At Trace we have worked with numerous clients whom have had varied and plentiful requests. Here we present a summary of what we have found helps our clients the most.

Content Management Systems

While we have developed sites without using content management systems (CMS), for the vast majority of websites a CMS is the biggest aid for our clients. A CMS enables our clients to make changes to their sites themselves. They can change the text, change the pictures, re-order menus, and change the look-and-feel of the site entirely. This is all carried out in a simple, clean interface, no extraneous information is displayed and simple text edit boxes and standard forms that any one who has used a computer before will recognise instantly.

The advantages of a CMS go beyond easy editing, it also allows for quick and easy blog writing, simple mailing list management, enabling visitors to the site to submit comments and other content, automatic spam protection, automatic search capabilities, and hundreds of other features.

The extensibility and modular capabilities of a CMS enable us to customise every website to each client's needs, removing unneccesary confusion while making the every day tasks simple, quick, and easy.

Documentation Helps

While we strive to present a simple interface to our clients, over time websites grow and expand, more features are added and this can lead to confusion. Providing clear, concise documentation helps our clients to navigate the administrative side of having a website. We refine the documentation for each website, customising it based on the skills of each client.

Most Requested Features

While all websites will have content, and inform visitors in some manner, there are a number of features that many Trace clients request.

Customised look-and-feel

Most clients want their website to be unique. While we provide hundreds of templates that can be chosen off the shelf, we also customise those templates or develop a new one from scratch. While and off the shelf template enables us to have a website up and running in hours there is nearly always a colour slightly off, or a font that just does not synchronise with a client's brand.

Search Engine Rankings

Every body wants their website to be found by their clients. We use the sitemaps protocol to compile a list of pages on each website and submit this automatically to a number of search engines, including Google. The sitemap protocol is accepted by all the major search engines, and is the best way to ensure all your content is easily indexed by the search engines.

Contact Form

Our clients want their customers to be able to get in touch with them. We of course set up e-mail for our clients which can be used to contact them, but we also configure a form on their site that allows customers to contact them quickly, easily, and most importantly without ever leaving the website, helping to retain visitors.

Site Analytics

We integrate simple analytics into the CMS allowing clients to see the number of times each page has been viewed, who is the most frequent visitor to the site, and even how long it takes a page to load.

On top of this, or instead, we also integrate a large number of our websites with the Google Analytics system. This increases the fidelity of the information available to our clients about the visitors to their website. Google analytics also displays benchmarks, enabling our clients to compare their website against similar sized websites.