Who are the people behind puresilva?

puresilva are essentially a two man team - Andrew Lang and Drew Jones. We are based in the United Kingdom, and primarily deal with UK based businesses - but we do have a handful of overseas clients.

Launched on April 9 2006 by Andrew Lang, puresilva has become a popular website template now used by many websites - from e-commerce sites to information sites to blogs/community sites. We are a small company focusing on a personal service to our customers while offering an excellent product at fantastic value.

Although puresilva is relatively new, we are not new to website development - we have over 15 years of experience in this industry between us.

Andrew is the main developer behind puresilva, while Drew is involved in sales, marketing and also production.

Why was puresilva developed?

We identifed a niche in the website development market - somewhere between the bespoke development market (i.e. making 'handmade', tailored websites) and the free website template services such as osCommerce, Drupal, Joomla etc which although are free, normally involve a 3rd party web design company to actually manage and host your website.

Bespoke website design is expensive and risky. You may have a wonderful looking website that functions exactly as you want it to - but it lacks search engine optimization, or fails usability tests, or is simply inaccessible to a number of website visitors and even search engines. Even if it has all that, you will inevitably end up paying for updates to the site since it's bespoke - which can easily double your expenditure from your initial outlay over as short a time as 12 months.

And the clincher: after your website launches, what kind of marketing help will you receive from your website developers? Do they even have this knowledge, or will you find yourself locating yet another professional and paying for more services?

On the other side, you have website templates such as CubeCart, OsCommerce, Joomla, Drupal etc. We see good and bad in these solutions.

An example of the good: open source templates such as OsCommerce have more features than puresilva - such as support for more payment providers. Having said that, these are issues we can easily address in the future (it's just we are customer-lead in terms of requests and are not finding these essential at the moment). This isn't to say that puresilva lacks in features (see here for our features list).

An example of the bad: we don't see any template solution that truly deals with search engine optimization as puresilva does - covering on-page and off-optimization extensively. There's also no direct connection between developer and customer. Most customers using these templates have paid a web design company to tweak the templates so you can't request a new feature directly to the developer. There's no instant updates on any of these templates like you get with puresilva. Also, we feel ALL of the template providers we tried lack basic usability, particularly in burderning shoppers with registering to buy something (often without even knowing the payment methods).

puresilva is a complete and ready-to-use website solution, but it is also an on-going project - we like to work with our customers in improving their websites through feature requests and free updates (that everyone benefits from). In this way, all of our customer's websites are "future proof" as they are continually patched with updates.

By being customer-lead, we had to focus on search engine optimization, and visitor retention features (such as a blog module) because the big questions we were always asked was : how can I get more visitors to my site, and how can I make them come back everyday? This is an example of focusing on the things that matter, rather than trying to cram in as many features as possible, whether they are useful or not.

A website works when people can easily find it, access it, know how to use it intuitively, and understand its message, and want to return back to the site to see what's new. All simple sounding stuff, but actually not that easy to execute. It is our aim to provide this kind of website for our customers - while advising them on their content to make sure the message part of the website is understood. After that, if the business model is good (i.e. a service/product is pitched to a market that demands it and has its niche), then you will have a successful website making regular sales. There is no magic to weave here (more details on this paragraph can be found on our 'selling online successfully' article).

puresilva will always be a work in progress. It is not perfect now and never will be. From time to time we find bugs, and they are quickly ironed out and all websites are patched - these are few and far between however. We also have feature requests all the time, so by that very fact alone, puresilva will always be a work in progress.