Website Design &
Development

We build WordPress & WooCommerce websites that perform. 10 years. Hundreds of sites. Built on the web’s most popular platform.

Did you know that have just seven seconds to grab the attention of your online visitors? That’s all it takes to decide if your business or website is what they’re looking for.

We’ve spent years mastering the art of crafting beautiful, stand-out websites that work hard for our clients. In fact, many of our customers trust us with the full life cycle of their website – creation, hosting, maintenance and further development. Our team of expert developers and designers can produce sites with any goal in mind.

Whether you’re an eCommerce brand or a services led business, we’ll work with you to create the perfect mix of style and functionality.

With over 100 years of combined experience, we’ve learnt that building a high-performance website can’t be done with just technical ability. We’ve created an approach that combines development know-how with decades of business acumen and branding expertise.

Why you can trust us to build your website

Starting out in 1999, we have over 20 years of experience working in countless industries

  • Our in-house team consists of the perfect mix of designers and developers
  • We manage over 150 websites and have built over 200 sites to date
  • We take our own advice – we’ve built our own eCommerce site, and it has gone from strength to strength. Read our case study here

Why you need a website

Think of your website as your shopfront. Anyone looking for your business, product or service, will likely start by searching Google. In this digital, post-pandemic world, many customers will visit your website before making a purchase or engaging with you. Having a great website and a strong online presence could be the difference between growing your business and losing customers to your competitors.

Of course, having an online presence doesn’t stop at having a website, but it’s the best place to start.

It’s a key factor for influencing credibility for your business.

What is the process of developing a website?

Thinking

Our process starts long before we begin developing your website. What sets Browndog apart from other agencies is that we really take the time to understand your objectives and get under the skin of your business.

You see, we don’t believe we can really do the best job until we completely understand what you do.

We’ll start with an informal discussion about why you want to build a website and what you expect it to do for you. This will help us to decide what kind of style you need and establish a list of required functionalities. We’ll talk you through best practice and provide project management to ensure the best results, on time and on budget.

One of the great things about working with Browndog is that the whole team gets involved with your project. We’ll conduct extensive research on your business and your competitors, to give you a full picture of what works well and what doesn’t. We’ll feed all of this into a detailed proposal to give you expert recommendations and a breakdown of the kind of return you can expect.

Specification

Most website projects will fall into the category of a brochure style website or an eCommerce website. Our expert team are at the forefront of technology so that we can always offer you the best solution for your needs.

We specialise in the open-source platform and widely recognised leading website builder, WordPress. We believe it provides the best base for our clients. WordPress websites are easy to update, they’re SEO friendly and they’re used globally, with more than 455 million WordPress websites in existence today and a global market share of 43% (Source: W3Techs, 2022) We use WordPress so that we can give you bespoke and specific functionality to suit your requirements.

We rely on WooCommerce when developing our clients’ eCommerce websites. With 29% market share of all eCommerce sites worldwide (source: Statista, 2022) making it the most popular eCommerce platform, and with 25% of the top 1 million sites that are eCommerce enabled using it too, this powerful and popular tool gives us all the flexibility and features needed for an industry leading ecommerce presence. From order tracking to discount codes and inventory management, WooCommerce can do it all.

The most important part of deciding on the specification of your new website is placing your customer at the heart of the project, because it needs to be right for them. Designing and developing your new website, we will initially focus on how you want your visitor to move around your site. What interactions might they have? What page should they visit next? What action do you want them to take on each page?

Branding & Styling

If you already have a brand, perfect! We can work with that to develop a style that fits with the one you’ve already established. If you’re completely new to marketing and you don’t yet have mature branding, don’t worry, we do that too. 

Take a look at our branding services for a little more info.

Once we’re all agreed on the goals of your website and the style, we’ll put together a sitemap and wireframes (a 2D illustration of the pages that will show you the space allocation, where the content will go and the intended actions of the visitor) as a starting point.

The design of your website is very important – it creates the first impression of your brand and has just a matter of seconds to hold the attention of your visitors. Styling, colours, and graphics will come next.

Building streamlined, fast and user-friendly websites is our specialty. Our creative web design professionals will consider the user interface and user experience (UI/UX) to make sure that your new website is easy to navigate as well as visually appealing. We’ll get feedback from you at each stage of our process before moving on.

We’ll put together a mock-up of a selection of web pages to show you how they’ll look on the page before we hand over to our front-end website developers, who will bring it to life.

We can work on design elements such as motion graphics and animations to help engage visitors on your site too. We recommend using moving banners and animated features to bring your content off the page.

Build

The website build phase will be scheduled once your design is signed off and we have all the content prepared. Keeping user experience at the top of the agenda, it’s important to make sure you have a website that is easily accessible on any device.

Mobile Responsiveness is an important part of your build because more than half of all website traffic comes from mobile. Our website developers will build and test each page to make sure the look and feel translates on mobile, tablet and desktop.

Your new website will go through a rigorous testing process to make sure all links, buttons, forms and plugins work together seamlessly. We’ll optimise the content to ensure the best site loading speed, as this is an important aspect of SEO.

Once complete, we advise testing your new website with a soft launch for colleagues, friends and family to review.

Once your website is built, it’s important to track how it is performing. We’ll install Google tracking code and set up analytics for you before go-live. This will help you to understand the demographics and volume of your website visitors. Our web team will be happy to discuss bespoke goal and report management to help you make the most out of your website.

Go live!

As you can imagine, we’ve successfully launched many websites, so we’re happy to support you in your post-live activities too. If you have your own in-house marketing team, they may wish to update content and make changes to the website after going live.

In fact, we’d recommend that you regularly update the content on your website to get the best possible traffic. We’ll work with your team to give them training on the website CMS and answer any questions they may have.

If you do not have an in-house team, we can give you ongoing support such as creating content, social media marketing, email marketing, branding, paid search and SEO work.

How long does it take to build a website?

The time it takes to build your website will vary, depending on the type of website (brochure vs eCommerce) you require and the functionality that you would like to include. We’ll work with you to create a project timeline that gives us enough time to make you a great website but also works within the timeframes that you need. 

We’ll never agree to rush a project, because it’s important that we get it right. As a rough guide, we’d suggest a 12-16 week timeframe for our average website build (dependent on several factors such as availability of the content, input from the client, the amount of brand development work required etc).

Before we start any work, we’ll share a project plan which will include deadlines for providing content, and we’ll keep you updated if the expected times change.

Writing keyword-rich copy will keep visitors on your website and encourage them to work with you. If writing isn’t for you or you just don’t have time, we can produce a content plan on your behalf.

How much does a good website cost to build?

Once you’ve decided that you’re ready to start a website project, we’re ready to chat!

We understand it can be daunting to approach an agency without an idea of how much this work will cost. We’ll work within your timeline and budget requirements, but we won’t rush things and we won’t cut corners to give you a cheaper service.

We will always provide you with a tailored quote, but as a guide, this is what you can expect:

Security and Hosting

Providing a secure website for your visitors should be a top priority. Nobody wants to stay on a website that they can’t trust; especially when they’re buying from you. You should always ensure you have a valid SSL certificate, and you should use a secure and reliable server to host your site.

Server hosting is a service that we offer when you choose to build your website with us. Our hosting package includes ongoing website maintenance and updates. 

Hosted on an extremely optimised and secure server provided by our partners WP Engine (who provide hosting for over 67% of WordPress sites), your website will have automatic updates, daily backups and advanced caching and optimisation for SEO page speed.

Once you have your website, what next?

Email Marketing

Email marketing is still one of the most effective digital marketing tools, so we can help you get set up either through Campaign Monitor, Mail Chimp or fully customisable HTML.

Content

Content can be adapted for different purposes, including websites, social media and print, all the time remaining consistent and pushing your call to action.

PPC

We specialise in Google Ads – the platform used to deliver pay-per-click advertising across the Google network. This includes ads on the search engine itself (Paid Search), as well as e-commerce solutions such as Google Shopping. 

SEO

This is a digital marketing tactic aimed at improving the visibility of a website and getting it as high up the search engine results page (SERP) as possible.

Exhibitions

We can create modular, bespoke stands or portable displays, and are known to throw in a lot of imagination to really make your stand look the best in the room.

We’d love to talk

To discuss how we can help with your web project please get in touch with our Strategy Director Alexis Bradbury.

Some projects we’ve worked on…

Digital

Celebration of innovation in textiles across Kirklees

Digital

Dynamic website for Sutcliffe Play

Digital

Calderdale College website with search at heart

Why you need a website

Most customers will expect you to have a website and may question your legitimacy as a business if they can’t find you online. When a potential customer does find you, what should their first impression be? You want them to be confident when buying from you and to have a good feeling about your brand.

If growing your business is a goal, then having a website is a great place to gain leads. Using the right mix of keywords and a thorough digital marketing plan, you can become good friends with Google! Google will play a significant role in helping your customers find you online and giving you a positive return on investment for the cost of your website and online strategy.

Even the most basic of websites should serve as an informative tool to answer frequently asked customer questions and offer your first port of call for customer service. Your opening times, address and latest news or offers should be easy to find. Ultimately, the better your website is, the easier it will be to find, and a great website will help you to reach more customers.

Being online helps you to reach a much bigger pool of customers than a bricks and mortar store. Your website can be the key to extended success, with no limits on the scope of your customer geography other than your product/service capabilities.

Working with an agency like Browndog will give you a technically sound, fresh and functional website which is responsively designed, and provides consistent brand messaging for your customers. We’ll also take the guess work out of your online strategy and make sure your website is targeting the right customer segments to increase sales opportunities and raise brand awareness.

How much does a good website cost to build?

  • A brochure site (a place to share information about your products or services) will cost between £6,000-£12,000 depending on the volume of pages, functional elements and any bespoke design requests you may have.
  • An eCommerce website (a place where you can sell your products or services and visitors can complete their transaction online) will cost from £10,000.
  • If you’re looking for completely bespoke design or just a website refresh, we’ll be happy to chat with you and provide a quote for your requirements.

We’ve developed over 200 websites. You can look at our catalogue of work here and chat with our clients if you’d like to get a feel for what it’s like to work with our team before we become partners in your project.

When you work with us, you’ll get that perfect combination of great design and technical development from our whole team, not just one person.

Security and Hosting

It’s important to consider where your website is hosted and if other websites are hosted on the same server. When you use our hosting service, your website is hosted on a dedicated server with 24/7 support, should anything go wrong. We know that understanding server security and website hosting can be complex, so our experts are here to talk you through it all and find the best plan that works for you.

To read a recent review of the WP Engine platform by Digital.com please click here.

We’re pleased to say that the majority of our clients choose to host their websites with us.

 

Tell us about your project…

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What can we help you with?

How long does it take to build a website?

Before we start any work, we’ll share a project plan which will include deadlines for providing content, and we’ll keep you updated if the expected times change.

Writing keyword-rich copy will keep visitors on your website and encourage them to work with you. If writing isn’t for you or you just don’t have time, we can produce a content plan on your behalf.