Website Design & Development Services
An effective website is essential for any business, large or small.
We design and execute data driven and insight informed websites that form the backbone of your online presence, bring you closer to your key audiences, and represent your brand’s products and services.
If you want to grow your business digitally, your website is looking dated and needs a refresh, or you simply aren’t getting the results you want from your existing online investment, Mackman provides you not only with a website, but also the tools and expertise to maintain and manage your presence online.
We work with ambitious market leading brands and help them to reach the increasing number of customers who search for products and services online. Our extensive website development and design services are utilised by organisations of all sizes and across many sectors.
How we can help
A plain speaking collaborative approach.
At Mackman, every aspect of the website design process is delivered by combining the skills of our insight, strategy, creative, communications, digital, marketing and development teams to make sure your website delivers the specific results you're after.
We build websites that will deliver consistent levels of leads and sales to your business.
To ensure that a website brings brands closer to target audiences, we combine our customer centric methodologies with brand identity expertise, providing engaging websites capable of effectively and efficiently communicating key messaging.
A website that drives user engagement and converts visitors into customers is a crucial part of your marketing, and at Mackman, we’ve perfected this process over 17 years.
Our strapline, ‘Together We Grow’, is integral to our approach where websites are concerned, as we collaborate with our clients to make sure that the finished product is everything that you hoped for.
Contact us today to discuss your website design and development needs.
Web Design & Development Services
A comprehensive portfolio of web development services.
At Mackman, our websites aren’t out-of-the-box solutions or temporary fixes. Our website design and development process is completely bespoke and tailored to your specific business requirements.
Although we build your website on WordPress, to make it easy to use and manage, we do not use off the shelf templates. Our development team create bespoke page templates based on the designs created by the design studio.
Our websites are informed by thorough user and market insight, often as part of a larger project that incorporates multiple aspects of your brand.
Applying industry best practice to website development with a focus on security, speed and functionality, we deliver flexible and effective cross platform, multi-device digital marketing solutions.
We focus our multi-disciplinary approach to website development across six pillars: insight, branding, content, functionality, design, and training.
DR GEMMA MACKMAN
Research Director
Contact Mackman today and let’s get started on your website development project.
For an initial informal discussion with a senior member of our team either complete the contact form or call us on 01787 388 038. We would be interested to discuss your requirements in more depth and how best to move forward.
“We would have no hesitation in recommending Mackman as a company to develop a website whether it is an information only site or a more complex ecommerce site which is automatically refreshed as ours does. We would especially like to thank Mackman for their contribution to producing and supporting the website.”
Graeme Moody, IT Director | Gisela Graham
Website Design
Highly qualified and experienced web design team.
If you are facing increasing online competition, need to refresh your brand, or are starting from scratch, then you will require a new website design that engages your customers better, helps you to collect data that you can use to make informed business decisions and maintain communications with your customers. Most importantly, it'll generate more leads and sales.
We help leading brands to stand out in a crowded marketplace and create long-standing relationships with customers through better design.
Mackman will make it easier for your customers to learn more about you, order products, and get in contact with you, ultimately seeing your brand as the clear alternative to your competitors.
Our Website Design Process
The quality of our website design is built upon the fact that we leverage all of our resources and experience here at Mackman. We will go through your business goals in a client kick-off meeting focused on your website in order to understand your aims in either updating, redesigning, or creating your first website.
Insight gathered during sessions with our experienced research and digital teams will establish key phrases, SEO recommendations and customer journeys. This is achieved using a combination of collaborative workshops and desk research to really understand your brand, your competitors, and the environment in which you operate.
This feeds into the development of a content strategy for your website, ensuring not only that your content will be relevant and engaging for your target audience, but that your website will also rank on search engines for common questions asked by customers.
Content Management
Content is one of the most important parts of a website. The effort to put it all together should not be underestimated either. So, at Mackman, we can do your content for you.
Our specialist team of writers can provide you with thoroughly researched content, optimised for both your visitors and search engines.
Alternatively, perhaps more relevant to smaller website builds, our clients want to write the content. In this instance we deploy easy-to-use content management software to enable our clients to input their own website content, providing layouts for items such as your homepage, service pages, and blog pages, and clear direction to establish consistent tone of voice and messaging that reflects your business.
Whether we are importing existing content to the website, creating content, or you are providing the content, this stage will be managed by one of our team to provide you with a fully managed process that is straightforward and easy to understand.
Website Development
A solid platform that underpins any digital marketing activity.
Website projects can look very different from one another. Some of our clients require a simple site that includes a few key pages and a contact form to promote their services and aid initial contact.
Others require something more complex such as an eCommerce site with full sales and marketing functions or an integrated learning management system for selling online courses.
We can also integrate your new site with an existing CRM, back-office solution, or something more complex to reduce the time you spend on businesses admin.
Once a website's design, look and feel is signed off, we’ll move onto the build or the development of the website itself. We build high performing sites that are fast and convert.
We build on a lightweight and versatile framework using the WordPress platform. This CMS (content management system) provides agility and the ability to optimise for ever improved performance.
A website needs to look great, yes, but it also needs to be easy to use and well structured. We build engaging websites for a great user experience as well as optimising them for search engines so your website can be found.
We build sites to SEO ready status. This means that your website is structured well and gives you access to all of the elements needed to perform well in search engines. If we are developing from an existing site, we’ll take your existing optimisations and include them in your new website.
If we are starting from scratch, we’ll make sure that all of the elements exist to optimise that site. Then you or our digital team can get to work and optimise your site for those ever so important keywords and phrases.
WordPress is the most widely used CMS, and also the most widely developed. So, there are a huge number of plugins that can be added to your site. However, not all plugins are good, and you can very much overload a site with plugins that are not required or should not have been added in the first place.
Our team of web development experts take care of this for you. Website performance is at the heart of what we do.
Once your website is ready to launch, rigorous pre-flight checks and testing take place to make sure everything is working as it should. These include testing your new site on a range of web browsers and mobile devices.
If you're migrating from an existing website we make sure to preserve the SEO value you've built up by migrating any current optimisations you've made and that all of your old links are pointing to the new pages if required.
We are available to respond to questions from our clients every step of the way to ensure that the final product is what you envisioned. Our processes are slick, and our performance second to none.
PAUL MACKMAN
Managing Director -
FCIM Chartered Marketer
“Mackman helped turn our outdated, un-intuitive website into a modern, easy to use, responsive site.”
Ben Sibbons, Sales & Hire Executive | Sibbons
“Digital design is like painting, except the paint never dries."
Neville Brody
WebCare
Keeping your website optimised and providing you support.
WebCare is our ongoing package of support once a site is live. Yes, it includes high performance website hosting on enterprise level, Google Cloud servers and access to Cloudflare's global network of data centres, it's also much, much more.
Our sites are launched to deliver peak performance from the get-go, but like a car, they will require maintenance. We take care of this for you by crawling your site for any technical issues and updating your plugins and themes as updates become available, keeping your site safe and secure.
We can also provide regular performance reports and recommendations to keep your site performing at its best.
Our WebCare packages also provide you with the support you need to confidently take control of your new website. Our support team are always on hand to help you with your website management, answer your questions and provide training. More importantly, should your site go offline we promise to get that site up and live on the internet again within hours.
We can also provide ongoing content and SEO support as part of your WebCare package.
We offer the highest levels of ongoing support for the websites that we build and will tailor your WebCare hosting and support contract to your exact requirements.
Contact us to find out more about our WebCare services.
Why We Develop Websites On WordPress
We are WordPress specialists.
WordPress is the world’s most popular blogging and content management system (CMS). WordPress powers a third of all websites on the internet, and it is widely used by leading brands such as Sony, Disney, and Facebook. WordPress is our platform of choice for a number of reasons:
- WordPress readily lends itself to search engine optimisation (SEO). It is SEO friendly out of the box, allowing you to inform search engines about your content through meta descriptions and title tags and sitemaps that are automatically generated to boost your rankings and index your page.
- It has been an open source platform since 2003, meaning that it continues to be developed by a group of contributors. Beware of becoming tied into a proprietary CMS platform, as you don’t technically have full ownership of your site and content.
This means that you’re effectively renting your website, so when your subscription or payment plan stops, your files and pages belong to the company or will be lost entirely. With a WordPress site, the files are your property, and can be migrated to other hosts. - It provides a solid foundation for bespoke development satisfying both simple and complex requirements. Although WordPress was initially developed as a blogging platform, numerous updates over the years mean that blogs, forums, ecommerce sites, job boards, knowledge bases and more can be created using WordPress.
This also means that WordPress has an excellent range of tools and plugins to assist you in your content marketing efforts, with quick and simple tools to write up and publish posts. - It has a great user interface which is intuitive and easy to learn. WordPress is customisable and flexible, and its basic functionality doesn’t require years of technical skills to get to grips with.
In the days before WordPress, an in-depth understanding of CSS, compliance standards, and HTML coding was essential to building effective websites. WordPress is designed to be straightforward to use, with layers of plugins and themes available to those who want to get more technical. - There is a huge developer community that surrounds and supports future WordPress development. This means there are always new features being developed and our in house support team can help deal with any issues that pop up. In addition, the majority of our websites are hosted through WPEngine, which uses Google Cloud to store data. Google aims to run their business on carbon-free energy everywhere, at all times, by 2030.
BRUCE BURGOYNE
Creative Director
A Comprehensive Portfolio Of Web Development Services
Ready, steady, grow...
With extensive in-house abilities, our track record speaks for itself; we’ve been trusted to launch 200+ websites since 2003 and we currently care for a large number of these with our WebCare offering.
We deliver on budget, on time and to a high standard every time because we know how to avoid common mistakes, follow a process to guide our work and work together with you to create a website that grows your business and engages your target audience.
Whether you’re a start-up needing the right foundations to build trust with your audience or established in your market and looking for the next stage of growth, contact us today so we can start the process of mapping your own website design and development project roadmap.
ADAM CHAMBERLIN
Head of Development
How We Work
Perhaps it’s just the right time for a refresh of your website to take advantage of web technologies such as event management and ecommerce, or maybe you're looking to breathe some life into an old website that's not generating any business.
We support clients with varying needs and differing levels of development and design. We can help with website migrations such as moving to a WordPress based site, or a complete site redesign where we improve the targeting, design and content to engage your customers.
Our plain speaking, collaborative, can-do approach makes us easy to work with, as together we develop bespoke solutions that are right for you and your organisation. We craft project roadmaps that clearly define objectives, scope, process, timescales and responsibilities.
If required, we can help you to manage key stakeholders, senior leaders, and engage with cynics as part of the process.
Our development team will also train you on how to use and get the most from your website. This enables you to take control by giving you the ability to add new pages, write your own blogs and edit text & images without having to pay for development time or wait for support to help you, although we'll always be at the end of the phone for you!
“We are delighted with our new website. The team at Mackman are a pleasure to work with and made the daunting task of developing a transactional site far easier than we imagined. They listened and took time to understand our business needs, and our audience. They created a site that reflects our values, product offer and services, communicating these in the best possible way. Their professionalism in guiding us through the process made, what could have been a very stressful experience, anything but.”
Yasmin Moss, Director | Jonathan Lambert
JESS CRAGO
Insight Junior
Why Mackman
Mackman is a full service brand development, branding and marketing agency based in the vibrant market town of Sudbury on the Essex Suffolk border. We work with ambitious organisations of all sizes, across many sectors, with our driven team of marketing specialists who are dedicated to developing growing brands. Clients tell us that they value our ability as a partner to use marketing to solve business challenges.
Our unifying strap-line is ‘together we grow’ which speaks about the relationships that we have with our clients, suppliers and colleagues. We focus our marketing across six core marketing pillars; marketing insight, brand development, marketing consultancy, communications & content marketing, website development, training and knowledge sharing.
