Our sites are tailor made for each client, but they generally fit into one of three categories.
Basic sites contain text and graphics. They may be visually exciting and have many pages but have no interaction.
Intermediate sites have an ability to accept information or instruction from the person viewing the site and to make appropriate responses by actually generating new web pages through the use of a computer program.
Advanced sites have the ability to store information for use by you or to be used for the content by computer generated web pages. They may also allow direct ordering and payment of goods by credit/debit cards.
Simple web sites will have the fewest requirements but you should plan ahead and make sure that you can upgrade your web-hosting package. The ability to store your web pages and basic e-mail facilities may be all you need at present but over time you may need some of the more sophisticated facilities outlined below. Many web hosts have packages to suit a variety of requirements and allow their customers to upgrade their package, often by paying just the price difference. Even for simple sites it would be wise to look for packages that offer multiple e-mail addresses (also known as POP3 mailboxes) and auto responder. The auto responder allows you to send a ready-made e-mail automatically.
Accepting orders or information from people directly through your website will require the use of computer programs or scripts to be run on your web server. These scripts take the information and produce an appropriate response, perhaps an e-mail being sent or a specially produced web page or to get further details. For such websites the hosting package should allow you to use your own scripts (provided by us) using a language that we use. Currently we use PHP and PERL through a mechanism known as CGI. Be careful, cheaper hosting packages may advertise CGI facilities but will not allow you to use your own scripts.
It is likely that you will need a database system if you need to store information that has been obtained from your website, or you have many product lines. We prefer to work with MySQL; it is fast, efficient and can handle the most complex information requirements. We use the industry standard technique of normalisation to ensure that even the most intricate data can produce information in a suitable form. For e-commerce sites, we can produce scripts to connect with Internet payment systems such as WorldPay and CyberCash but many high-end hosting packages offer a shopping cart facility, which would reduce the overall amount of work we need to do.