Web Designers in Cumbria - Vertebrate
Websites for Artists
For nearly a decade we've built websites that people can manage themselves and we're proud to be doing sites for Cumbrian Businesses so we decided to put this page together to help explain some of the options that are our there for Rural businesses in Cumbria.
We'll be expanding on this page and making a whole section full of useful information for people running websites whether you're a client of ours or not. Of course if you're looking for a new website or Web Designers in Cumbria, please do drop us a line. We're friendly people, we avoid jargon and we don't sell at people... Nope, we make websites, we're not sales people.
On to the information.
Distinctly Cumbrian and Vertebrate
In essence Distinctly Cumbrian has three objectives:
- To enhance the infracture for local production, distribution and sales
- To develop the capacity of producers
- To assist producers adopt IT and the Internet to support the sales and marketing of products.
So what exactly is Distinctly Cumbrian?
Distinctly Cumbrian is part of the Cumbria Rural Enterprise Agency. They're based at the Rural Enterprise Centre at Redhills (just outside of Penrith) and down in Kendal in the Lake District Business Park.
We're not part of Distinctly Cumbrian or the Cumbria Rural Enterprise Agency but we are one of the web design companies who make websites for the businesses they support.
Some people are under the impression that all the web designers are still in the cities, that's not true, there's some talented designers up here and I doubt that we're the only web developers who have migrated to Cumbria.
Who does Distinctly Cumbrian help?
Distinctly Cumbrian's main focus is helping Cumbrian businesses make the most of the internet and naturally this means helping them get websites amongst other things. It's hard to say exactly who is eligible for their support but so far we've seen Food Producers, Butchers, Artists, Jewellers, Brewers, Toy makers and Boatmakers amongst others and we're really happy to be making websites for some of them.
What do they offer?
As a brief guide they provide grants of up to 50% for website development and they provide impartial advice about how to run your website and who should develop it. They don't specifically recommend a web developer but they'll help you put together a brief of what your site needs and invite the web developers to indicate their interest in your site. You then go through the "Expressions of interest" with them to shortlist a couple/few companies you'd like to talk to and then make your decision. They are there to help you not to dictate to you.
Once you've made your decision a formal offer for the grant funding is made to you. This can take a while so if you're thinking about applying for grant funding don't wait to get the application form. The grant panel meets every 6 weeks on average so sometimes the wait is longer than others depending on where in that 6 week cycle you are when you make your choice of web developer.
A lot of sites below a certain threshold don't require the approval of the whole panel and can be authorised internally. You still need to fill in the application form.
Sites below this threshold don't always require you meeting several web design companies either so if you like our work please do contact us with your ideas (or plans) for your site and we'll happily talk to you about it and let you know whether your site is likely to be below that threshold (quite a few of them are).
Why sell online?
According to the National Statistics on Internet Access 63% (or 29 million) of adults in Great Britain have accessed the Internet (by February 2006). 67% of those people have bought or ordered goods or services.
In our opinion that number is likely to grow as websites get easier to use and the choices available to people increase. We know from experience that specialist business do particularly well on the net so long as they get the website right. If people can't use a site they won't, it's that simple.
Rural Businesses and the Net
It's amazing what the internet can do for rural businesses. Having lived in London we know exactly how much more it costs to operate from there (or any other city for that matter) and Rural businesses do tend to have lower rents to cover so you can keep overheads down. This means that you can undercut someone offering the same service from a city.
If you're a farmer selling directly to the public (or to restaurants, hotels and other local businesses) you can cut out the middleman. People are becoming increasingly aware of how much major supermarkets are squeezing producers so that they can keep their share as high as possible and a lot of us don't like this. We want to see the producer benefit after all they are the ones who've done all the work, cared for that animails and taken all the risks (and in the case of a lot of Cumbrian Farmers survived the Foot and Mouth crisis).
There's a lot of organic production here too this is again something that people are very keen on but it you're an organic farmer you almost certainly already know that.
More Info:
Websites for Retail
So if you do live or work in Cumbria, and you are a rural business you really should have a look at their own pages. They're currently developing a new website and we'll put a link to it here as soon as it's available (there's nothing to see there yet).
For now you can read the lastest news in the Distinctly Cumbrian Summer Newsletter.
The main pages about them are currently at:
http://www.crea.co.uk/distinctly_cumbrian.htm
Of course we don't just do websites through Distinctly Cumbrian so if you're looking for a web designer in Cumbria please do drop us a line.