hamiltro website design

The main reason is that we combine deep care for you as a client needing to reach your target audience with our deep knowledge of how people find and respond to websites and other digital marketing platforms. 

People sometimes think the way to begin finding a website designer is to describe the number of pages they want their website to have and ask what the price would be. If you want to find your solution based on providing that little information, the chances are very high that you’ll end up with a […]

Working with us on a custom design means you get all the expertise of years of designing focused on your website so that every page and every feature is tailored to achieving engagement with your target audience/market.  We do much more than just create a unique and memorable look for your website. We also design […]

We tailor each web design so specifically to the client's requirements that it is impossible to to give one price as an answer to this question. We need to fully understand your requirements before we can give you a quote.

For large projects we work to a fixed quote. Once we are clear about what you want we will create a document of understanding of what work will be covered for the price before beginning work. You will have the opportunity to confirm or change the document before we proceed.

Our design process begins with a discussion with you about what you need for your site and also your preferences about website look and functionality. Depending on the design brief, we may also undergo extensive design research before beginning a draft design for you. What may surprise you is that it's not the need to be able to visualize what you want that matters most to get started but the need to know what you want your website to do for you.

Yes. All our new design is fully responsive so that your site will look good on every device people use to view it. We can also optimize older sites for mobile devices without having to do a complete re-design if you like.

We will build your site in a way that Google and other search engines can easily index the content and they will include it in their search results. You will not immediately appear on the first page of results for every search query for which you’d like to be found (there is competition for all search terms) but we can work with you to gain increasingly better search results over time. Your best bet is to focus on what is most unique about you and what you offer — and to compete hard for that niche. If you think about what you would write in the search field if you were looking for someone just like you and optimize for that, it will help.

Yes. We can add both social sharing links (Facebook “Like”, Share on Google+ or LinkedIn, pin to Pinterest, Tweet this, etc) as well as social follow links to social media accounts that you maintain.

Usually what we do is create a Dropbox folder into which you can upload copies of your content (texts, images, mp3 files, mp4 files and pdfs) and from which we can download everything. If you prefer to use Google Docs, that works too—or, when you only have a little content, email.

For full website design and development, we customarily request a 1/3 payment to begin designing, with second and third payments following at approximate 1/3 and 2/3 progress points. The proportions and timing vary according to the size of project but this is the most typical arrangement.

Unless your desired domain name is one that you can imagine someone else wanting, you are more than likely ok to wait until the website is ready to publish—and then, if you purchase the hosting plan and domain name together, the billing will always be at the same time of year (which reduces confusion when […]

The most efficient way to upload your content for a new website is to upload it all to a Dropbox folder that we will share with you (you’ll receive an invitation to the Dropbox folder by email). The Dropbox folder will be in our Dropbox account, so you don’t have to have your own (though […]

Browsers all cache the stylesheets of websites for a while once you’ve visited a site (or page) once. They do this to make the pages load faster when you visit again and for published websites that aren’t changing, it’s not a problem, as the fresh content still displays well. However, when your website is in […]

We can re-size images for you to reasonable sizes for the web but if you take the time to reduce them before you send them, the uploading process will be faster—especially if you have a lot of images.

Using images at high resolution is not recommended for anything other than images intended to be zoomable for detail-views. High-res images have high file size and are therefore slow to load and not user-friendly (especially for mobile users). If your image needs to cover a wide computer screen, consider using images that are 2000-2560px wide but saved at low (eg level 5 in Photoshop). If your image is to display at the full width of a column of text, 1000px wide should be fine. If your image will be used next to text in wide screens, 800px wide will be enough.

You can view the pixel dimensions and file-size of an image by right-clicking the image to get the metadata.

It’s often the case that people will purchase their desired domain before they even begin the website design process or purchase a hosting plan. If you wish to have your website hosted with a company like bluehost.com (recommended) and the domain name is registered elsewhere, you can either point the domain name to the host company’s servers (e.g. ns1.bluehost.com and ns2.bluehost.com) and keep your registration where it is — or you can transfer the domain registration to the new hosting company.

Spam from both email addresses and forms on websites is a problem that's ongoing, despite the best efforts of the spam filters your email-host provides.

Providing a direct email link on your website makes it very convenient for potential clients to reach you as many users prefer these links so they retain their "sent" version of the email. But these links also make it super-easy for spammers to email you. You can mark these spammers as "spam" and it may slow them down—but not by much as they can easily use another email address in the future.

Providing only a form on your website can slow the spammers down as they'll need to fill out all the obligatory fields and you can add a captcha to block the robots. The downside of this is that the sent email actually comes from your domain and to mark those emails as spam would end up sending all your form-sent emails to spam (and put your domain into spam filters generally). The best solution for forms on a WordPress website is to use a plugin like Akismet to filter out most of the spam.

When we published your website, if you have a contact form embedded, we will have tested it to be sure you get the email.

Because all things internet are continually being tightened up to reduce spam and other malicious activity, filtering technology changes and it can happen that emails that reached their recipients before suddenly start failing to get through.

Essentially, what you write in the Alt Text field for each image should be a description of the image content that will describe to a blind person what it is that they are not seeing. Keeping this in mind, you can strategically include keyword-rich search terms in this description that will help people find your content via searches.

It is far more important to have STRONG passwords than to be able to remember them. Your email account will be associated with your password and if you ever need to login from a device that doesn't remember your password, you can easily set a new one using the "Lost password?" link. What you absolutely don't want is to expose your site or account to the people who bombard sites with robot-driven login attempts, trying to get access to your site to make surreptitious use of it for their own purposes. And most passwords that you can remember are easy for these bots to crack.

Yes. You can set up a domain-based email (eg info@yourdomain.com) as soon as you have purchased your domain name and hosting space if you want your email hosted with the same hosting company that will be hosting your website. You can also set up an email account with a dedicated email company as soon as you have purchased your domain name if you prefer that but if you keep it with the web-hosting company that you choose, the email account will be free.

Your site will be appearing in search results for what is unique about it (which may, at first, only be your name) within about a week after launching it, but it won't be in the top results for more general descriptions of what you do. It takes a lot of work over time to move up in search results for search terms that relate equally to other individuals and companies who were already on the web.

Yes you can. We can set you up with a Google Analytics account and you’ll be able to see not only how many people are visiting but also much more.

Unless you have specifically requested a static html site, we will develop your website in a content management system with a user interface that does not require knowledge of code to use.

Because we use a lot of custom code and use as few plugins as possible (keeping the site code light and more easily maintained), it is rare that there are issues with updating on websites we build and you can set the plugins updating to "enable auto-updating" and update the Wordpress installation as updates become available. Even beyond this, because we use a lot of custom code and use as few plugins as possible (keeping the site code light and more easily maintained), it is rare that there are issues with clicking those updates. Nevertheless, it is a good practice to make backups of your website as you update the WordPress version and/or plugins (and as you add fresh content).

Yes, websites can need additional features over time and we can help you with this as well as with any other kind of technical or digital outreach help you may need.

If your site disappeared completely, it is most likely that you missed a payment for domain name registration or hosting. If you set up auto-pay, check that your credit card had not expired. Unless a long time has elapsed since your site went down, it should be an easy matter to get it restored. Another possibility would be if you fail to respond to requests to keep your registration contact details up to date. If your site has just stopped displaying properly or has error messages, there could be other issues—such as software upgrades by your hosting company.

That would be extremely unlikely but even if you did, websites can be restored from back-up.