No Snake Oil offers here

No Snake Oil offers here

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We blog very little, because we tend to be busy enough already working for our customers, but a new article will reassure visitors that we’re still in business and going strong. So, ta-daah!

We do believe Heading for the Coast punch way above our weight in terms of design and web builds. Our design is first class, our builds are bespoke and trusted by serious businesses and government to work effectively and to answer all the questions a viewer might have.

Our customers are the experts at what they do. We are the experts at what we do. Together, we are able to build a fruitful collaboration based on our relative areas of expertise. In short, it pays to hire a business that knows what they’re doing.

Occasionally (if time allows), we’ll visit our local rivals websites to see what they are up to... their projects section usually hasn’t been updated with anything new, but their blog is updated regularly with purloined articles about Google changing their policies or other similarly web-obsessive things. We often wonder if they‘ve got any work to do? One of our rivals’ own website is riddled with spelling mistakes and extraneous word   spacing. Why would you trust the people responsible for it to design, write content and build a website for your business?

There are lots of snake oil salesmen out there in the world of website design too... they’ll sell you all the gadgets (pop-up salesperson chat boxes?) and buzz word monthly charged services like SEO optimisation, Pay Per Click advertising etc.

We don’t use $49 website templates bought online - because in our eyes, it’s cheating... like announcing you are a Chef, only to secretly serve up an Iceland frozen ready-meal and claim it as all your creation!
And of course, those bought-in templates will actually slow down the performance of your website, as they are loaded in the background with different theme version code for all business occasions, and the fake web Chef never seems able to remove that extra coding... they even often leave in the name of the theme they’ve used!

In the true spirit of honesty, of course we’ve lost a customer or two over the last couple of years, the attrition we’ve experienced is due to change of ownership and snake oil from the new website builder, but thankfully, we gained more happy customers too!

We’ve recently introduced a single web page package for start-up businesses at an amazing value £400.
This equates to 8 hours content and design creation, and 8 hours build and launch time. We’ll probably do more than those hours, but that’s our commitment for you.

Neil Ballard
Design Partner

The boardrooms of London

‘The perfect design business’

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Like the decorator who never gets to paint his own home, we finally got around to completing our own website - after a year and a half in business... but we had been a bit busy!

We started with the vision of creating bespoke websites and brand design for SME businesses in North Shropshire, to help them step-up and maximise their potential, but we’ve also completed a large array of other projects too for multi-million pound businesses to sole trader start-ups throughout the UK.

Our ability to understand any of our clients’ business complexity and then organise it into a succinct proposition and supporting sales messages meant that we were requested to create several business presentations and then further assist by actually presenting them in the boardrooms of London. This client is delighted, and reports business is up over 20% since we became involved.

Our work has graced the desks and shelves of the major food retailers in the UK (and a German one too) and they have been mightily impressed.

One project, Barnstormer West Country Cheddar launched nationally in one of the big 4 UK retailers during Quarter 3 in 2016, and we’re proud to have created the brand, design and packaging for the single packs and SRP cases.

The WordPress community forums have been mined for new techniques and short cuts to solve all the technical web thingies that needed solving, and we have become a truly nimble business, aided on our ‘creative work-days’ by Simon’s very precise coffee-making technique.

Our design work has indeed travelled far and wide. We were recently commissioned to create packaging designs for an international supermarket group based in the Middle East, our work has also appeared in the USA, all over Europe and we even created a pack design for the No.1 Peanut Paste in Ghana.

In the last year we have directed 6 videos, created animated digital pitch-side advertising seen on national TV, supplied expertise for the Welsh Government and designed lots of press ads.

We’re much wiser too, having learnt all about high quality German modular kitchens, British artisan cheese, aluminium security shutters, roller garage doors, awnings, natural beauty products and we can now spot different makes of helicopters! Fairly diverse huh?

One client - impressed by our service said... ‘You are the perfect design business in a Tao-ist way, you don't seem to have to try. You just are.’

Thanks for reading. If we haven’t already, we look forward to meeting you one day soon.

Neil Ballard
Design Partner