We started Ionian Webworks when were were living in, you'll be unsurprised to read, the Ionian Islands in western Greece. After returning to the UK and spending 3 years in the Cotswolds before relocating to Cornwall, the name was being recognised, so we stuck with it!
Ok, so now we've cleared up the mystery of the seemingly unorthodox name, the next question is, What can we do for you? Ionian Webworks can help you to gain a presence on the internet or improve your existing website by working with you to create a professional, elegant website that accurately reflects you and your business. An effective website is a crucial marketing tool that will help promote your business but it must not only look good, it must also give your customers and potential customers a clear understanding of the products or services you provide. We can utilise not only our programming expertise but our broader business experience as well as a large dose of common sense in order to help you achieve this.
We can build a simple but stylish website of one or just a few pages or a more complex website with a range of functionality such as image galleries and videos, on-line shopping and forms for customers to complete and submit, as well as anything else in between!
Our aim is to ensure that our websites are fully responsive and work on all major browsers on PC, Mac and mobile devices. We can also offer advice on domain name registration, hosting packages, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and statistical analysis.
There are website content management systems (CMS) such as WordPress, Drupal, Wix, MODX and many more which allow non-developers, i.e. the end clients, to make future edits and additions to a site initially designed by a website developer. We find, however, that many companies don't ever do their own editing for a number of reasons - lack of time whilst managing the day to day running of their business, nervousness about 'messing up' the website and some systems not being quite as 'user-friendly' as they could be. We therefore design the website in raw code and then add a system which provides a very user-friendly interface allowing you to see exactly how your edit looks on the website before saving that edit to the live site. We're happy to do a demonstration of this system at any stage during our proposal process.
Equally, we're also more than happy to carry out future edits and additions at very reasonable rates, giving you more time to concentrate on other aspects of running your business.
In the past we have set great store in having at least an initial face-to-face meeting with our clients throughout Cornwall and further afield. Whilst much website design can obviously be done remotely, we feel it is beneficial to be able to meet in person. This gives us a better understanding of you and your business and, equally importantly, you of us. We believe a good business relationship has a degree of personal interaction which involves building trust, confidence and understanding of one another.
Alas all that changed in 2020 - however, Skype, Teams & Zoom have facilitated the next best thing and have enabled us to maintain personal contact with clients, and we imagine we will continue this modus operandi for the foreseeable future.
It's a cliché, but true. Although well written text is crucial, images are also essential for most websites, and professional photography may be desirable to help create the right image, quite literally, for your company. There are a number of cost-effective resources for 'stock' images and these can be useful in some circumstances. However in others, we feel they can appear as impersonal images disconnected from your business.
We feel that each business and business owner is unique, and so should be their website. We aim for professional, creative and elegant designs but avoid flash, animated gifs and what we feel are other unnecessary fripperies that distract your customers from understanding your business clearly and quickly.
The best website designs, we believe, are developed by close collaboration between us and our clients. We know that some clients may have a very clear vision for their website, but other clients may have just some vague ideas and we are happy to work to realise that clear vision or help cultivate a vague idea into a final design. All our code is well structured, well commented and thoroughly tested.
We pride ourselves on our attention to detail which will ensure that your website will not only look impressive, but be informative, relevant and accurate. We will work closely with you to achieve this by combining your expertise and knowledge of your business, using your content as well as assisting with our own knowledge, research and copywriting skills and experience if/where applicable.
We know that good website design is a process that may involve several iterations before both you and we are happy with the end result, and we will continue to work with you to accomplish this. Right from the start of the design & development of your website, we will upload pages onto our development space on the internet so that you will be able to see exactly what your website will look like with every addition or modification. Even once your website has gone live, we will gladly make small modifications and tweaks to ensure you have the website you want.
So, what's the bottom line? Unlike some companies, we don't quote a price per page; this is because one page may have no more than a few paragraphs of text, whereas another may have text, images, video, forms and other functionality and therefore would take much longer to produce. Also, some clients provide content and copywriting, whereas others require us to do that too. So we feel it's much better to discuss a potential project with each client, then produce a written proposal and quotation.
Ionian Webworks is owned and run by Andy MacKellar and Ann Rowe. Andy has over 30 years experience as a freelance software engineer, having worked in many sectors of industry. Ann has a similarly long and successful track record in business and together they are able to provide a reliable, high standard of service and expertise. In 2010 we set sail from the UK in our yacht and spent three years slowly making our way to the beautiful Ionian Islands of Greece.