In simple terms, Magento is a free software created by community of developers, that you can install on your hosting account to create your own online store.

Magento allows you to sell your products and services online, with a professional and easy-to-use interface for your customers, and a secure and easy-to-use admin area to manage your shop.

Magento can be customised with unique layout and design your business, and has some amazing features included as standard:

• Search engine friendly code (SEO)
• Multi-language support
• Vouchers/discount code system
• Shipping calculator
• Payment integration
• Order management system

Magento is so good, that it is used by major brands including Homedics, Jack Wolfskin, Time Out and Myla.

Semi-Skimmed use this amazing technology to help small businnesses and charities trade online.

At Semi-skimmed we aim to do our best to work towards sustainability. We have a range of environmental, social and financial strategies to help us reduce our negative impact and give something positive back to the world. These include:

• All our websites are hosted on carbon neutral servers
• Operating a virtual business structure to minimise our resource and energy consumption
• Buying second hand equipment where possible, and re-using or recycling as much as possible
• Using renewable electricity supplies where available and offsetting more carbon emissions than we produce
• Encouraging our team to follow a healthy lifestyle
• Only working with organisations committed to working towards sustainability
• Supporting charities through advice, donations and fundraising activities
• Minimising our financial and ethical liabilities
• Building a strong, valuable brand & fabulous websites

In fact, we think we probably have the lowest carbon emissions of any branding & web design agency in the UK. We’re always trying to find better ways of doing things though, so if you have any ideas on how Semi-skimmed can become even more sustainable then please get in touch or leave a comment to this post.

We are members of Ethical Junction, and are listed in the green directories One Green Earth and All Things Eco.

Features such as real text links, search engine friendly URL’s, neat coding and an XML sitemap are standard with all Semi-skimmed websites.

A search engine friendly webdesign is an essential aspect of any website as it allows people to find you easily.

It also provides the foundation for Search Engine Optimisation, which is a more advanced and in depth process of focussing your website design and content to rank highly in search engines when people search for specific keywords.

Here are a few questions to ask yourself when starting on a website design project:

• Do you want to grow your organisation and increase your customer base?
• Do your target customers use the internet? If so, would they use it for looking for your services?
• Are you targeting a local audience, or a wider national or international market?
• Do you want to sell online or accept online donations?
• Do your target audience already know you, or will your website be their first experience of your organisation?
• Do you spend a lot of money on advertising?  If so, could your website be a more cost effective marketing tool in the long term?
• Is your website about telling people about your organisation or is it more about building long term relationships?
• Do you want your website to help with market research or just promotion?

Basically, you need to know who your website is aimed at and what you are trying to achieve with it.  If you’re not sure how to use the web to help your organisation or not sure if you need a website at all, please feel free to contact us for some informal advise.

You may also find our article What type of site do I need? useful.

What this means in practice is that it is a free software that you can install on your hosting account to publish your own website.

It was originally developed to allow people to write their own blogs but has grown to become a highly sophisticated system that can be used for publishing full brochure websites and even e-commerce websites.

There are really four main aspects to a Wordpress website:

1. Theme

A Wordpress theme defines its style and layout.  This is effectively what you would call the website design.  A number of standard themes are available but a professional web designer can develop you a custom theme to make your Wordpress site look and function exactly the way you want.

2. Content

A great looking website is nothing without great content.  Wordpress allows the sites owner to write and edit content for the sites pages and blog posts from its online control panel.  The control panel is very simple and allows users without any specialist technical know, how to keep their website up to date.  A nice feature of Wordpress is that you can also allocate multiple authors to your site, and assign different levels of control over the website to different users.

3. Plugins

Wordpress is an excellent platform on which to build a website and has some great standard features, but there is almost unlimited potential to increase its functionality using plugins.   Plugins are basically upgrades or extensions to the Wordpress system that can be used to make the site function exactly the way you need it to.  For example, they can be used to improve your search engine optimisation (SEO) or integrate your website with other web technologies such as flickr and Youtube. Thousands of plugins are available, and your web developer can create one specifically to meet your requirements.

4. Widgets

Wordpress widgets are in effect gadgets that can be inserted into pre-defined spaces in your website themes layout.  For example, clocks and calendars, online polls, news feeds, newsletter sign up forms etc.  As with plugins a large number of existing widgets are available or you can have your own widget custom designed by a web programmer.

At Semi-skimmed we build websites for charities and small businesses using Wordpress.  Using a combination of customised themes, plugins and widgets, we tailor each site to meet the specific needs of each client.  We can also provide help with copy writing to ensure that your website content is doing your organisation justice.

Traditionally, a website would be designed by a web designer using specialist software such as Adobe Dreamweaver.  All the graphics, pages, text etc would be programmed in this software and then uploaded to your website hosting.

If you wanted to change some text, replace a photo or add a page to your website, you would have to ask your web designer to do this for you, or learn how to do this yourself (i.e. learn to be a web programmer).

This is now all changing thanks to clever thing called a Content Management System (CMS). Basically, it is an online control panel that allows you to edit the content of your website or blog.  The style and layout of the site is still programmed by a professional web designer, but once the site is up and running, you have control over the content of the pages and are therefore able to manage your site yourself.  For example, you could add your latest news, update the description of a product or add a new page for a new service offered by your company.  The great thing about a content management system is that you not only save money by making changes to the site yourself, but you are also more likely to keep your site up to date if you can easily and quickly do it yourself for free.

A CMS may cost a little more than a website without one, but in the long term it will pay for itself many times over.  At semi-skimmed we build all of our websites using the Wordpress content management system, or in the case of ecommerce websites we use Magento, both of which are extremely versatile, reliable and easy to use.

Find out more about Wordpress in our Introduction to Wordpress article.

Hosting is basically the computer on which you store your website.  When you create a document on your home or office computer in a program like Word or Excel, you save it to the hard disk of your computer so that you can open it again later.

A website must also be saved somewhere, but it needs to be available for everyone on the internet to open and view, not just you.  So instead of storing it on your own computer, you can pay a hosting company to store it on their ’server’, a large computer that is connected to the internet 24 hours a day and is designed specifically to ‘host’ websites.

There are all sorts of special features that your hosting company can provide, including an online control panel to manage technical aspects of your site, email administration and even the ability to install web based programs such as Wordpress at the click of a button.

However, there are a few basics that you should know about:

Reliability

Many hosting companies will advertise a feature such as 99.9% up time.  This means that on average the server (and therefore your website) will be functioning properly 99.9% of the time.  No one can guarantee 100% up time, but it is important to find a reliable host because if your website keeps going offline then you will be missing out on visits from potential customers and it could give a bad impression about your organisation.

Storage Capacity

As the name suggests, this is the amount of information that you can store on your hosting account.  Simple websites only require a few MB of space but if you have a large site with lots of pictures, animations, videos, music etc then you could need much more.  Many hosting companies now offer Unlimited storage capacity so you don’t need to worry about how big your website grows.

Bandwidth

The visitors to your website will be spread around the world and viewing your site from their own computers.  Therefore, in order for them to see your website, your hosting company’s server must send your website data over the internet to all of these different computers.  This requires your hosting server to do work, which is measures by the quantity of information (MB) that it sends each month.  A maximum amount of information per month may be set by your hosting company, and is referred to as bandwidth.   The amount of bandwidth that you need is mainly affected by two things: 1. The number of visitors to your site and 2. The size of the files on your website.   Some hosting companies now offer hosting with unlimited bandwidth.

Compatibility

If you want to host anything more than a very basic website, then you need to check that the hosting that you buy is compatible with any technologies that you intend to use.  For example, systems such as WordPress and Magento are basically pieces of software that run on your hosting server to make your website function correctly.  Just like when you buy a piece of software for your home or office computer, you need to check that your computer meets the operating requirements of the software.  It is easy to check, as your hosting company will be able to tell you whether they can run the technologies that you need.

At Semi-skimmed, we host all of our websites with Dreamhost.  We’ve found them to be extremely reliable, have great customer service and provide excellent value for money with unlimited storage capacity and unlimited bandwidth.  It’s also carbon neutral.

If you have any questions or comments relating to this article then please feel free to post them below.

In a nutshell, Wordpress is a piece of software behind the scenes that controls the design and content of your site.  They call it a Content Management System (CMS).  The way it works is that we hard code the appearance, layout and functionality of your site, and then you get a nice control panel where you can write pages, write blog posts, edit pages, add pictures and videos etc.

There are many different content management systems, but we’re passionate about Wordpress and believe that it is by far the best solution for  small organisations that don’t have huge budgets and in house technical teams.  Here’s a few reasons why Wordpress is just brilliant:

1. Most importantly, it is probably the easiest to use content management system out there.  This means that you can keep you own website up to date without any technical expertise.
2. Secondly, Wordpress was originally developed as a blog, which makes it extremely search engine friendly and the perfect system for telling your story and engaging your customers online.
3. It’s open-source.  That’s nice not just because we’re not lining the pockets of a monolithic computer giant, but there are thousands of passionate, dedicated programmers around the world working to make it better everyday.
4. It’s extremely versatile.  Wordpress can be used as a blog, a fully functioning website or even an e-commerce store.  Add to that thousands of plugins and widgets to provide almost every kind of functionality that you could dream of, and you have amazing power just waiting to be harnessed.
5. Wordpress makes it easy for users to access your site, and consequently very easy for you to comply with accessibility standards.  Accessibility is  fundamental element of the Wordpress system, which combined with careful site design and management means that everyone can see what you’re talking about.
6. Last but not least.  It’s free. Despite its awesome functionality, Wordpress doesn’t charge for use of its technology.  They are very nice indeed.

Find out about our great Wordpress Website Packages.