Website Design Pretoria | Web Development Company in Pretoria, close to Johannesburg
(Gauteng, South Africa)
NextG is a professional web design company in Pretoria, close to Johannesburg (Gauteng). We specialize in developing websites with a modern "look and feel", mobile friendly, with the ability to import Facebook and ready to use all the latest technologies at your disposal. By using advanced and modern web programming methods, the website owner is empowered to update his own website content, upload new images and post new articles. By providing the correct training and assistance, our clients are in no time able to manage their own website content and ready to ride the wave of the next generation web.
Most of our web site clients are from Gauteng (Pretoria and Johannesburg area), but due to the ease with which the whole web development cycle can be completed online, we have clients all over South Africa and even a few international clients.
Websites should be built with the latest coding and using the latest technologies
It is important that your website's look and feel is consistent over all major web browsers and that the website coding used by the web programmer or web developer is the latest version. If the website was built with sound programming principles, your website's functionality will also be consistent. Web browsers use most of their capabilities to "try and render" a badly coded or a badly designed website. They are actually doing a very good job at rendering broken websites, but are becoming less and less lenient as time passes by. The fact that a website might look beautiful on the outside in a specific web browser, is not to say that it is also beautiful on the inside. A badly coded website is like a a fairy princess on the outside and Frankenstein on the inside. Sad to say, such websites will not stand the test of time and might begin to fall apart not before long. Besides all this, the websites need to be SEO friendly in design. This is the ease with which SEO coding can be added, without completely rebuilding the back-end coding and structure of the website.
Changing colours on your website should not mean rebuilding the complete website!
Another aspect is that the website programming platform (the programming code), the styling ("look and feel") and the content (articles, videos and images) should be separated. Should a client want to change some colours on his website, it really becomes a big problem if a programmer needs to go through all content to remove the styling from all the individual text and other content. This greatly impairs the client's ability to manage and update his own website content. That is why clients that purchased a content management system from NextG, are able to update and manage their own website content so soon. Further, if you are tired of your website, NextG can either purchase a new template and customize it for you or just built a new template from scratch. Changing the complete website's look and feel, is then just a matter of changing the website template, uploading and installing it in Joomla and 'voila'. That is why WordPress and Joomla is becoming so popular, but remember that even though your website is built on a CMS platform, the web programmer might have messed up the coding and not kept styling and content separate.
Does Joomla or Wordpress determine the look and feel of my website?
Many people are confused about what type of website they have and which ones they would prefer. The look and feel is not determined by the website platform. A static website built in HTML or a dynamic, database-driven website built in Joomla or WordPress can all look the same. NextG will be able to build the same website on any platform. Just be aware, as in many cases websites are built on some foreign website platform or online "website creator" and then the clients might have gotten themselves a really bad deal, especially if they have paid money for it. In most cases those websites are unable to handle SEO coding and are very limited in their capabilities for adding new modules like displaying the latest Facebook posts for example.
Website Design purchasing a commercial template or using a Graphical Designer?
The traditional method for getting a website design, was to approach a Graphical Designer to design a website layout for you, with all the relevant colours and a theme suitable for your business. The duty of the web programmer was then to design a template (or static website) that looks like the design prepared by the graphical designer. Today this is mostly the choice, if you are a corporate business with a very specific or peculiar need. In many instances large corporate companies also started moving away from this method, as it is very rigid and inflexible and many are starting to use Joomla, WordPress or Drupal Content Management Systems. The problem with the traditional method can be where the Graphical Designer after various attempts were unable to satisfy the client. In essence there might have been nothing wrong with the designs, but like the tendency is with us all, we sometimes do not know what we want, unless we see it in action somewhere else.
The best and latest way of doing it, is going shopping online for commercially available templates. Though not all companies are recommendable, many deliver high quality designs and excellent support. These designs are made by the world's best designers and tested over various platforms beforehand. There you can see the template or design in action and with a few adjustments, it might just suit your needs. Many of newer modern designs have a much more open and clean design, compared to the previous generation of cramped and rigid website designs. You money can be better spent on a graphical designer to have a proper logo designed for your website. Many of the new template designs comes with Photo Shop files and perhaps you can have a logo for free by just editing the text in the logo PSD file and exporting it as an image. These designs in many cases have mobile responsiveness built into the designs. Though not all of the commercial templates have this functionality, you can sometimes even change the colours and layouts yourself, without the help of a web programmer, by changing the settings in the website administration panel.
NextG has contracts with some of the world's best suppliers of commercial templates and commercial modules. Using NexG as your web developer can save you a significant amount of money, firstly on graphical designer fees and frustration as mentioned above and also paying large amounts for these modules or templates as a single purchase. NextG purchases commercial licenses and then we can use it on as many website as we like.
NextG recommends a Joomla or WordPress Content Management System
We have found that Joomla or WordPress are the easiest for clients that want to update their own website content. These platforms are also modern and can import virtually all of the latest technologies. It is strongly advised to have a maintenance contract with NextG, so we can maintain the Website Hosting and programming side for the latest software releases and you can then be focusing on writing content and getting new images for your website.
Some clients prefer that we do all changes to website content for them. Having a CMS like Joomla can save you a lot of time, as you have to pay web programmers per hour. With a CMS, the time taken for tasks doing updates and changing website content is reduced drastically. If a website is large, with many pages, applying the changes on all the pages can take a considerable amount of time. With Joomla a change to a menu item, is dynamically propagated to all pages, even if it is a thousand pages. We have seen web developers giving up on maintaining websites with a large amount of pages, as it had just become unmanageable and prone to errors. The saying "Adapt or Die" is true with websites. Perhaps it is time for you to take a lead forward and into the future with your website.
Three years ago mobile compatibility was a luxury, now it had become a necessity. Your clients' expectations have become more and more advanced and people are becoming less forgiving towards outdated, broken and neglected websites.
Choosing NextG as your web consultant and partner will ensure you to have the right guide to stay ahead of the times, up to speed with your clients expectations and ahead of your competition.