We have recently launched a new website for a client of ours who are heat exchanger and transfer specialists by the name of Universal Heat Transfer Ltd.

The web design requirement was to bring the website up to date and initiate a marketing strategy to complement it. Their was no option but to start from scratch with this redesign as the existing website was built some years ago using dated web technologies and prehistoric standards. While the website did work it failed to meet any of the SEO criteria we abide by, and also lacked in contextual information.

We began by developing a whole new structure for their website to break down the layers, products and services of the business in a more logical and explanatory manner. In doing so we also wanted to achieve a clean, corporate and professional appearance whilst not being boring or too old fashioned.

See fig 1 for the old website, and then fig 2 for the new website to see the transformation from a website which was blocky, and had some padding issues, most of which are probably more to do with the way the internet and browsers/standards have developed over the years rather than the fault of the original web designer, who at the time of development probably did a pretty good job and delivered what was “at the time” a fairly modern look.

Fig 1

Fig 2

The final result above shows the homepage of the website which is designed to form a microcosm like overview of what the website does, who they facilitate and how to follow the correct sales funnel to get in contact for additional information. The website incorporates features such as Print and PDF for usability, products search, and is built to be as SEO friendly as is computer-ably possible.

To see more of our web design work visit our Web and Blog Design Portfolio.

That’s Right Facebook is down, or has been for a lot of people today and while we are not usually ones to gossip here at Quixotic, but again Facebook has been experiencing server issues. The reason I pose the question “Are You?” is because once upon a time there was no such thing as the Facebook Like button, or any of the other pretty cool (for the most part) Social Plugins. Now there are which means when Facebook has issues, we have issues, at least with our sites if we are relying on some interaction using the Facebook API.

I thought that Facebook by now would have a professional and apologetic method of degrading in these situations, so that when their servers do not work, you can have it timeout to a “Sorry” or “Be Back Shortly” message after I don’t know, say 10 seconds? Instead your site will hang and appear to be loading for eternity when in actual fact, everything has loaded as per usual at the usual speed apart from any Facebook scripts. I have noticed tonnes of sites, almost all I have visited today just loading and loading.

12 Months ago, this would have been an annoyance at the least but with Google “apparently” putting more emphasis on web pages load time would a routine scan of your site at the same time as Facebook lagging, come back with a very negative score? One to think about anyway, so Facebook if you can hear me, sort out some sort of error message and timeout. Purleeeease.

The current status of Facebook can be seen using the Facebook Status Checker on http://downrightnow.com/facebook a clever tool to see if there are technical issues with many popular sites so you can make sure it is not just your connection. The Status at the time of publishing is “Likely Service Disruption”.

These days more and more people are becoming interested in setting up a presence on the web. Many people that are interested in developing a web site feel that it is too complicated. They are intimidated, afraid and don’t know where to begin. It is much simpler to build a successful website than these people realize. The following will break down the 5 easy steps of web development.

1. Domain Hosting

A domain is basically the cyberspace that a website is contained within. Domain hosting is a service that a company provides to house a website’s domain on their servers. There are many companies to choose from when selecting domain hosting services. Some companies have more reliable servers than other. It is important to choose a company that has reliable servers, because when servers go down a website is inaccessible. Of course, it is also important to choose a company that offers a cheap hosting plan. If it is possible to find a quality company that offers a free domain hosting, then that is even better.

2. Web Hosting

Web hosting is very similar to domain hosting, but it is a service that offers more. In addition to hosting the domain, the company will provide the client with web services. Web hosting will give a client a web page. They will offer tools to build the webpage. Web hosting will give clients a number of email addresses that go along with their website. They will usually offer a certain amount of space on their servers to host large files.

3. Web Design

Web design is perhaps the most important part of the web development process. Web design is the process of building a website. Good web design will make the difference between a site that looks professional and one that looks amateurish. Many cheap website hosting plans will offer free web design tools that will give a site a very professional look. It is also possible to use software like Dreamweaver to build a beautiful website. For those that want the best looking sites, they can hire a web designer to make their sites look their best.

4. SEO

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is the process of using website names, banners, headlines and content to get the attention of the search engines. Since Google is the biggest search engine in the world, most websites utilize SEO to get their websites to rank high in the Google search results. Google has a tool that allows anyone to see how often terms are searched for. This data includes how successful these search terms are at getting searchers to click on ads. Using this free data from Google is a great way to write content on a website that is successful SEO content.

5. Web Marketing

Web marketing takes a variety of shapes and styles. One of the most increasingly popular and successful web marketing techniques today is to utilize free social network marketing. This means creating a presence for a website on social networks like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. Then, updates are frequently posted on the social networks, which help to drive traffic to the website. It is also possible to do more traditional marketing by purchasing ads from companies like Google and Yahoo that will show up when users search for terms.

WordPress is the CMS (Content Management System) of choice for all of the publishing projects and web ventures we at Quixotic are involved in, it is also the CMS of choice for the majority of our clients and partners.

This article will attempt to justify why we use WordPress every day, why it is a fantastic tool for web design how we improve it further using other tools and extensions including plugins, and the Thesis theme.

WordPress is used by more than 12% of the 1,000,000 biggest websites according to Wikipedia making it the most popular web publishing platform around allowing it to organically improve and evolve as time passes, WordPress is now on version 3.0.3 and still going strong.

Each major release of WordPress tends to add a boatload of desired featured for webmasters, bloggers, and designers alike and most recently by adding an advanced menu system developed and donated by the nice folks at WooThemes. They also added further support for Custom Post Types and Meta Fields, something that turns what was traditionally known as a system developed for blogging into an expansive fully featured Content Management System.

Web design and development has changed a lot, we provide a solution and often reinvesting the wheel each time is simply unaffordable and illogical. Utilizing WordPress we can in some cases get a website from concept to launch in a matter of hours.

The main reason our clients resonate so well with WordPress is its user friendly WYSIWYG editor, allowing control to publish pages and posts containing all sorts of media from hyper links, videos, and images (including a built in image cropper).

WordPress makes it easy for us to keep ourselves and our clients at the cusp of development online, allowing us to make the most of new social tools within hours of them becoming available thanks to the incredible ability and support from the wide spread WordPress Development community, more often than not by making us of publicly developed plugin extensions.

Why Thesis Framework?

All of our WordPress builds employ the help of the Thesis Framework by DIYThemes, why? Because in our humble opinion its the best platform to let us build sites on an empty canvas, have complete flexibility about what goes where, maintain everything is future compatible by not editing any core WordPress files.

Yes there are lots of free themes available from the WordPress community, and these are great for getting started, my personal view is that a premium theme can often offer a better ran community, support, and continual development, this is also the case with some popular free themes but we personally love Thesis the most for all of its extras and simplicity.

Thesis also boasts a huge array of SEO options allowing us to customize and control every aspect of our websites to please the SERPS. Custom meta data on a page/post/and archive basis allows us to concentrate our primary keywords to ensure good rankings. That really just scratches the surface as there is a long list of benefits to using Thesis, it also adds canonicalization, noindex options on pages and posts, custom css control, and much more. Want to get thesis? Click Get Thesis Now!.

Looking for web design in the West Midlands or Staffordshire? You’ve come to the right place!

Quixotic Media, part of One3rdNerd Media Ltd, is a website design and creative media company based on the West Mids, Staffordshire border. We have a varied portfolio of clientèle from both the UK and abroad. Click to view our Clientèle Map. As much as we enjoy and appreciate working with a variety of people from around the globe, we find that when we work alongside local business’, we form valuable and long lasting links with people from the local business community. The Staffordshire & West Midlands business community is close-knit and we find being able to meet with people face to face when necessary can also be a big advantage. In the current economic climate there are many incentives to work with and help local businesses.

In order to further this campaign we are offering a 15% discount on all our services to any business based in the West Midlands or Staffordshire area, plus free keyword optimisation on up to 10 pages, using our collection of SEO tools and acumen.

What We Do:

Web Design

Our website and blog portfolio cover a broad range of market sectors. From nightclub, events and entertainment industry all the way to real estate and small to medium businesses. We specialise in web design and customizing content management systems like WordPress. To see our portfolio and to find out more Click Web Design.

Identity & Branding

Whether your business is offline or online, identity is an important area of concentration. First impressions count and that’s why we believe there is a lot to a logo no matter how minimal or complex. Once created, branding can be applied to all sorts of mediums in both web and print. Here are examples of our logo design work and the product packaging we often put together for new online learning resources and ebooks. Click Identity.

Social Media Design

Social Networks are the largest growing area of the internet and we appreciate the need to build a brand presence in the public domain. Taking your branding to the social media networks is a great way to engage your potential audience and build a valuable community. For this reason we have introduced a range of social media solutions, from assistance in setting up all the worthwhile accounts to taking your branding and creating you a bespoke design to ensure brand consistency throughout your online presence. Want to know how the Social Media revolution can benefit your business? Click See Design Examples.

Areas covered include:

Staffordshire:

Alton, Branston, Burntwood, Burton upon Trent, Cannock, Chasetown, Cheadle, Hednesford, Lichfield, Newcastle under-Lyme, Norton Canes, Penkridge, Rugeley, Stafford, Stoke-on-Trent, Tamworth

West Midlands:

Aldridge, Birmingham, Brownhills, Coventry, Edgbaston, Erdington, Handsworth, Kings Heath, Moseley, Sandwell, Solihull, Stourbridge, Sutton Coldfield, Walsall, Wednesbury, West Bromwich, Wolverhampton

We can announce at Quixotic that within the next few weeks we shall be adding Open Graph to the list of services we shall be offering via our Social Media Optimisation page. We have been testing the new usages such as using the new Facebook meta data, adding the Facebook like button, and other social tools such as social activity, recommendations, adding Facebook comments to your site and now even setting up Facebook Insights to track your domain in addition to using it for keeping an eye on your fan page interactions. The possibilities are very exciting indeed and here is a snippet from a very interesting article which goes into more detail about the intentions and purposes of Open Graph and speculates many possible routes it could evolve down.

An article published recently on SEOWizz – Search Engine Optimisation Consultant.

Just over a month ago Mark Zuckerberg & co also known as Facebook dropped a bit of a game changer at their annual F8 conference. The announcement of Open Graph has created a whole new layer to Facebooks existence and functionality as it moves another step closer to becoming the first true semantic search engine. Before I get into that let me break down the contents of Open Graph.

Open Graph API

The API is a piece of web based software which allows the interaction and communication between websites, their pages (objects) and the Facebook database (Open Graph). Its both an attempt to allow webmasters to better inform Facebook of their contents and allow them to build an even more content rich social network. Let’s say you went to watch Strictly Come Dancing on BBC iPlayer or something on 4OD and by doing so automatically allowed the API to access your information on Facebook, it could then recommend alternative shows to watch based on your favourite film and television listings on your public profile and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Yes, that’s right, here at Quixotic Media we have been working hard to deliver a stable and profitable affiliate platform that is both easy to use and still offers the features required for us to carry out our ambitions of marketing via word of mouth recommendations over paid advertising options both effectively and coherently.

So what are the terms? You sign up and you are automatically generated a link, you can mask or control this with an url shortener of your choice or by masking via your own site. When someone gets in touch you will be added as the lead and if that referred enquiry turns into a sale then 10% commission will be awarded to you. The cookie lasts 365 days so anyone you refer that comes back months later will still be associated with you and we have also provided a range of different banner graphics in different sizes for your marketing convenience.

So if you want to earn commission referring your friends, colleagues, business partners, twitter followers or whoever for web design, and other new media solutions then you have come to the right place.

To sign up to register as a new affiliate or to sign in to your account go to Quixotic Affiliates here you will be provided with further instructions.

If you have any questions about our service or would like to request to use your own designed banner click the contact link at the top of the page and let us know. The inspiration behind this strategy is the current success and great results we have experienced from clientèle recommendations and we wanted to thank our referrers in a more well substantial manner.

The Wake Up Cloud is a website about self improvement, motivation, healthy lifestyles and life hacking. The brief was to deliver a clean light site, that was easy on the eye and not too cluttered, whilst still being functional and making the most out of Web 2.0.

The emphasis has been based around the branding we designed early on in the design process. We again wanted to portray the web 2.0 style using soft gradients and clean layout.

The result is a well organised, well optomized lifestyle blog which Henri is very pleased with. For more information  click The Wake Up Cloud.

Kevin is part of a large circle of sucessful online marketers and works from all over the world spending just a short few hours per day to achieve great financial success and a large and loyal following.

We were first in contact with Kevin a couple of months ago and threw some ideas out on the table for a possible future blog redesign. The project brief was to be sharp, professional and promote his professional style without forgetting this guys got style too, and understands the importance of branding and standing apart from the crowd. We can now present this design in its entirety at MLM Success.

We used a rich purple as our base color for its bold and powerful qualities and quickly drew some lazer style curved lines so the first impression of the site has some life. We incorporated his professional photograph to help promote his human branding and wrapped it up with a bow.

Cheryl Currie has been a client of ours for some time now. We have already assisted in her blog management, and help develop her confidence with her content management.

After not so much deliberation Cheryl decided to take the leap sooner rather than later and follow suit in changing her WordPress framework over to Thesis. We wanted to maintain the original color scheme, whilst adding more flexibility and some enhanced yet minimal branding.

Cheryl’s confident approach to marketing and networking has gained her much attention and continues to help break down the jargon and give it to you straight. To view Cheryl’s new sparkling website go to “Ways to Make Money“.