What to Look For

So you're looking for a website design company. There are hundreds of them. How do you choose between them?

Web design companies tend to fall into one of two categories.

The first category is the budget category, where you might even be able to get a website "designed" for as little as £99! We cannot emphasise enough how much you should avoid these companies. They are not really web design companies, they just have 1 or 2 website templates and they put your name at the top and very little else. Even at £99, these are not worth the money.

If your website looks similar to several other websites, most search engines will penalise it. This means that you are unlikely to get many, if any, visitors from search engines. Some search engines may even ban your website completely if it is too similar to other websites.

On top of this, these companies are unlikely to offer you much in the way of after sales service. We've heard stories about website changes taking months to get done. And some will even charge for any subsequent change that you require.

The second group is at the other end of the spectrum. These companies will usually charge you several thousand pounds for a bespoke website. Whilst these companies are better than the first group, you still have to be very careful.

A lot of these companies will design you a website that looks good in their portfolio of designs, rather than a website that produces results for you. Now don't get me wrong, the websites they produce are likely to look stunning, but stunning websites do not get you customers. Good usability and effective design gets you customers. Don't choose a company that is a creative design company first, and a web company second.

In the past we have taken websites that have been designed by companies like this and completely re-written them so that they look and feel very similar to the original design, but now they work effectively, display the information in a more usable format and attract customers rather than alienating them.

We believe that OpenGlobal is the first in a third category of web design companies. We understand that usability is crucial when designing a website. If a visitor needs to install a special plugin (such as flash, shockwave or java) to view your website, they will leave and never return. If your website is designed for a particular browser and it doesn't look right in other browsers, visitors using those browsers will leave rather than swap to your preferred browser. If visitors need to click through several pages to get to what they want, they are likely to give up half way and try somewhere else. And crucially, if your website is so "artistically" designed that visitors do not know where to click to get what they want, they will also leave.

OpenGlobal believe in using simple, easy to use designs that give your visitors what they want and in turn, give you the customers that you want. We do not believe in using fancy gimmicks to try to impress your visitors and we do not believe in using a technology for its own sake, or because it is new.

Web designers have long had a reputation for being the cowboys of the IT industry. They are frequently seen as being lazy, unprofessional, misleading or downright liars. OpenGlobal is the sheriff that's come to clean up this industry and push the cowboys out of town.

If you are looking for web design in Gloucester, or even further afield, look no further.