Portfolio

SL6 Consulting


Overview

SL6 Consulting provide software consultancy in the SL6 postcode area. They required a website that shows their competences and some of the big brand clients that they have worked for.

The brief was

  1. I want a website like yours

Solution

A website like the Red Kite Code one. Mmm. Well some of the things that define this particular website are an emphasis on speed, clean lines and good SEO practices. Speed is important for 2 reasons. The first is that is it nice for users, especially on mobile, but the really important reason is that search engines rank fast sites higher. Red Kite Code loads the home page in 0.6 seconds and every other page in around 0.3 seconds. That places it in the top 98% of all websites on the internet. It is also very deliberately not a CMS website such as WordPress. These websites have lots of plug ins and .php files which really slow web page loading times down. A typical Wordpress site made well, takes 2-3 seconds to load each page. 10 times as long. And as 80% of the internet is now Wordpress, you can see how avoiding this can give you a real edge in the speed stakes.

The other advantage of not using Wordpress is total control to make the site look however you like and also behave as you like. For example if you hover over the laptop above, it scrolls down the demo site. If that isn't in your wordpress template already, that's a tricky thing to add. On this website, it took us under 10 minutes to add that feature. It is also easier to add under the hood scripts and widgets to each page as you directly control the code at source. You can do this with Wordpress, but you are always running up against issues that smash the template and cause unforseen knock on effects throughout your site.

The Process

We started by using the exact same base html template as we used for this site. We skinned it appropriately and then added the content. We were also able to directly copy some of our under the hood scripts in and just modify for SL6 Consulting. Once the site was finished, we zipped it up and sent to the client ready for deployment. They hadn't yet chosen a domain name, and so they can upload when ready. Their new site has all the files they require including robots.txt files, a 404.shtml page, .htaccess and sitemap.xml files. They will be able to just copy and paste the site into their site's public_html folder when they are ready and it will run.

Mobile version of SL6 Consulting website.