Web development
Building a website is a lot like building a house – you need a solid foundation.
Your website is your virtual shop window, browsed by countless potential customers every day. The question is, how many will step in and make a purchase or enquiry? If you’re a B2B business think of your website as an extra salesperson, constantly generating new leads.
What is web development?
Web development is the process of incepting, designing and building websites, as well as maintaining and adapting a current site to keep up with industry trends or improve its performance.
Our development services
Front-end
Content management systems
CRM and ERP integrations
Ecommerce websites
Why is web development important to your business?
The average user will spend less than 15 seconds looking at a website before deciding to go elsewhere or delve deeper. This means every unattractive page, unclear message and low-functioning feature on a website could cost your business a brand-new customer. However, a well-built website by an experienced digital agency could dramatically increase your customer base, brand awareness and revenue.
In addition, more and more users are using their phones to look up businesses and services they’re interested in, meaning that you need a highly responsive website that caters for various screen sizes and only loads necessary scripts to maintain page speed. With 40% of online sales occurring through a mobile device, and over 50% of consumers saying they would not recommend a business with a poor mobile website, the importance of truly mastering the mobile has never been clearer.
From a security stand-point, your website can act as a window or wall for your customers’ personal data – depending on how it’s built. Our websites come with SSL certificates as standard, along with daily backups of all files and databases. With our hosting plus package, we also offer monthly reviews and add security plug-ins to alert us to any potential threats as quickly as possible, allowing you to protect your customers’ vital information and keep your finances away from cyber attackers.
How does The Bigger Boat approach web development?
We employ a three-pronged approach when developing a website, with close communication and clear conceptualisation from our design, development and content teams. The look, function or content of your website can individually or collectively impact search engine optimisation (SEO), conversions and user experience.
Our design and development teams will get to know your business and understand your needs with thorough research and discussion. We have a keen focus on user experience and will work tirelessly to ensure your website attracts and keeps as many users as possible. Using clear calls-to-action, smooth and fast functionality and breathtaking visual designs, we help increase your website’s traffic, conversions and, ultimately, your business’ revenue.
Using popular content management systems, such as WordPress, StoryBlok, Prismic and Contentful, The Bigger Boat fully submerges itself in your business and its needs before building a user-focused, high-functioning and easy-to-work website. While our development team is always on hand, we aim to leave you with a site that’s as easy to navigate for users on the front end as it is for you on the back end, allowing you total control of your brand-new site.
Headless approach
Headless is an alternative framework for creating websites that has significant business advantages over the more traditional website such as WordPress. With Google putting more value on speed and usability, now is the time to start considering getting ahead of the curve and using a headless framework for your next project.
FAQs
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This is a difficult question to answer. No two websites are the same, and neither are their requirements. Naturally, the greater number of pages of your website, the longer its design will take. But it’s more than that. We specialise in perfection and exceeding expectations, meaning we sweat over each detail and produce the highest quality work within an agreed-upon timeframe. The quickest way to find out how long it would take to design your website is to get in touch with our design team and discuss what you need your website to do and how you want it to look.
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Headless is an approach to web development whereby the front-end of a website (the head) is detached from the CMS, content and data (the body). They are hosted separately, load independently and communicate through an API, which improves speed, security and performance whilst eliminating the need for updates and multiple sources of data for different websites.
Conversely, with a traditional CMS such as WordPress, the front-end, content and data are all hosted together, resulting in a slower experience for the user – something Google does not look favourably upon – and requiring regular updates to remain secure and functional. While traditional CMS website can function perfectly if set up by an experienced web developer, the benefits of a headless approach mean it is likely to become the future of web development and getting ahead of the curve could set you apart online.
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Without knowing the requirements of your website, it’s difficult to determine how much it will cost. Many factors can influence the time spent on design and development, which are better discussed in detail to provide a realistic timeframe and price. Get in touch, tell us about your website, and we’ll find the most cost-effective way to exceed your expectations.
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Yes, it’s your website after all. At The Bigger Boat, we specialise in creating a back-end which is as clear and easy-to-use as the front-end, meaning that you can maintain, manage and change your website to reflect the ever-evolving offerings and needs of your business. While we’re on hand to help with any developmental inquiries post-build, our aim is to leave you with a website that you have full autonomy over. This is one of the many reasons we prefer a headless approach as it is simple to use in every way.
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Yes, many of the websites we build use WordPress. It is the most common CMS for businesses due to its flexibility and generally wide-spread use. However, the staggering number of plug-ins and options can seem daunting if you’re unsure what you’re looking at. To improve site speed and provide the clearest user experience, we always try to build a website using as few external plug-ins as possible – letting our design and coding skills take the weight of your website so that it runs as smoothly and efficiently as possible.
News and insights
How PHP Version Deprecation Affects Websites
With some versions of PHP soon to become unsupported, we explain what this could mean for your website, and what you can do about it.
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AI tools in web development: Our thoughts
With the recent rise in AI across the world, it’s no surprise that industry-specific AI tools are starting to crop up. In fact, our crew has started to use some AI tools to assist in web development, including ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot.
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