Website Development and Hosting
Plastic injection molder Teamvantage website - http://teamvantage.com Your website is the best way to show and tell the world what you do 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It is the #1 place everyone goes to learn about your company.
Creative Technology provides website development, support and hosting services. Our specialty is complete site creation. We utilize personal visits for photo and video, to help us best portray your company culture and strengths through words and imagery.
Our goal is to provide you with a distinctive layout and appearance to reveal all that makes you special. Over more than 40 years in industry, we have found that each of our clients fills a special niche. We help you identify your niche and focus your media on that.
We develop our sites using the latest content management systems (CMS) and cascading style sheets (CSS), a template-driven system that makes ongoing updates and enhancements easier for us, easier for you, and less costly. Keeping your site up to date on a regular basis helps keep traffic and interest up, driving more business your way.
Click on any of the example websites to see that page in greater detail on its own page.
Website Design
At Creative Technology, we are experts in website design and creation for manufacturers. Years of experience serving only manufacturers means we know the industry terminology to help you convey your information clearly and effectively.
Five cavity and core mold halves ready to be shipped.
These are molds for 5-gallon buckets.A key component of a Creative Technology website is its visual imagery. Related photo and video content to accompany the written word make your story more engaging for your customers and prospects.
Attracting & Engaging Visitors
The first of these, drawing your audience, relates to attracting those searching for new vendors and information. We call this SEO or search engine optimization. Our core strategy here is organic searches, using terminology in our text that matches the terminology for which your prospects are searching. "plastic injection molds," "in-mold decorating," "end-of-arm tooling," and other words and phrases like this are the key to how Google and other search engines connect prospects with your site. We enhance the menu layout and text on the site to attract more hits from search engines by using more keywords in the text, as well as lists of things like industries served, product examples, specialties, etc. These words also help those clients who want more facts and drill down for the details about all you have to offer.
The second aspect to a strong website is visitor engagement. We attack this by creating a solid and logical organizational (menu) structure, and then populate it with a combination of interesting imagery and words that help the viewer understand what makes your company the best business partner for them. The images are integrated into the text to tell a story with a logical flow. We use various tools like frames or mouseover zooms to help the images pop and draw the viewer's attention. Most important to this is that through our selection of words and imagery, we work to convey a sense of your company's culture, promoting the partnership that you can provide your clients.
We are able to provide a lot of help with the creation of text, however ultimately what we provide for ideas is all subject to fine-tuning and editing by you and your team. We will write draft versions of the text on the site to expand on the current site's content. Any help available including old brochures, standard terms and conditions, sales-type text from proposals, etc., can help a lot with this step. In some cases we may ask that your project managers and sales representatives provide bullet points or text about specific topics to help us with creating the rough drafts. The final text is normally honed from the collaboration with your team for site finalization. In all cases, we will work with you to help ensure that we leverage trade terminology and organic search phrases as much as possible.
Creative Technology is a unique resource for website design, combining the experience of more than 40 years in high-tech manufacturing with an eye for imagery that will get you noticed.
Website Infrastructure
One of the most important considerations in website design is the infrastructure, the underlying development system. Creative Technology is committed to open systems, providing you choices with widespread support and continuous improvement.
The foundation of every Creative Technology website is HTML5 (Hyper Text Markup Language), CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), and a CMS (Content Management System). CSS means that we can easily change the appearance of a site by editing its style sheet, the formatting for the website elements. Working with CSS, for instance, the font size or background color can be edited at one location to change the whole site's appearance. CMS or Content Management System means that once content is in the website, it is stored as data and may be manipulated easily to change the location or appearance. For instance, the menu for a site can be quickly altered once, changing the whole site's layout in just seconds. All of this technology is a tremendous benefit to keeping up with changes in your company's technology as well as website style and technology.
WordPress is a CMS that is commonly used for blogging. As such, WordPress is the most popular website development tool in use today. It works well for writing text about a topic with limited imagery, however can be more difficult to customize and tweak for a sleek and custom appearance. Creative Technology designs and supports websites developed in WordPress when requested by the client, however it is not our preference in the vast world of website design.
Joomla is our CMS of choice. It is open source, providing continuous improvements and enhancements, a wealth of enhancements and extensions, and it provides a lot of flexibility for custom formatting and layouts. Customers find that Joomla offers the freedom for them to easily edit and add content, as well as enhancing the site's format and layout. Our expertise with Joomla provides you the features and the depth of support you want and need.
Website Updates
Many clients want the option of updating their own website content. Creative websites are made to be updated. We often include on-site training as a part of our new site startup.
The most valuable aspect of a website is its currency, the ability to update it frequently without a cost penalty as with old-fashioned print media. Some people write blogs on a routine basis to create fresh, current content. Others simply establish a habit of updating news, capabilities, or calendar events. The bottom line is that your website can best serve you when it is frequently updated with current info.
One of the great benefits of a website by Creative Technology is that we design it to be updated easily. Job and news postings are just two examples of updates easily accomplished, that can even add new headings, like a News Flash module, or Career Opportunities.
The Joomla foundation on which Creative Technology websites are built provides an ideal environment for client edits, with a graphical editor, image uploader, and security options for guests, editors, and administrators. It all adds up to easy edits for those who want it.
For those clients who don't want to do their own edits, our experience in manufacturing helps us take over from whatever info you can provide. Our creative writers can quickly transform a simple bulleted list of thoughts into a polished article to share your latest news in timely fashion.
Whatever your goal for site updates and edits, a site created in Joomla by Creative Technology gives you the flexibility you need.
Website Hosting
Safe, reliable webhosting is critical to your web site and your overall internet presence.
Creative Technology is not just another hosting provider. We are unique, working to provide you seamless hosting and support. We know that your business is manufacturing, so we work to transparently support and manage your site, so you can focus on your business and making money.
- All the system features are supported for MySQL, Joomla, Wordpress, or custom CSS, CMS, and HTML5.
- An optional user login can be setup, allowing you to edit and update your site with the changes you want when you want them.
- Secure access to the site's "backend" allows addition of plugins and extensions for enhanced site design and features.
- Hosting is in a secure data center with limited, monitored, guarded access, with battery backups, environmental temperature and humidity control, redundant direct multi-gigabit-per-second fiber optic feeds to the global internet's backbone, backup power generators with more than seven day's fuel storage, and extended redundant backup environmental control system for temperature and humidity control. (This is a central Chicago location serving mission-critical systems.)
- 24/7 administrative and hardware maintenance engineers on-site with hosting hardware.
- Three levels of backups for data security, including daily backups on the hosting computer stored to a separate hard drive, daily backups on a separate server within the data center, and weekly backups of each site offline, in the cloud.
- Weekly cloud-based off-site backups of all sites.
- Single-source responsibility for hosting as well as hardware and software maintenance and support, for no finger-pointing.
Hosting your site with Creative Technology provides you the reliability and the confidence to do what you do best.
Website Server Performance
Website server performance is key to a good browser experience for your customers and prospects. Creative Technology serves up high performance with our own secure, dedicated website server. The benefit is that visitors to your site get faster response when they click on a link.
As a part of our hosting service, we monitor all sites 24/7/365 to ensure reliability using a third-party global monitoring service. Each client site is checked for response time every minute of every day.
Shown at right is a response time report showing the change in response when Creative Technology took over the hosting for one of our clients. You can see the dramatic change in response time, from an average of more than three seconds, to about half a second, about a six times improvement.
Fast site response is critical to your search engine rankings as well. Slower sites are penalized because companies like Google recognize that slow website response results in dissatisfied viewers.
Website server response is just one of the many ways Creative Technology helps you deliver quality information in a timely manner for better browser experience and higher page rankings.