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I worked for many years in IT and I still "keep my hand in" by designing web sites. This is more of a hobby now and so I don't charge the earth. I don't do fancy artwork and the like because I'm not really an artist. However, if you want a good workable website, without hassle and without being worried about being over-charged, give me a ring!

You can also take advantage of having your own Testimonials facility to allow your clients to leave their own comments. I find that many of my clients decide to contact me because they liked the way the testimonials were obviously not "invented" by me.

I designed this site and also the Testimonials system which this page links to. It not only uses the usual html coding, but goes a great deal further into what is called Active Server Pages, or ASP. This is full-on computer programming which can produce all sorts of additional features such as on-line booking, etc. You would normally expect to pay thousands of pounds for ASP websites.

Standard web pages (i.e. those ending ".htm") are fixed pages which sit on the web server. When a client clicks on to a link, or enters the web URL, the server simply sends this page. With ASP technology (i.e. those ending ".asp") the web page is constructed "on the fly". It can look up databases for example and return up-to-the-minute information which has previously been updated by another ASP page. This is how the Testimonials system works. When an ex-client adds a new comment, this can be displayed to the next potential client without me having to do anything.

Search Engine Optimisation

• It's no good having a wonderfully appealing website, if Customers can't find it on Google!
• It's no good having a website that IS found by Google, but which is no longer appealing to Customers!

Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is essentially the process of making your web pages appealing to Search Engine robots, rather than to people. To do it properly requires much thought and experimentation in order to retain the essence of the web pages whilst making the necessary changes. The problem is that the Google "robot" likes to decide for itself what each page is about. The more an exact phrase appears, the more it decides that this phrase must be important. It also likes these phrases to be near the top, near the bottom, and starting sentences and paragraphs. In fact there are very many signs that the robot looks for. Also Google deliberately don't publish how they do it. The page itself is important. Getting this right is phase 1 of the process. The other phase involves getting your web site to appear as links in other websites, which involves writing and submitting articles to thousands of on-line publications.

There are many companies who offer quite cheap Search Engine Optimisation services. The problem is that they usually use their own templates and simply fill in the blanks with little chunks of text from your existing web pages. They then manipulate this as quickly as possible to produce an "optimised" page. The end result looks awful and it is painfully obvious to anyone who sees it that it was created by someone who had no idea what they were writing about. They lose any sense of what you were originally trying to say.

Think about this. These days, an experienced programmer may reasonably expect a salary of £60K. With overheads, this employee will cost more like £90K each year. His or her employer would expect that person to generate about 120K in revenue, or over £500 per day! If they are going to charge you £200 for a "full optimisation service", what can you expect from someone after less than a morning's work?

It is very difficult, and expensive, to have a web page perform well in a "non-local" way. I.e., it is probably many thousands of times more difficult to appear in the top 10 of Google for the phrase "tv shop" than, say, "tv shop burnley". National on-line shops will employ many people, at a cost of hundreds of pounds, to optimise their pages.

I offer a service in which I take time to do the job properly and sensitively. I am self-employed, with low overheads. I can spend days doing what employees of bigger companies have to do in hours.

Also, I do this work now just because I love doing it. Although I was a Corporate IT manager with BAE SYSTEMS and also worked with Compaq and HP, I now work as a Clinical Hypnotherapist. I just can't stay away from programming!