Standard Functions

All ORCA products and services have been exhaustively researched and tested and we pride ourselves in our ability to provide you with first rate website design and the most user-friendly technology available.
        
In our desire to give you the most competitively priced and technologically advanced website on the market, your site will be equipped with the following functions:  

Content Management System (CMS)

Our unique Content Management System puts you in control and enables you to update and maintain your website quickly and easily. All ORCA websites allow you to add new pages, upload images and add and amend copy anywhere on your site. You can even assign others within your business with 'user rights' so they can perform updates, or manage a specific area of the site. You won't require any programming experience or new software as complete computer novices can quickly get the hang of it. For the technically minded, the CMS runs on a Linux system and uses the Red Hat Enterprise version. The web server uses Apache software and all CMS content is stored in a secure postgreSQL database. The CMS is coded on object-orientated PHP 5.

Website Statistics

Your website will be designed to help you achieve your business goals. This tool will help you to monitor just how well it performs and how much business it generates. As with all ORCA technology, it is extremely simple to use and provides information about the number of visitors to your site, the number of pages they viewed, the time and day of the week they visited, how long they stayed on the site for, where they came from and much more. 

Flash Panel

Research proves that internet users are notoriously impatient and will give your site less than ten seconds to make a good impression. A Flash Panel enables you to add colour and movement to your site so that it immediately captures your visitors attention. Our search engine-friendly flash panels are designed to enable you to add or remove any images, ensuring that you are able to keep it fresh and appealing. 

Contact Forms

Your new website will be designed to win you more business and it is therefore essential that business contacts can get in touch with you at a time that is convenient to them. Over 86% of website traffic is attributed to business related research and a huge amount of this is conducted in the evenings when most businesses are closed. Your site will be fitted with a contact form that is personalised to your needs to ensure that your customers can contact you at any time, meaning that you never miss a business opportunity.

Search Engine Optimised and Meta Data

In order to maximise every opportunity, it is essential that your website is easy to find and that it lists as highly as possible on all search engines. Your site will be equipped with the very latest search engine-friendly technologies and will be built in accordance with the most recent search engine guidelines. The key to search engine success is to update your site as often as possible, however, your site will also be equipped with a secret weapon in the form of Meta Data facility. This enables you to add extra 'keywords' or 'key phrases' to your site that visitors may be using to search for the products and services you provide. Adding additional words and phrases in this way will give your site the advantage over your competitors and enable you to move higher up the listings. We will also submit your site to the major search engines on your behalf.

Site Map & Google SiteMapsTM

Your site will be equipped with a site map that updates automatically each time you update the content. This feature also improves your site's performance on the search engines.

Keyword Search

This feature will allow visitors to find the content on your website very quickly using commonly used keywords and key phrases. They simply type a word in the search bar and are automatically taken to the relevant content on your site. 

Add To Favourites

Every page of your website will contain a link to allow visitors to 'bookmark' that page by adding it to their list of favourites. This encourages regular visitors to visit more often and ensures that new visitors are able to get back to your site quickly and easily, helping you stay ahead of your competitors. 

Print This Page

This will allow just the content of the page to be printed without the accompanying navigation elements and layout. It is very frustrating for your visitors when they are unable to print your site content quickly and easily, therefore this function increases visitor convenience and enhances the general visitor experience. 

Tell a Friend

Word of mouth is one of the most cost-effective ways of promoting a website, hence yours is equipped with a 'Tell a Friend' feature on each page to allow it to be emailed to a third party to help spread the word. 

W3C Compatibility

The W3C (The World Wide Web Consortium) provides best practice standards and guidelines for the World Wide Web. Their mission is to lead the World Wide Web to it's full potential and to ensure that web technologies are compatible with one another. Their standards cover everything that is web-based, including search engine optimisation, web code and web accessibility. All ORCA sites are built to meet W3C standards and are regularly checked to ensure continued compliance.

The W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines exist to provide website owners with direction on making their websites accessible to visitors with disabilities. The importance of the guidelines is strengthened by recent legislation in the UK and in particular, the Disability Discrimination Act Part III, which requires all businesses to provide equal access to goods and services for all individuals.

We build our websites to be compliant to at least Level 1 of the Guidelines and can work to higher levels when required. This includes providing visitors with the ability to increase font sizes to make website content more legible, as well as ensuring our sites are ‘screen reader' compatible. (Screen readers give the website a ‘voice' and read the content of the site to the visitor).

Hosting & Security

Your site will be hosted in our state of the art, extremely secure data centres. It will be monitored on an on-going basis and any issues will be dealt with promptly and efficiently by our highly trained Support Team. We run a cluster of servers (which are load balanced) to reduce any downtime, and monitor peak traffic usage to ensure that extra throughput is always available. All sites are password protected and we utilize the latest Cisco PIX firewalls in our data centre, along with other security mechanisms such as VPN access to sensitive areas. Data is stored in a storage area network which utilizes high grade security protocols such as SSH, SCP and VPN's.

Training

It is vitally important that you are able to quickly and confidently use your website as a genuine business tool. Your ORCA Website Consultant will spend as much time with you as you need to ensure that you are comfortable with every aspect of running your site. You will be presented with our extremely comprehensive and easy to follow website User Guides to guarantee that you have everything you need to succeed in the online business world.