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Slide 1: Website Design in the UK is not Necessarily the Same as in the US What makes the internet so special is the fact that it has ‘reduced’ the size of the globe by allowing international trade and communication to be simpler and faster than ever. The improved communication that the internet provides means that businesses can trade and operate completely online, regardless of where in the world they are located. Conference calls, business meetings and invoices can all be operated through a well designed website with the required support software. With the increased reliance on the internet, the design, usability and functionality of websites is increasingly important. With this in mind, how do web design UK companies operate, and how do they differ to those overseas? Web design UK companies can be considered as a cheaper alternative to those in the USA. For a start, there is one major difference, scale. The size and scale of USA web design companies means that they often come at a higher cost. With web design UK companies there is often a combined service that can be provided. Not only can a web design UK company provide the actual website and its design, but they can also provide domain name management, web hosting services, technical support and search engine optimisation, all rolled into a single purchasable package. This combined nature is altogether more popular and available in the UK. Web design UK companies are often focussed on offering their services at a reasonable price. This is the same for much of Europe also. The market is saturated with web design companies and, as such, the price of the service becomes more important. The pricing in general for web design, search engine optimisation and web hosting is cheaper in Europe and the UK than in the USA. The companies that provide these services are driven by competitive pricing and service quality. In order to remain competitive and affordable they need to put procedures in place to ensure that the services they provide are quick and effective. Web design UK companies often offer web design services based on templates. These templates are a combination of tried and tested CSS styles that will be already tested for browser compatibility and formatting. The client can then decide which existing CSS template best meets their needs. Then their images and content can be populated into the template. Customising templates is more commonplace in the UK and Europe and can greatly reduce the time and cost of websites production, compared with building the site from scratch for each customer. Not only is the web design UK process different, so is the hosting of the website. Many companies provide the hosting service in conjunction with the design service. This can also reduce costs for the customer and mean their website is online and ready to view by the public a lot quicker than if the services were provided by different companies. To drive down costs in hosting and design, web design UK companies have created automated process,
Slide 2: templates and efficient systems. Differences in website design and hosting between the UK and USA don’t just cover financial factors, but also technological aspects. The bandwidth of the core network on which these services are provided can differ greatly. Where large areas of the USA can provide webhosting on a Fibre Optic wide area network, certain areas in the UK still utilise 56kbps dial up to access the internet. These technical factors can alter the work considerations of many website design UK companies as much as the financial factors involved with web design. © dotAgency –web design UK at http://www.dotagency.co.uk