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 >

Beaver Design has finished work rebuilding the Grassform website, incorporating current design methods and SEO.

Grassform wanted to keep the design and style of the website, but update the code used to build it to incorporate current design methods, W3C standards and search engine optimisation. The old Grassform site was built using old methods, which are not search engine friendly and not seen as keeping with the W3C standards of practice.

Beaver Design took the original site and exchanged old methods with newer ones. We were also able to include Grassform's new logo (designed by Beaver) to give their brand a unified look. The finished site essentially looks the same, but will now be easier for search engines to index and for future revisions in the website code.

For more information, take a look at the Grassform website >