Web Design

Introduction

Portfolio

The internet is cluttered with web pages offering services and products. The problem comes with trying to distinguish the good from the bad. A web page is a marketing tool, the poorer the impression your site makes, the less the client is going to want to buy from you.

At Six Squared Design, we believe that web sites should be interesting, eye catching and informative. To this end when you ask us to design a site for you, we think of everything, the most important of which is who your target audience is.

With this main goal in mind, we will custom design a site from scratch that is unique only to you. We don't believe in mass producing template sites, you know the ones with the standard logo across the top and a few shiny buttons along the side. Each site is a piece of art, and with this attitude, we believe we have the edge over most of our competitors.

As a part of our web design service, we offer free logo design, if your company does not already have one.

We offer solutions using the following technolgies and services:

Databases & E-commerce (MySql & Shopping Carts)
Programming & Scripting (PHP/ASP/Javascript/Flash)
Site optimisation
Maintenance & Upgrades

Below is a rough guide to our pricing structure per service. If you have any questions, or would like a more custom tailored quote, please contact us.

Programming & Scripting

Six Squared Design employs talented young programmers to do programming and scripting. In essence these are the same thing as web relies on scripting for programming. Scripting is a very powerful force, this site is designed using a combination of HTML and PHP and most of the sites we have designed use the same technology.

Javascript, ASP, PHP, Flash and many other scripting languages can be used to run your entire website fromt database elements (eg. E-commerce) to making feedback forms and interactive menus. On the other hand we use scripting only where it is needed, as too many scripts can bog down a site and make it load slowly.

Databases & E-commerce

Database driven sites can be very useful if you have masses of information that needs updating on a fairly consistent basis. E-commerce sites are such sites, where products have to be updated and prices changed. We use MySQL as our database backend, which enables us to keep costs down as this is licenced under the Gnu GPL (General Public License).

Many other designers use prebuilt scripts to build E-commerce (shopping) sites, but there are limits to this as you are constrained by the template nature of the program. We design from scratch as we believe the database element should fit into the site and not the other way around. This we believe is a very important aspect to the way we work, whether it be E-commerce or any other database related site.

Optimisation

When we design your site, we optimise it for fast loading and high search engine rankings. This does not guarantee your site will appear in the top 10 of the search engine searches, but it will rank higher than if the optimisation was not done.

The reason for creating fast loading sites is that in South Africa most people have a slow 56kps connection and when waiting for a site to load people can get frustrated if it does not load within 10 seconds or so. This is not that important to people in Europe or the Americas, but you could lose visits if your site takes too long to load. Graphic intensive sites need not take very long to load. Take a browse through the sites on our portfolio and see for yourself.

Optimisation is a FREE part of our service which is provided whenever we design, upgrade or do maintenance on a site and is not offered as separately.

Maintenance & Upgrades

Whether you have a website designed by another company and would like us to maintain your site, or we have designed the site for you, we offer a maintenance service. Upgrades can also be done if there is not much to change, otherwise it will fall under a redesign, which we should quote you on.

The monthly maintenance service offers 5 hours of web design services per month. Alternatively we could do maintenance on a per hour basis.

You could save up to R150 per month on maintenance if you have a web hosting contract with us, as we offer a discount for customers whose hosting we supply.

Below is a pricing structure for the web site maintenance service.