The task of building the perfect website is an ongoing one. Continuous monitoring, tweaking and updating is the only way to ensure your site is the very best it can be.

Here are ten tips to improve your website…

1. Understand the customer – sounds simple but so many people get it wrong.

Get all your great products together with a clearly defined and communicated brand message and you’re on to a winner!

2. Make finding things easy – some sites are just so damn complicated!

Provide easy to use, fast and accurate search facilities as standard. Ensure that navigation is simple and easy to use – no hidden or difficult to find buttons or tabs.

3. Once you have their interest why not show them what else they want?

Upsell, cross-sell, showcase promotions, offers, best sellers and new products. A sure fire way to increase basket size and average order values is to show similar or slightly better products at the checkout.

4. Understand your performance.

Use analytic tools to ascertain what’s going on with your site. The information gathered could unlock areas for additional marketing, enhanced usability or missed opportunities to tap into.

5. Let them see all you have to offer.

Use rich imaging (a fancy way of saying zoom and alternative views) with professional, clear photographs throughout.

6. Tell them what you have to offer.

Make the words on your site interesting and engaging to your target audience as well as optimised for good search engine rankings. Don’t bore them with drawn out technical specs and data which could be summarised in a table elsewhere.

7. When you offer help – give it.

Don’t you just hate the little button that says ‘Sizes Explained’ (or something equally promising) that then links to a nightmare table of numbers with no explanation or help in sight?

8. Get the customer to tell you you’re good.

Positively encourage your customers to leave and publish reviews.

9. Offer other information options.

Newsletters, promotional emails, catalogues or store information should be offered for those who want it. You could make a regular customer instead of a one off sale!

10. Offer something different.

In a world where everyone has a store online being different to the competition will help your site stick in the mind of the customer and could make the difference between a sale or not. Check out your competition and see what you could do better.

The system built for Travel Smith Limited, based in the South East, required more than 400 hours of complex programming over a period of 6 months. This was needed to ensure that a range of back end systems could work together seamlessly to assist those booking holidays on the Channel Islands.

Built by St. Agnes based, UKnetweb, the new system allows customers accessing travelsmith.co.uk to book flights and accommodation through the one site building on their previous success in arranging accommodation and ferry travel for customers throughout the UK.

Although flight booking systems of this kind often appear relatively simple to the consumer using them, they involve a range of highly complex programming languages to ensure that the different parts involved in the process work together to generate the required results.

“Many people could be forgiven for thinking that the site is pretty simple, after all, that’s how the customer should see it. However, behind the scenes we have to ensure that thousands of processes work hand in hand to deliver the service they expect.” Says Toby Parkins, UKnetweb’s Managing Director.

“As a company we focus on these kind of projects which other companies find difficult. Knowing that nothing is impossible we work to establish new ways of doing things and have become nationally renowned for a number of European internet firsts.” He continued.

The Travel Smith system is not the first project of this complexity undertaken by UKnetweb, past projects have included a national sales system for genealogy store, Parish Chest and a mobile application for brand leader, Nokia.

Anyone looking to develop their own booking system, or other complex web development can contact the company at their offices on 01872 555933 or visit the company’s website at www.uknetweb.com

When we first heard about the dontclick.it project we were excited to see what it had to offer and whether this might just be the start of an entirely new way for websites to work. Driven by my passion (and if I’m honest geeky desire) to search out the best of Web 2.0 projects and emerging internet technologies I first came across dontclick.it through a random Stumble and at first site was pretty impressed.

Not wanting to stop at my own first impressions I felt it was time to let the site do the rounds of the office and see just what the designers, techies and normal polite members of society thought about a site that doesn’t need (or allow) to be clicked.

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John Thornton… resident PHP Programmer and general ‘codehead’ at uknetweb

The user interface is definitely a novel and very innovative one; however this kind of site operation is likely to prevent site visitors suffering from motor control problems or other special needs due to the nature of the programming employed.

The various button control techniques shown, set about destroying some of the only positive arguments for an interface control system of this kind. i.e. that you don’t need to keep clicking or pressing buttons!

The delay while you hover waiting for an action to start makes the site clumsy to use, confusing and slower than clicking. The continuous mouse wiping and waving motion is more likely to cause Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI) than a single movement and a click.

In all it’s a great theory which unfortunately lacks any forethought (but it does look lovely).

Score: 2 out of 5 – awarded for innovation and looks.

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Richard Collett… resident CSS expert responsible for making client sites ‘look pretty’.

What an annoying site! OK, so on first impressions it captures every aspect of the Web 2.0 style – bold colours, reflections, crazy page structures and so on but come on is there really any need to remove the click function?

Within minutes of hitting the site I couldn’t help myself, I pressed the button on my mouse, sending me to some strange page of snow that told me I shouldn’t have done that. The site creators just can’t help themselves after all this site is more about standing out from the norm and doing something different rather than anything useful.

My annoyances in the site didn’t stop there. Try using this site with a laptop touchpad, I beg you to!

OK so lets be serious here for a moment. What does this site achieve?

Very little I’m afraid. I have spent my time putting together sites and ensuring ease of use for site visitors but this site is just so confusing. You are never quite sure where you are or where you’re supposed to be going, that’s fine for a crazy test site but it just isn’t applicable to any real world scenarios.

Score: 0 out of 5 – because it’s so god damn annoying!!

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Esther Caulfield…a rose amongst the thorns, she handles all the lines of communication coming into the Engine House.

Ummm. I’m confused why do you want me to go to this site?

Hey, what’s the point of all this.

It just told me to click and now I have been told off for clicking! Oh, how annoying is this!?

I’m bored can I go now… ah, wait a second I’ve just found a giveaway!

Score 1 out of 5 – it has a giveaway!

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So at the end of the day the team here at uknetweb were not impressed by the dontclick.it project giving it a final score of 1 out of 5. Our end message to the developers has to be ‘Why? – If it isn’t broke don’t fix it!’

The general concept is a never ending flash based site featuring hundreds (maybe thousands) of little gadgety things to share, embed or whatever you please. With easy ‘share’ tags on most animations featured, they offer easy forwarding to blog pages, del.icio.us accounts and much more.

This feature rich site fully embraces the web 2.0 principles offering engaging and interactive content that weaves effortlessly into the social bookmarking and online sharing communities.

Well done Orange – I look forward to wasting hours lost talking to little robots, cutting the hair of weird birds or inventing my own brands of ice-cream.

The business, previously owned and managed by Aren Grimshaw, will be incorporated into uknetweb as it moves to increase links between clients’ online and offline activities.

Uknetweb, Managing Director, Toby Parkins commented, “We have been working successfully with Galileo on a number of projects. This move comes as we work to enhance client relationships and extend partnerships with agencies offering complimentary services.”

“Aren’s experience in running his own business ideally places him to work as a project and account manager. His ability to understand client needs will allow us to ensure the highest online returns as we move forward.”

Galileo’s marketing services will be turned towards the development of more sophisticated web based systems and websites rather than the agency’s former branding and offline marketing work.

The change will take place immediately with Aren joining the team at uknetweb’s offices in The Engine House, Wheal Kitty.

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Local website development company, Uknetweb is celebrating success after one of their sites won a prestigious award at The British Media and Environmental Awards (BEMAS) held recently in Canary Wharf.

The site produced for Environmental campaign charity, Surfers Against Sewage (SAS), beat off strong competition from the Telegraph’s Earth site and Green TV to win the category of Best Website 2007.

Looking for the most effective application of new media, market audience engagement, plus links for the scientific, education and environmental communities, the SAS site was judged top of the class.

Only launched in March this year, the website receives around 30,000 visits per month acting as a window on the organisation’s campaign work and fundraising activities, e-commerce store and information portal.

Uknetweb Managing Director, Toby Parkins, said, “It is great to see one of our clients win this level of recognition. We aim to build all of our client sites for ease of use and customer engagement and this is a strong indicator we are achieving this aim”.

“Over the past 8 years we have been really proud to have helped support the SAS campaign through managing and building three separate sites. It’s awesome to think that the latest website has managed to beat off competition from far higher budget websites and come out on top.”

Surfers Against Sewage, not wanting to miss an opportunity to shame award sponsor, Northumbrian Water, handed out their own golden toilet brush award for in their words, “showing a disregard to the health of the marine environment”.

The winning website can be seen at www.sas.org.uk or as part of the company portfolio on www.uknetweb.com.

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The new site has been built for Redruth based Cornwall Kawasaki Centre and currently holds more than a million motorcycle parts, making the site the most comprehensive web based store for motorcycle parts in the UK.

Uknetweb’s Managing Director, Toby Parkins, commented on the launch, “Many web developers tend to supply off the shelf systems and packages which are not suitable for more sophisticated web based shopping systems. With each of our sites we take time at the beginning to consider the customer’s needs and identify methods for making their shopping experience the very best it can be.”

“In the case of Cornwall Kawasaki Centre we found that many people experienced difficulties in linking diagram numbers with parts numbers and taking this forward in locating the part for sale. We developed a unique system which allows users to view detailed parts diagrams, identify the parts number, and then order the part, all from the one site.”

The plan for the site is to continue adding to the present catalogue with the aim of providing one site for all bike parts and accessories. The site went live on the web at www.cornwallkawasaki.co.uk on Monday and is expected to be a welcome relief to thousands of motorcycle enthusiasts who often need to spend hours searching for parts for their motorcycle and visiting garage after garage in search of them.

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