This is one of the most common questions I am asked and it is also one of the most difficult to answer. It's a bit like asking a builder how much it costs to build a wall without giving him the dimensions or telling him the bricks you want to use or the type of brickwork required.

Calculating the cost of a website depends on many factors such as:

The festive season is almost upon and it's time to decide how much time we're going to be taking off work to indulge in merriment and cheer.

Here at Shore Dutton, we will be closed for business on Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Year's Day. In addition, we won't be available via our office telephone number (01212 888 608) on the 23rd, 24th, 27th, 28th, 29th, 30th or 31st of December. We will still be monitoring our email and voicemail periodically each day and our priority mobile number (for clients only, i'm afraid) will still be available.

Portfolio: 

We were asked by the committee of Arley's new Community Centre to construct a website that could be used by multiple community organisations in the village.

As well as Arley Community Centre, it also had to have sections for Arley Community Association and Old Arley Residents Society as well as links to other community websites such as the Arley News website and local authorities.

Other requirements were that it should be quick and easy to update and local news stories could be added to the website.

Having completed quite a few projects for local Churches, I've had the opportunity to see first-hand the benefits an Internet presence provides.

For those of you that are considering getting a Church website, here's my Top 6 list of benefits:

Portfolio: 

Mark Liddell, Reverend of The Abbey Church of St Mary the Virgin approached us after seeing the website we designed for St Laurence's Church in Ansley.

St Mary's Church was in need of a website to provide information to the local community and publish articles about it's unique history to the wider World.

We created a unique design that Father Mark "absolutely loved" and provided a Content Management System, so that temporary information could be updated when required and the Church's history could be expanded over time.

Wow! it's been a while since my last blog post. I took a short break at the end of May and came back to a mountain of work, which has made June an exceedingly busy month.

As a website designer, I'm constantly plagued with emails from off-shore companies pitching their services to me. Personal I prefer to use local suppliers but on occasion I've used national companies and freelancers that have done some fantastic work for me. I've also used a few foreign companies, from which I've had mixed results.

As of November 2008, only around 30% of small businesses in the UK owned a business website [Source: Federation of Small Businesses]. We recently conducted a short study to find out the primary reasons that were preventing small businesses from promoting themselves on the Internet.

Here are the top three factors that stop business owners purchasing a website:

If you don't work in the technology sector, you've probably not heard of Wolfram|Alpha, a new type of search engine that's peaking the interest of industry specialists around the globe. Created by Wolfram Research, the company behind computation software Mathematica, it's been available to trade experts for a while now, but this weekend saw it launch to the masses.

One of my clients recently moved premises and asked me to update their address details in various Internet directories. He had quite a good search engine ranking, so I wanted to run a few tests before I made the change. One test was to see what Google Local does when an address is updated.

We are pleased to announce a £50 discount on our Business Website Design Package for all small/medium-sized business in Warwickshire. Was £495, now £445.

This package has been specially-designed to contain everything a small business needs to start promoting their products and services online. As well as a professionally-designed unique website, it also includes: