Web Design Macclesfield

Melted Media are an agency specialising in web design and development. They are based in Macclesfield, Cheshire, about an hour away from Chester. Established in July 2002, Melted Media provide web design in Macclesfield for local businesses. You can read about their services and some of their successful projects in the article below.

Web Design Macclesfield

Above are a selection of recent Wordpress and bespoke websites that Melted Media have created for their customers. These examples includes both WordPress websites and bespoke sites built using PHP and MySQL. There are also a number of Melted Media's own WordPress projects. Please see below for further information about some of these examples.


WordPress websites

Melted Media have built may WordPress websites since the were formed. A recent example is the website for editor and proofreader, Jane Woodhead. The team used AccessPress Lite theme for Jane's site, which despite being a free theme, has lots of customisation options, including a built-in slider. This means it was easy to create an engaging homepage, keeping it visual with short compelling messages and clear meaningful calls to action.

 

Another recent job was a WordPress website for The Bruce Arms pub in Macclesfield. Regulars of the pub themselves, the Melted Media team have looked at the pubs website for nearly 20 years. When a new landlord came in 2019, it was time for a refresh and the team rebuilt the site in WordPress, using the Spacious theme by ThemeGrill. This is an incredibly good multipurpose responsive theme, which can be used for a business, portfolio, blogging or any type of site.


Bespoke websites

Melted Media don't just build WordPress sites, they also build bespoke websites where appropriate. A client for many years, Stuart Smith approached Melted Media off the back of a recommendation from a fellow company director. For the the last five years, Stuart has used Melted Media exclusively for all his company websites. The most recent of these builds was for the Berkshire Guitar Amplifier Repair site, a bespoke responsive design and build.

 

Another long-term client of Melted Media is Jenna Robins. Over the 15 years, the team have built several websites for Jenna, including her current clinic website. Jenna is a Massage Therapist, Acupuncturist and Tai Chi Instructor based in Wilmslow, Cheshire. You can see a video of Jenna that was used on her website at the bottom of the page.

 

Newsletter sites

After building a bespoke newsletter website for an early client, the team saw there was an opportunity to create something that could be repackaged for other customers. This led to the team building their newsletter engine, which provide a simple interface for managing subscribers and creating and publishing email newsletters. There are two currently live examples of newsletter sites  built with the engine. Rotary News was built for the Rotary Clubs in the North West of England and Sale Golf Club News was built as a add-on to the club's main website and has just had a recent face-lift in line with the same site.


In-house WordPress projects

Melted Media also work on many in-house projects as well as sites for paying customers. A example of such a WordPress project is ShoeFreak. The website was built to automatically generate content based on a product feed from an affiliate network. It was originally developed quite some time ago, so the team have recently made the site mobile-friendly the WPtouch plugin.

 

A more recent project along the same lines was Everything Baby. The team also came up with this concept some time ago, but didn’t have time to build until more recently. The site is designed to be a portal for everything baby-related. Like its sister sites, it automatically populates with product feeds, but this time the team decided to build using WooCommerce.

The potted history of Melted Media

It all started in 2002. The founders of Melted Media had both been employed by Europress Software, an educational and entertainment software house. When Europress ceased trading in June 2002, Melted Media was formed and its initial project were developing a number of educational CD-ROMs to be released under the Europress brand name.

 

It wasn't very long before the started developing for the web. The development tools they used at the time - Macromedia Director and Flash - both had plugins which meant you could deploy on the web, so this was a natural step. They began creating online games, eventually moving on to full websites builds.

 

The success of those early CD-ROM projects would see Melted Media complete over 20 educational and licenced titles over the next five or so years, working for a number of different UK software publishers like Focus Multimedia and Global Software Publishing. The most known of these titles was Art Attack Digital, a CD-ROM which allowed users to perform wacky special effects on digital photographs and imported images. The CD-ROM eached to No. 1 on the Amazon.co.uk Hot 100 Software chart in the run up to Christmas 2004.

 

As web technology advanced, Melted Media began to work in collaboration with other digital agencies to develop several online games, working on projects for several well-known brands such as Toyota and Carlsberg. This experience would see them start to develop and publish their own games. Their most successfully release was Autofrag Sumo, a 3D Shockwave racing and combat game, which reached No.1 in the Channel4.com 4GAMES CHART from October 2004 to October 2007.

 

The team started to work on a wider variety of projects, so as their skills became more diverse, it was no surprise that it would see them start to take on full website projects. Over the last 13 years, this is the area that Melted Media have mainly worked. As well as web design in Macclesfield for small local businesses, they've also taken on larger clients such as a multi-million pound online retailer and they continue to be involved in projects of all sizes and complexity. They are able to use this vast experience to help small businesses with their first website. It's the same experience that has allowed Melted Media to fine-tune new website builds to be as pain free as possible. This is just one of the reasons why they love WordPress because it allows them to do this. Interested to find out more... keep reading!

WordPress web design in Macclesfield

Melted Media can build you either a WordPress or bespoke website, whatever your requirements. They have an extremely cost effective WordPress starter package for only £250+VAT. For that you will get:

  • Simple content management - Full control over the design and display of your content
  • Mobile-optimised design - An easy to use mobile friendly website, so you do not lose business
  • The most search engine friendly platform  - Takes care of the most basic SEO best practices out of the box

The WordPress platform gives you these features and many more on a budget you can afford.

 

Melted Media love to build with WordPress and there are lots of reasons for that… firstly, you can set up the basic structure of your site in no time at all. Many hosting providers now include a one-click install for WordPress, so that makes things even quicker. Did you know that at the time of writing there are over 500 million sites using WordPress! Why do you think so many people use it? Keep reading to find out more.

 

WordPress now has some extremely powerful page builders available and Elementor is the best FREE WordPress Website Builder, with over 5 million active installs. Create beautiful sites and pages using a drag and drop interface. Not only does this mean clients can easily update all aspects of their sites, but it means the initial build is much quicker.

 

The time is takes to get a client's website up and running is vastly reduced because of the huge ecosystem of free plugins and themes available to use. WordPress is also SEO-friendly out of the box. You can take it further by utilising one of the many plugins to further optimise and this makes it the best CMS for SEO, no question. Ranking your website high in Google is possible to achieve with the right strategy.

 

There is no reason a WordPress website would not load quickly, If built correctly, but there are also some great caching plugins that reduce the load on your database and this is particular relevant for high traffic sites. It makes no difference if you view your site on a phone, tablet or desktop as modern WordPress themes are fully responsive, so your site will adapt to the screen size it’s displayed on.

 

Melted Media always use a number of third party services on all of their WordPress builds. Many WordPress sites use Cloudflare to make them faster, but Melted Media also love Cloudflare because of it's built-in security features. One of these features is the ability to run your site on SSL at no extra cost, which means your site will show the secure padlock in a browser without actually purchasing a certificate. Melted Media also use Wordfence to protect their clients websites with the very best WordPress security there is. It includes a firewall and malware scanner built especially for WordPress, so you don't need to worry about keeping your website safe.

 

By utilising a free theme, Melted Media offer their basic WordPress package at the amazing price of £250+VAT! WordPress itself is completely free and in many case it’s possible to build a site using a free theme and free plugins and those budget savings are reflected in the cost to you, the customer!

Other services from Melted Media

Melted Media are happy to also provide some complimentary services to their website design and development. Once they build your site, they can also host it from just £70+VAT per year and this includes Cloudflare content delivery network (CDN) for built-in performance and security. If you don't have a domain for your website yet, they can register and renew UK and international domains from just £15+VAT per year and this also includes DNS management via Cloudflare. They're also happy to assist with optimisations and implement any new features you might like to add  to your website after it launches, utilising their vast experience with integrations and online marketing.

Melted Media Limited have a long history of providing web design in Macclesfield. Melted Media design and create professional and original web solutions and stand out because of their attention to detail. With years of experience of multimedia and web technology, Melted Media can help you get the most from your web presence. Get a professional WordPress website for your business for a surprisingly cool £250.