers educated to degree level or higher with previous experience in translation, copywriting, or digital marketing, so even if you don't speak a language fluently yourself, you can rest assured that we do.

When completing website translations we make sure to translate all the fiddly bits - the Metatags, footer text, eCommerce messages and automatically generated emails, so that international visitors will have a seamless experience.

Discover more about our website translation service service.
eCommerce and other functionality

We've created eCommerce sites in over ten different languages for a wide range of companies and when designing an eCommerce site will:

Ensure that products are grouped into appropriate categories and are easy to find.

Enable payment in the currency of your choice. This can be pounds for your UK site and Euros for visitors from Europe, for example.

Enable payment by bank transfer or PayPal for your online store.

Automatically generate invoices for every purchase.

Allow you to add postal charges as necessary, and manage stock.

Provide an intuitive admin interface for your company to login to that lets you see orders, stock, etc.

See more details on our European eCommerce web design options.

The web design process

It normally takes us at least 6 weeks from project start to go live, as web design is a collaborative project and requires input from a lot of different people. Where two or more people can work simultaneously, they will do.

We start by discussing your requirements and depending on the complexity of your site, we will then put together the following:

WireFrame - A rough guide as to how different elements of your site fit together.
Complete design in PhotoShop - Our graphic designer will also carefully create at least the home page in PhotoShop.
Functional specification - A detailed document specifying all the functionality, different content types, user roles, etc. that your site requires.
Keyword research - Research into the monthly search volume and SEO competitiveness of different keywords.

This is sent to you for your approval and after incorporating any requested modifications we then:

Design the theme - The template on which all pages are added. Some sites have different themes for different types of content.
Create any illustrations - Design any illustrations your site needs, which can include a logo for new companies.
Write any content - If you need new content in your primary language, we will write it and send it to you for approval in a Word document or Excel spreadsheet before adding it to the site.
Create pages - Add all the pages, including the layout for core pages that have a unique look and feel.
SEO optimisation - While we keep SEO in mind as we write content, we will do a final check and write the Metatags and do other on-page SEO.
Translation - If required, we will translate your website using an SEO translation.
Testing - We will test the site and ask you to test it to and after making any final modifications...
Go live - We put your site live, and provide ongoing hosting and support.