Web Design

Responsive design is making sure that your website ‘responds’ to the size of the screen that it is being viewed on so that it still looks great when viewed on any device of any size. Desktop computers, laptops, tablets and mobile phones now come in so many different dimensions that it is impossible to just create a rigid design for certain specific screen sizes. Instead, we create websites using flexible layouts, flexible images, and CSS (cascading style sheet) which means that, whatever the screen size, the website fits that space perfectly and gives the website users a great user experience.

A great website is one that is built with its users in mind. Whatever the purpose of the site, be it for e-commerce, lead generation, data capture, or a combination of these, each site should have its own unique journey to encourage that behaviour. This is a part of Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO); encouraging your users to ‘convert’ using clever website design.

Using the correct imagery and content are also very important to create a great website design. You might have the nicest images in the world but if they alienate your target audience, you might as well give up now. Your content needs to be carefully written to embody your company’s Tone Of Voice (TOV), and your TOV should be decided upon for the people who you are targeting.

To sum up, a great website blends expertly written content, great quality images, and useful, beautiful functionality to create a site perfect for the target audience.

A lightbox is a pop-up which highlights key information or asks a user to give their details. Generally, a lightbox blocks other content on the page, and the background of the site is dimmed whilst the lightbox is bright. Usually, you have to cross off a lightbox in order to return back to using the rest of the site. You can also use a lightbox when you are showcasing items such as a video or a gallery of images, meaning that the website only loads these large or data-heavy features once the user chooses to activate them.

A wireframe is a very basic mapping out of the key pages of the website, a type of skeleton of the key features of the site. This is usually one of the first steps in a website design process and can be as “low tech” as drawing a sketch on a piece of paper. The person creating the wireframes, usually a UX designer, would draw out the specific features of the key pages on the website and map out where the key features will go.

We will communicate with our clients regularly, with project updates in weekly calls, emails, and face-to-face meetings. We will fit our communication around you – some of our clients prefer to speak regularly on the phone, some just prefer brief updates via email, and some choose to come into our office for each update.

Usability refers to how easy the site is for a user to interact with the site, and this is a cornerstone of our website design process. Some websites might look visually stunning, but be really difficult for users to actually make their way around. Because we are a search-led website design agency, our websites are all built with SEO best practices. Search engines value website usability; it is a ranking factor for how well a website performs. Therefore, we blend aesthetics with usability to create websites that look great but also perform really well.

A good website design is beautiful, useful, and gives the user what they want quickly and easily. It also isn’t ‘style over substance’ – there is no point in having an amazing website if it takes 30 seconds to load and annoys all of your users to the point that they never get to experience it!

You will see the designs at multiple stages. The first design step in our process is to create the home page designs, and then we will present these to you, and you have the opportunity to send over any amendments. Then we will work on any changes to the home page designs as well as create designs for any bespoke internal pages that we are doing for the project. Then we will go through all of these designs together, and once again you will get the opportunity to share any comments or amendments.

We want to make sure that the website is completely signed off from a design perspective before we start to develop the site, which, although requiring more work upfront, results in far fewer delays later down the line.

Yes, with Embryo you will have a dedicated, PRINCE2-certified project manager who will manage your project from beginning to end. They will be your constant port of call, they will let you know exactly what assets you need to provide, what access they need, what to expect from the project, and you will have your project updates from them too.

Yes, all websites we develop are set to work on all devices and browsers. We do robust testing to ensure that this is the case.

We can indeed, several in fact. We tend to build e-commerce sites using WooCommerce or Shopify, but our website developers have also worked with Magento and PrestaShop.

The more assets you can give us, the better. High-resolution versions of your logo and your brand guidelines are essential. Product and lifestyle photography can take a website to the next level, but stock imagery can be used if you don’t have your own images, or your business doesn’t lend itself to having its own images. Then it depends on the site, you might want to display logos of the clients you work with, any accreditation you have, and any reviews you want to display. Your project manager will create a list of all of the assets they need for your site.

We predominantly use WordPress. Why use any other? There is a reason it’s the most popular CMS in the world. It’s open-source, it’s user-friendly, it’s SEO-friendly, it’s developer-friendly, and our clients can use it with ease. You can develop a WordPress site to do just about anything you need it to do.

We use Invision, Adobe Creative Suite and Sketch for our designs.

Our web design team looks at websites like Behance, where the best of the best designers & developers showcase their work. If you can keep up with the in design trends on Behance, you are pretty much at the forefront of design trends and technologies. Our website team are big web design geeks, they read a lot of design articles in their spare time, they look at the Awwwards website, Medium, Dribbble, Codrops…There are so many!

No project is ever the same. No matter what web design project we undertake, the company, their goals, their brand, and their main aspirations for the website, all of them are completely unique. It’s also so creative, being able to make beautiful websites that delight our clients is a great feeling. It’s also very fast-paced and I have never once been bored doing this job.

There are many reasons why our website team are great to work with; we have really talented team members, we go above and beyond for our clients, and our service is second to none. But, more importantly than all of those things in terms of the website you will end up with, we are a search-led website team.

You might think that all website developers would know how to build a website that ranks well on Google, but you would be wrong. The disciplines of SEO and website development are traditionally two very separate disciplines, which has resulted in us working with some clients who have spent a lot of money getting new websites that look great but would never ever make it onto the first page of Google.

We’ve seen websites which have actually had Google’s robots blocked from crawling the site – not on purpose but purely because of a lack of awareness. The fact that our website projects are completely integrated with our search team is the #1 reason that you should choose Embryo to design and build your site.

In one of our first meetings, we will have to create your design brief together. In this session, we ask a lot of questions about the company, your target audience, your USPs, your brand, why you want a new website, what you want people to think about your brand… There are far too many questions to list here. Our project manager wrote a whole blog about the importance of a website design brief, which you can read here!

Yes, we can, our designers have all got a lot of experience working on company brands, be it a startup with just a company name, from a huge company re-brand. Sometimes, we have to recommend a logo redesign, because an old-fashioned logo can really ruin a beautiful new website.