Here at Turtlereality, we aren't great at blowing our own trumpets. We believe in working diligently to provide a great service to our customers - but we would like to share with you what it is that sets us apart from other web design companies. Here is a quick summary:
- Attention to detail
- Design - flair and effectiveness
- Quality assurance - we test things - and fix them
- Optimisation - pages load blazingly fast
- We understand mobile - our designs work for all screen sizes
- Great photography - we get the most out of even poor source material
- SEO - all sites get at least the basics
Attention to Detail
Websites are complex things - and getting ever more so. A mixture of content, design, Google optimisation, the need to display on different screen sizes and shapes. It's a crazy combination of elements that all have to work together - and it's the details that make the difference.
We often use the analogy of a garden, there is an overall structure but within that, each element of the garden needs to be polished and tidied. It has to work close up as well as from a distance. My work with top global design company Agency.com taught me that it's the details that really count. It can be a challenge to bring this level of polish to projects with small budgets, but we always aim high.
Design
Our websites are designed with flair - but the design process is mainly about effectively communicating our clients' offerings. The designs we create help our clients to punch above their weight, look bigger than they are - and ultimately to grow and thrive. Sometimes they grow so much we lose them to mergers or corporate in-house teams!
Quality Assurance
This is jargonese for 'testing'. Here at TR, we have a 3-server-approach to building and deploying websites. Development is undertaken on a server in our offices. When a website is ready to be approved by the client we deploy the code to a password-protected 'staging' server. Once approved it can be promoted to the live site. We test things before they go live on a variety of platforms, devices and screen sizes. All of our code is deployed via secure BitBucket repositories, which also provides great version control.
Site Optimisation
The speed that a web page loads is critical to the success of a website. Fractions of a second can make a huge difference. We test page load speeds and optimise all aspects of the site to make this as fast as we can, often near to half a second. Visitors will not wait for slow pages to load - they will just go elsewhere.
We Understand Mobile
Since the launch of the iPhone back in 1948, sorry, 2009, web designers have had a new problem to solve - how to make sites look good on big screens and also tiny phone screens. It's been a huge paradigm shift and many web design companies just haven't been able to effectively make the leap.
Here at Turtlereality, we understand how to make a site work well on a mobile - and how to make the same site work equally well on a desktop. It's a tough ask, but we have mastered it - check out our portfolio sites on both a desktop and mobile and you will see how well they transfer.
Photography
Good photography is key to many successful websites. At Turtlereality we produce great photos, applying post-production tweaking to our own photography but also to any images supplied by third parties. I don't think we have ever been handed photographs that we haven't been able to make look better by tweaking them in Photoshop.
SEO
SEO stands for, of course, "Search engine optimisation". Without Google finding your site you are basically wasting your time. That's why all of the sites we make have at least the basics of SEO, even for websites with the lowest budgets. For clients serious about SEO we offer tailored monthly plans to help you grow your business.
Drupal
One key factor in making our sites great is that we specialise in Drupal web design. This gives us a huge advantage in making great sites - and the freedom to create what our clients need.
Great results, even for small budgets
So, that's how we make a difference. Most of it is plain, old-fashioned hard work, persistence and diligence. On top of that, we have a combination of design flair and technical excellence.