Integrated Hosting and Design
A successful website is not simply a product of great design - the infrastructure needs to be in place to support it. Netsight operate an on-site co-location facility that allows us to precisely tailor the hosting specification to match the requirements of the site we are developing. Through running our co-location facility, we have experience in capacity planning and scalability issues for large, mission critical sites.
Many design companies take a hands-off approach to their hosting provision, and outsource entirely to third-party suppliers. This can lead to a lack of flexibility caused by limited application support.
Content Management
Netsight believe that the quality of the content on a website is critical to its success. Gone are the days of a "write it once" website, and few things look worse than an out of date site. Web users now expect to see a regularly updated site, with useful, relevant and accurate content.
Many design companies produce a website as a static set of HTML pages. This means a simple change to a site, such as a new logo or additional section to the site can result in a time-consuming manual change to all pages. This overhead in updating static sites means that content is left to stagnate, with out-of-date news items and features left in place.
In contrast, a content management system allows changes and other maintenance to be performed extremely quickly and efficiently, and with little technical involvement. The total cost of effectively maintaining a large website is often substantially less if the site has been implemented within a content management framework.
Software Engineering Practices
The Netsight team includes experienced software engineers who write all of the code for our bespoke sites in raw HTML and Python, without the use of "point-and-click" web design programs. This results in faster, cleaner and more efficient site code, which is easier and cheaper to maintain.
Many design companies use programs such as Dreamweaver, FrontPage or GoLive, which can result in slow, unmaintainable sites.
Benefits of Open Source Software
Netsight has been committed to the use and development of Open Source Software from inception. Open Source software traditionally has no licensing fees, and is supported by a large community of users and developers.
The security of commercial systems is vital. With the source code being available for these products, and such a large community of developers, bugs and security holes can be fixed much more quickly. In some cases mainstream proprietary products may be significantly less secure than open source alternatives (from Gartner report, 19/9/01). This view has most recently been backed by the UK Government, who has published a proposal to embrace Open Source Software in their projects.
Many design companies rely heavily on commercial software that ties them in to a specific vendor, and often results in high initial and/or ongoing licensing fees.
For more independent information on the benefits of Open Source Software see the Open Source Initiative web site.
Dedicated Experienced Team
Netsight appreciate the difference between software engineering and graphic design, and we split the design and implementation between these disciplines. This allows our designers the freedom to be creative, whilst our technical staff can concentrate on functionality and performance.
Other design companies, especially smaller ones, often fall into just one of the two disciplines. If a web design firm is too heavily focussed on technical aspects, they will often not have the necessary experience in creating effective design, understanding user behaviour, interface design and marketing. Similarly, creative-led design houses are frequently unable to deliver robust, high-performance, bespoke content management or e-commerce systems.
Unlike large advertising or design firms, Netsight is small enough to ensure your project receives focussed attention. Each project we undertake is one of two or three, not one of twenty or thirty.