Web design & e-commerce

Mobile first, lightning fast, user focused.

"Never to let the user wait more than a few nanocenturies for a response"

50 years on and the above rings truer than ever. The average web page has grown, over the last decade, to be enormous, currently at around 2MB. Many web users, especially on a mobile connection, don't have a fast enough experience to stay and use the page.

By optimising every web page for the slowest connections, we aim to make your website enjoyably usable for the largest possible audience.

It's win, win, win, win:

  • Good for the users' experience
  • Good for conversion rate & revenue
  • Good for the environment
  • Good for the competitive edge in search visibility

Approach

We aim to make each user's experience as close as possible, from your customer using fast fibre down to a slow 3G mobile connection. Our goal is to optimise as much as possible without degrading the user experience; get the text and usability to them first, then lay on the niceness.

Our core design principles:

  • Mobile first and responsive
  • Lightning fast
  • Accessible

Benefits

  • Increased user retention
  • Improved user engagement
  • Increased reliability
  • Improved search engine ranking
  • Reduced carbon footprint

Under the hood

We employ a host of aggressive optimisation techniques throughout our continuous integration & deployment workflow. We've been steadily working towards these goals for several years and we're proud of the stable of techniques we now think of as standard practice:

  • Treeshaking, bundling & minification
  • Lossless compression including SVG, lazy loading & low quality placeholders
  • Page stability; minimise layout shifting during rendering
  • Automated optimisation
  • Building static pages
  • Caching
  • Lean serving architecture
  • Cross browser, real device, throttled testing
  • Excellent LINX placement

E-commerce

Expand your e-commerce business with Psand's extensive tools and knowledge.

Psand take a flexible approach to e-commerce development. Whether it's your first storefront, a re-design of your current site, re-platforming or integration with other business processes, we can help.

We select the best open-source tools to fit your requirements based on your business objectives. Be that Magento, Spree Commerce, OpenCart or a bespoke e-commerce solution, we can provide the perfect responsive platform to support your online sales and drive digital growth.

We keep it simple, making updates easy and future developments straightforward. Once configured, we'll make sure the platform grows along with your business, adding in additional functionality & integrations as required.

When designing and building we always think customer first. Good user experience is crucial for high conversion rates and customer retention.

Piggy banks

Responsive

All of our solutions are designed to be mobile first and responsive, meaning whatever devices your customers use to browse and purchase, their experience is fast, smooth and reliable.

Map of the connected world

Going global

Combining multilingual, real time currency conversion and integration with local partners means we can support your international expansion to other territories.

Plug in a shopping cart

Seamless integration

We pride ourselves on being "Internet Superglue". Creating smooth data transfer to solve business bottlenecks is what we do best. Integrating with marketing resources, such as email & social media through to the business end of finance, inventory, despatch, printing and invoicing is fun to us. No, really.

Shopping on the web

Hosting & support

All of our websites and supporting management systems are hosted on our own dedicated servers. We constantly monitor, backup and upgrade our servers, routinely achieving 99.9% uptime. Find out more about our hosting and rock star support.

Managing multiple storefronts

Psand's content management system, Changing Pages, gives you the power to manage hundreds of online stores from one interface, saving time and resources. From here, you may also assign single users or teams to manage single storefronts, or groups & regions. Whether you use this for different product lines, geographically local markets or different storefronts to target niche market segments, is up to you. See our multi-site CMS for the bigger picture.

Nitty-gritty technology

As for our tech stack, Psand are very versatile with the technologies we use.

For servers we mainly use Apache or NGINX. For backend, Perl, PHP, Python, Node.js, Rails. For frontend, "Vanilla" JavaScript, HTML5, CSS, jQuery, React, Foundation, Bulma...

We are experts in refactoring code to replace outdated technology with modern standards to gain performance, reduce maintenance and ease development. Some of us older fossils have been developing for over 20 years when Internet Explorer Version 6 was a new, exciting (and quite frustrating) thing.

When the world first heard of adaptive design, HTML5 became a valid standard and the web started to request security certificates by default (HTTPS), we were among the first to implement these new standards.

Even behind the scenes, we follow the best practices of adopting cutting edge standards. Our development process utilises Git, GitLab, CI/CD and automated tests with Puppeteer & Selenium. Our developers are capable of working both with old reliable stuff like Emacs and Linux terminal, as well as with newer fancy things such as VSCode, Atom, Sublime & Figma.

If you're still awake...

Get in touch

Call us on +44 (0)117 325 1055