At the beginning of 2010, the School Governors One Stop Shop (SGOSS) approached Beaver Design with a brand new design concept they had created, for a new website they wanted to have built. As the main resource for would-be and serving school governor volunteers across England, the main aim was to make it up-to-date, easy to manage and feature the most relevant information for the volunteers, schools and local authorities who work with SGOSS.

“We decided our website needed an entire overhaul in terms of design, content and navigation. After a lot of work in-house over a number of months, we came up with a design we wanted and took it to Beaver for them to turn into an actual website.” - SGOSS

The website design was first done in-house at SGOSS, before being given to Beaver to turn it into a reality – in addition to building the new and more user friendly CMS to support the new site...

“Beaver also built a new and easier to use CMS for the site, which we have full control of, enabling us to add content where necessary and make any changes we need to and overall making such process a lot quicker.” - SGOSS

If you would like more information about SGOSS, please contact info@sgoss.org.uk or visit the website at:

www.sgoss.org.uk

Today, St Andrew Street in Hertford launches their new website - designed and developed by Beaver Design!

Take a look: www.standrewstreet.com

For the last few months, Beaver Design has been working very closely with the businesses of St Andrew Street to create a new website for the whole street. The result is a site which features news, lots of pictures and videos - all with the aim of engaging with customers and showcasing the range of quality independent shops on the street.

All the designs, logos and layouts on the site were created in-house by Beaver Design. In addition, Beaver Design provided some photography services for the street, as well as videos provided by Ware-based Media 14

As well as designing and managing the site, Beaver Design is also working closely withe street to improve their presence on social networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter. With so many people using these services, St Andrew Street identified a need to be a part of it and engage online.

"By incorporating state-of-the-art features like video content and rolling news, we know that this website will be bookmarked and revisited regularly by many people. We are delighted with the result!" - Rod Lewis, Hertfordshire Graphics, St Andrew Street

To launch the site, the street are organising an event for Saturday 26th June. Vouchers are available online, so grab yourself a bargain!

Beaver Design has recently finished an extensive project for London based Resource Furniture Services Limited (RFS), designing a new corporate look, including a new logo, stationery, brochures and a website.

LOGO

Starting things off, Beaver designed a new logo – a clean, professional graphic, using RFS colours and incorporating the slogan of what they provide: workplace solutions.

From the original concept and design of the logo, the rest of the brand identity followed. Beaver delivered the RFS company stationery, such as business cards and this was followed by designs for the livery of the RFS company vehicles and company brochures.

BROCHURES

The RFS brochures needed to convey information about the company, as well as fit in seamlessly with their corporate branding. Beaver designed an eight page brochure with all the information, as well as images of projects and installations.

Professional, clean and elegant design was key and the brochures were finished with a quality matt laminate, including an inside pocket for additional documents.

WEBSITE - www.rfsinstall.co.uk

The final phase to the RFS redesign project was their new company website. Like the rest of the designs in this project, this site is clean and professional, aimed at providing key information to visitors.

Like all websites designed by Beaver, it uses the latest in web development techniques, as well as simple web features such as a photo gallery and news blog. Good search engine optimisation techniques were integrated, helping RFS to be found by their clients.

By using the same brand identity throughout their print and website, and by following professional design practices, RFS now have strong tools to help better promote their business.

For more information about RFS, please go to:

www.rfsinstall.co.uk

Beaver Design has completed a new website for Foila – the advanced hair foil preparation system. Foila helps improve productivity and efficiency in professional hair salons with the Folia Dispenser and Refoil products.

Foila asked us to create them a site which looked and functioned like other high-end, fashion led websites. Like the Foila product itself, we designed a website which is a stylish reflection of their brand. Simple and contemporary designs were put together, along with some modern web features.

Working with the production team from Media 14, Beaver Design also integrated a demonstration of Foila into the website – demonstrating some of its cost saving benefits for salons in a short video.

Form as well as function

The website is created using the latest web design techniques, featuring an online shop, a savings calculator and search engine optimisation. The site also features a content management system, which allows Foila to amend and update the pages as they need to.

With a new, stylish and well designed web presence, Foila has a strong position to help reach their customers and promote their hair salon products.

For more information and to view the site, please go to:
www.foila.com

In addition to our article in April's Axis Magazine, we take a more detailed look at 'search engine optimisation' (SEO). Search engine optimisation is the process of getting your site to rank as highly as possible for the searches which are relevant to you.

Download your copy of our article from Axis Magazine (1MB) >

In the article, we covered some of the basic principles on SEO and Google. But what about other search engines? What about Yahoo, AOL, Ask and MSN? Because Google processes 60% of the world’s searches, it is usually easier to just talk about how to rank on Google. Especially because many other search engines follow what Google does.

When search engines do their searching, they aren’t actually searching the live web. They are only searching an index of it. In the early days of the internet, search engines used human-edited directories. A popular example of this was Yahoo, which had hundreds of people updating the index of websites.

The problem was that this took a long time and niche areas of the web were poorly indexed. What Google did (and did well) was to create an algorithm which automatically trawled through the web, indexing what it found. By judging a page on the words it found, the links it had pointing to it and so on, Google created a huge and accurate index. They’ve been continually refining and shaping this technology and due to its success, other search engines (including Yahoo) now use the Google index in conjunction with their own.

There are hundreds of different things for SEO, each of which usually only makes a small difference to your ranking. However, an organised and comprehensive approach to web design will help you get the best from your website and how it ranks.

Other interesting things about Google:

Google’s unofficial motto is, “Don’t be evil” – meaning that they don’t seek to exploit people or the web for their own ends. Read more about Google’s motto >

The Google “I’m feeling lucky” button on their home page takes the user to whatever the top result is for that search. However, the existence of this button is reported to cost Google $110million a year. Read more about this button >

Google has often been criticised (and praised) for dominating the online market. With so much power and influence in the shape of the internet, Google are defining the web in the same way that Microsoft defined software. Read more about Google's competition >