SERVICES
Website Design and Programming
We design websites which are functional and user-friendly. In contrast to many website design companies, Xenon is able to undertake and appropriately manage and deploy dynamic websites, which draw on databases and serve up fresh and changeable information to their customers.
Best of all, we put control of frequently-changing information (like news articles and calendar events) into your hands - you can add new articles when you want to, without involving us! We have found that our clients are more likely to keep their sites up to date if they can do it themselves.
Content Management Systems
We have worked with several open-source Content Management Systems (CMS), including Xoops, e107 and PortalApp. In every case we have customised the solution for our client, including writing custom plug-in modules. Talk to us if you need a solution that goes beyond the mainstream!
eCommerce Shopping Carts
We have implemented and customised existing shopping carts (osCommerce and Zen Cart), and have also written our own simplified cart for clients with basic needs. Our programming skills enable us to customize and modify pre-existing solutions as required.
Discussion Forums / Message Boards
Our preferred solution for interaction via a forum / message board, is phpBB. phpBB can be integrated into many of the existing open-source CMS and eCommerce solutions, and we are skilled in customizing and modifying this superb message board system.
Hosting
Don't get Jack to design your site, Bob to write the backend programming to connect up to your database of products, and Fred to host it! We can do it all in one place for you: design, hosting, programming, the lot.
Our hosting rates are excellent, and start at R99 per month. All our hosting plans include PHP, MySQL, full FTP access, and POP and web-based email.
Click here for hosting terms and conditions
Search Engine Optimisation
OK, so you've got the website, you even hooked it up to a news database and a feedback form - you're really optimistic, and you're sure your customers (and more importantly, potential customers) will love it. Problem is, will anyone ever find it?
We will optimise your site for searchability on the major search engines, and handle submitting it to them. We will do the finicky technical stuff to make sure your site accurately reflects your products and desired market, not just to the human beings surfing it, but to the automated computer spiders sent out by the search engines!
When your site is completed, we will feature it in a news item on our own home page - a web page that is visited by Google every single day. This means that Google will find you and start spidering you straight away.
We use Google Sitemaps to inform Google's crawler about all your website pages.
The Process
Every website goes through several phases of development along the road to completion of a perfect solution:
- Solution proposal
We have the experience required to take your needs and translate those into a viable web-based presence, including any additional website features that will improve both your and your visitors' experience of your site. We never propose something "fancy" just because "it can be done" - we are always cognisant of your requirements for the site, and the experience you want your site visitors to have.
- Design / layout
Taking into consideration your existing corporate branding, including logos and letterheads, we design a "look-and-feel" for your site that closes matches your company's ethos and your own likes and dislikes. Every website quotation includes 3 different designs - with major variations. In reality, our clients are usually happy with their first design, with minor revisions.
- Database design, implementation and coding
All but our smallest sites require this development phase. We recommend to all our clients that they keep their website content fresh and up-to-date - even if they just have a news section that is frequently updated. And then we ensure that the client has control over that. With easy-to-use tools, most of our clients update their own news, special offers, product catalogues etc. This requires some back-end coding, and database stuff - which we are able to undertake in several programming and database technologies. Our clients are happy with our intuitive update interfaces, not to mention the fact that they don't have to pay us every time they want to add a press release or news article!
- Final Approval, Live Launch and Training
Once the website is complete, we liaise with you to determine your preferred time for the site to be "made live" - i.e. to be accessible to the public. If applicable, we will then provide training on how to use the update interfaces of your website administration modules.
