Internet Solutions Services Limited is a small website development company based in Greater Manchester. ISSL may be small, but the design and development team use technology efficiently to ensure that operations run smoothly. We are not a 'jack of all trades', we specialise in helping businesses get the best from their website and with over twelve years of trading you can rest assured that ISSL will be with you for the long haul.

All of our website hosting is here in the UK on dedicated servers—this is one thing we do not share. By not using third parties it gives us freedom and control over the standard of service that we can offer. For you this means that you know where your data is held, and can be confident that it is secure. ISSL is also proud to be a member of Nominet and as such have all our .co.uk domains on our own tag - UKPROPERTY.

Initially our main area of focus was within the estate and letting agency industry back in 2002. We developed software to enable estate agents to display properties on their own website, as well as designing and building the website to accommodate the database.

Naturally, the business has progressed to other areas as more clients recommended us to other companies in other industries.

Co-Director Lisa Spann is the author of the 'Owner’s Guide to the Small Business Website' published May 2014. The book was written on request to help all business owners understand in plain English what they need to know before embarking on a new website—the idea being to help them to get what they need and, importantly, what their customers need without paying the earth.

A standard website is built with a large screen and a mouse in mind. This means that unless something is intentionally done, people with smaller screens might find themselves with a sub-par experience. This could be caused by text that is difficult to read, buttons or links that are difficult to interact with, images or videos being too large and too slow on a mobile phone network, or items on the screen simply being too big to fit.

Nearly all websites are functional on modern smartphones—even those that were designed only with a desktop computer in mind, but you often run into problems like those above, and that might just be enough to put a customer off.

A mobile website is designed to fit a smaller screen, with easy to press buttons and navigation items, easy to use contact pages and—if required—pages containing only the information someone might require on the go, all with a design in-keeping with your branding but suited to the size of screen available.

At ISSL we go one better by creating ‘responsive’ websites as standard. These websites look their best on the widest possible range of devices—from the very small to the very large—while keeping all of the benefits of a mobile website. They aren’t designed with any screen size in mind—smart defaults are used so that everything ’responds’ to changes in screen size.

We think there are two (equally important) things every website should aim for. The first is to get a company’s message across and provide the information that a visitor might need. The second is to be as user-friendly and accessible as possible, so that the maximum number of people can find that information.

“We think websites should be enjoyed, and if someone is enjoying your site or finding it easy to use, we think they are more likely to interact with it—and your business.”

By showing the exact same website on both types of device you are not providing the best experience for at least one of those. We think websites should be enjoyed, and if someone is enjoying your site or finding it easy to use, we think they are more likely to interact with it—and your business. This applies to almost any company, from someone scanning through an estate agent’s properties to viewing a restaurant’s menu and a great user experience is part of that.

But it isn’t all about taking larger components and rearranging them so that they fit. A mobile-optimised site can be designed so that key information—such as an email address or phone number—is more readily available to a mobile user, making it easier to find what you need on a small screen.