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Web Development

We provide a range of web development services, using the latest web development technologies, from our offices based in Reading, Berkshire. Our aim is to make your business more profitable through imaginative use of web technology, building innovative, efficient and easy to use web based systems that are right for your business.

Web development – making your business more efficient

If your business has a website or you sell a product or service, then web systems can streamline and automate both the way in which you do business with your customers and suppliers. In addition, well designed, efficient web systems can ensure your internal business operations run smoothly.

Do you want your website to work harder for you, or your employees to be able to work remotely? Do you have systems that you want to integrate with your website to reduce data entry? If the answer to these questions is yes, or even that you’re not sure, here are some ways in which web development can help to move your business forward:

If you’re not quite sure how the web can be harnessed to develop your business, don’t worry. Our talent is understanding how your business works and identifying where you will gain the most from using web based systems.

Website Development

Like most businesses these days, you probably already have a website, but just how effective is your website? If it simply consists of a couple of pages that you rarely update, now may be the time to think about how it could be working harder for your business.

Our website designs are clean and simple. We want your website to do as much for your business as possible, so during the design process we’ll help you to think about what you want from your website. For example, you may want an online shop from which customers can place orders and pay.

Use a website content management system

Without the correct tools for the job, updating your website can become a headache over time.

Initially, when you don’t have much content, keeping your pages up to date and looking consistent is relatively easy. But as your website expands and you have ever increasing numbers of pages to maintain, you will need a system that manages the look and feel for you, leaving you free to focus on what you write.

Web applications for browser-based working

For most businesses the reason for using web applications is the ability to update and maintain information from anywhere via a browser, without having to install software.

Web Application example

Why use web applications?

There are countless ways in which web applications can be used, with the most commonly known ones being, online banking, online reservations, e-commerce/shopping sites and online training.

Our experience across different industries means we can develop web applications tailored for your business needs. Whether you want to make an existing, locally installed system available on the web for your employees to work remotely, or you want an e-commerce site that enables your customers to place orders via your website, we can help you to take advantage of the flexibility and versatility of the web.

Benefits of using web applications

It goes without saying that the freedom to connect to an application that you want to use, from anywhere in the world is a fairly significant benefit in itself. But web applications offer additional benefits, such as:

  • running applications in web browsers typically requires little or no disk space, the added benefit of this is that your IT hardware costs will be reduced
  • upgrading to newer versions of software is easier as any changes to the software are implemented centrally and automatically delivered to users
  • they are generally compatible across platforms because they operate within web browser windows.

Web services to automate tasks and integrate systems

Web services are less well understood than web applications, but they are just as powerful. Unicorn have been in the business of developing web services for a long time (as you will see from our whitepaper Why Web Services?).

While your business may have all the systems that you need in place, the way in which your business and its software evolved could mean there are a range of disparate systems all working well in their own right, but independently.

For example, take a small company with an online shop front website, who starts small and enters each order manually into an Order Entry system. As the company grows, increasing numbers of orders make the process unmanageable. Using a web service, the website orders can be integrated with the Order Entry system, automating the process, and as an added bonus, reducing data entry errors.

Don’t just take our word for it

Another way in which web services can be of use are for speeding up web systems that are running too slowly!

We used web services to help a customer whose website menu was taking so long to load that the intranet for users was unusable. The nature of the business meant that the menu needed to incorporate an A-Z index within the navigation menu, and it was this that was causing the problem.

Read our case study that details the challenges, proposals and results in the Web Service Case Study.

If you have areas of your business that you think could be automated, even if you’re not sure, please contact us and we can advise you.

Website and application hosting

Whether you are looking to reduce costs, simplify your IT hardware systems or both, we can host your applications and websites.

If your website is selling a product or service, or even just providing information, it’s important that it’s available all of the time. Similarly, ensuring your business applications are always available means your employees can gain access to them out of hours.

For small businesses in particular the practicalities of keeping systems available 24/7 can be a problem. The solution is to allow us to host your systems for you, ensuring that they are backed up daily and running efficiently, leaves you free to focus on your business.

We have the necessary experience required to manage the complexities involved in moving your systems to our servers, keeping downtime to a minimum and setting up and moving your website.

If you would like to know more about how we can help you with hosting services, please contact us.