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What Website Services Do We Provide?

Paper Tiger Web Design delivers a range of low cost Web services and Content Management Systems to Online Shops and Graphic Design. Content Management Systems are Websites which allow the system owner to access the content (words, picture and files) directly, using a program similar to Microsoft Word, and change the site without the need for a Programmer. This makes the website easy to maintain and ensures that it encourages repeat traffic. Flat sites, which are NOT dynamic - often stay the same for months and rarely give visitors a reason to return.

Sytems that are designed to grow and expand as inevitable change occurs.

Diverting traffic to my website, Webshop or Webstore

Once my website or webstore has been built, how will I get traffic to visit me? It's common for this issue to be addressed, after the site has been designed and built, which leads to disappointment and a slow realisation that building a site alone, is not enough to attract visitors. eCommerce sites thrive on activity, but need optimising to ensure the search engines will find it. Designing websites and webshops with the search engines in mind, is the sensible starting point for all online web development. This is often referred to as having an SEO strategy. Webdesign of any kind has similarities with offline situations. In online shops, you attempt to improve your Search Engine Ranking, so that all the busy traffic will pass your storefront. The main difference is you don't move your webshop, you essentially move the traffic (you stay in the same place). This website or webstore attracts more customers, because it targets what it is that customers want. SEO only works by focussing your webdesign to produce a more attractive service. Trying to hoodwink, or hook customers, may produce initial traffic, but nothing substantial in the long term and will not convert visits to sales. Search Engine Optimisation is good for buyers and sellers.

Optimisation of your Website or Webshop for Search Engines

Paper Tiger offers SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) as a service to be considered, before development of your website or webshop begins. Most online retailers and shops, reverse engineer their websites according to search engine specifications. They design the entire website according to SEO rules, because they know that high natural or organic listings are so valuable, they are worth pursuing.

Paper Tiger can offer optimisation for your site from as little as £99. This highly competitive price will involve producing reverse-engineered keywords, meta-tags, an XML sitemap and manual submission to the top 4 Primary Search Engines (who control 90+% of all Internet traffic). Further techniques, incur further costs.

Designing websites or shops is a process that begins with both the look and feel (often referred to as 'template design') and equally as important - the content. The content must adhere to the keywords, which makes perfect sense. Once these design constraints have been established, the development can begin. This is the first step in the SEO cycle.

Deciding What You Need - Website, Webshop or SEO

eCommerce and Internet retailing will see growth of over 25% in 2009. Online purchasing is predicted to grow at 27.8% capturing 8.5% of consumer spend. (1.5% increase over 2008). 53% of UK adults intend to increase their online purchasing for Christmas 2009.

What Webdesign Technologies Are You Offering?

   - CMS Websites - Joomla CMS, Drupal CMS
   - Online Shops - Magento, VirtueMart
   - Product or content photography
   - WebDesign - Graphics/Logos/Photoshop/
   - Search Engine Optimisation - SEO, SEP.
   - Consultancy - advice, opinion, risks.

Drupal: A Content Management System Product.

Please note: Magento the shop software is new and the most professional software framework yet available as Open Source. If you require a shop on a limited budget, please email.

Prices - a guide:

Simple site - content management- 5 pages - £350 (does not include words, pictures, hosting or SEO). The webdesign can be selected from a portfolio of templates - with some tweaking.
Medium site - content management - <15 pages - £750 (does not include words, pictures, hosting or SEO). The webdesign can be selected from a portfolio of templates - with some tweaking.
Large site - content management - >15 pages - from £950 (does not include words, pictures, hosting or SEO). The webdesign can be bespoke, but the more complex the design, the higher the cost.

Each site comes with 2 weeks support while you familiarise yourself with the content management system.

Hosting - is provided by a third party and is approximately £7 per month.

Add Hoc development work/changes to sites/small jobs are billed at £20 per hour.

SEO - from £99 - Keywords, Tagging, XML Sitemap and manual submission.

Although there are cheaper brochure sites (using HTML) - usually starting at £150 for a single page, they cannot be updated by the owner without using the developer, which inevitably incurs further costs. As well as looking cheap and amateurish, the fact that they rarely change their content, significantly affects their ranking in Google and other search engines. Paper Tiger's CMS Webdesign approach is about offering the highest chance of success, for the most competitve fee.

Who Am I?

I am an industry professional (graduate) with 15 years of IT experience, both as a developer and project manager. Based in the City as a technical consultant - the majority of my work has been for FTSE250 organisations. My background has been web-based since 1998 and I have considerable experience with customer facing and delivering to meet [high] expectations. You will find me honest, friendly, professional and succinct.

What's Open Source - In Simple Terminology?

Open Source software is free to use, unlike commercial products (e.g. Windows - which is approximately £100 per licence OEM). This means that the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for the system is substantially lower. The downside to this - is it's complex to understand and somewhat difficult to configure, but this is improving all the time.

Explain Websites and Webshops To Me, Please

Building a Websites or Webshop is not entirely different to printing information, or selling goods through a shop in the offline ‘real’ world.

Websites – explained

Websites (or web sites) began life in the mid-to-late 90s as HTML documents. If you wanted to make information available on the World Wide Web, you converted the text and documents into HTML and stored them on a web server (usually running Apache). When a user clicks on the link for a website, the browser (e.g. Internet Explorer) sends a request to the Web server for the HTML page. The browser converts that HTML into a page with text, pictures or video, which the user can view. This essentially has not changed, though there are several problems associated with it.

HTML is a mixture of ‘content’ (words, pictures, etc.) and presentation information HTML) which describes what the text looks like, how large it is, the font, colour, where the pictures are, where a link leads to – and so on. The problem is that information regularly changes, so every time the text and pictures are changed, the HTML has to be ‘unpicked’ and recoded with the new information. Which is both time consuming, and subject to error. Content Management Systems were a way of combating this issue. The words are stored in a database table, the pictures in another table (in simplistic terms) and the HTML presentation information is also stored elsewhere. When a page is requested in the browser – the HTML is mixed with the words and pictures ‘dynamically’ to create the page. The user cannot see any noticeable difference in the way the page appears, but the site owners and administrators have a much easier time altering the content. Now all the text is stored as separate articles which are easy to edit and change. The result is that sites that employ a CMS are much easier and cheaper to update.

Webstores and Webshops – explained

Webstores and Webshops arrived later. Often called eCommerce in broader terms, much of what the user sees is actually B2C (Business to Consumer) eCommerce. With the introduction of a database connected to the Web server (as seen in a Content Management System), there was scope to further increase the sophistication of Web sites. Buying through electronic means had existed since the 1970s (EDI), though was largely the preserve of corporations, due to the expense of leasing the lines. When the World Wide Web opened up to ordinary users, it took some time for security protocols to become established, that would permit the exchange of sensitive account information across a public network (Secure Sockets Layer). With a database to store products, transactions, customers, etc. it took very little time for the first Webshops to become established. eCommerce was a buzz-word at the turn of the millennium, though very few retailers were able to extract a profit from the process. This in part, led to the collapse of the Internet bubble in 2001. Since then, Webstores such as Amazon have continued to strengthen.

Amazon Webshop - an online retail success story.

The Amazon Webstore: a global brand for successful Internet retail.

In the recent global downturn, many Webshops (such as ASOS – online clothing) have shown remarkable growth in a depressed marketplace. It is often commonplace for a non-chain, high street store to also have an online Webshop to supplement their customer base. Webstores can attract interest on different continents, which is a valuable asset in a tough economic climate.

Web Design Using Photoshop

Photoshop

Photoshop is a graphics editor (with some text and vector graphics capabilities) developed and published by Adobe Systems. It is the market leader for commercial bitmap image manipulation, and probably the most well-known piece of software produced by Adobe Systems. Currently it is released as Creative Suite 4, though CS versions 1-3 are still used commercially by many organisations.

It is usually referred to simply as "Photoshop". Photoshop is currently available for Mac OS and Microsoft Windows; versions up to Photoshop 7 can also be used with other operating systems such as Linux using software such as CrossOver Office. Past versions of the program were ported to the SGI IRIX platform, but official support for this port was dropped after version 3.

The photoshop development and design environment.

Although primarily designed to edit images for paper-based printing, Photoshop is used increasingly to produce images for the World Wide Web. Recent versions bundle a related application, Adobe ImageReady, to provide a more specialized set of tools for this purpose.

Photoshop also has strong links with software for media editing, animation and authoring. It works with Adobe ImageReady, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Premiere, Adobe After Effects & Adobe Encore DVD to make professional standard DVDs, provide non-linear editing and special effects services such as backgrounds, textures and so on for television, film and the web. Photoshop's native file format (PSD or PDD) can be exported to and from Adobe ImageReady, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Premiere, After Effects and Adobe Encore DVD. Photoshop CS broadly supports making menus and buttons for DVDs. For PSD or PDD files exported as a menu or button, it only needs to have layers, nested in layer sets with a cueing format and Adobe Encore DVD reads them as buttons or menus.

PSD or PDD is a widely accepted file format. Competing bitmap image editing programs (such as Macromedia Fireworks, Corel Photo-Paint, Pixel32, WinImages, GIMP, Jasc Paintshop Pro etc.) can import and edit layered PSD or PDD files.

Web Design and Online Shops

Whether you require a simple Website , Website Redesign, affordable eCommerce facilities (a Shop) Webshop or a complex, dynamic Content Management System, Paper Tiger Web Design can build a custom website to service your requirements. Based in London in the UK, Paper Tiger canJoomla CMS, Drupal CMS and is offering Magento shop software for the first time. Click here to view a demo shop.

All websites and webshops are ranked according to their content (and many other factors). When contructing your site for the Web, Paper Tiger will encourage and guide you to produce content that will positively affect your Search Engine Optimisation and ranking. Web site developers often get mired in the programming and development tasks and pay less attention to what will happen to the website or shop, once it is built.
By focussing strategically, our primary aim is for your internet business venture to be successful. We want customers to be attracted to your websites and webstores, so focus on SEO from the start. After all, just like you - we want customers to return and discover what other solutions we have available for them.