About us

Fontana Design was set up in 2008 by Steve Mitchell and Adam Simmons in response to a gap in the market for promoting good, clear web design combined with marketing expertise on how best to exploit web sites.

Steve designed the web site for a holiday home on Spain's Northern Costa Blanca; this was done to augment the details allowed on holiday rental sites and help potential clients to be given more information on the property.

In 2009 and 2010, the apartment was fully occupied for over three months between May and September without any discounting necessary. As far as we can see (researching entries on the holiday rental portals), this is one of the highest occupancy rates on the Costa Blanca.

A blend of web design and marketing expertise

The two principals of Fontana Design have complementary strengths which make us so much more than just another web design company. You would expect a web design company to be able to design web sites! However, the web design aspect of your project would be carried out by a designer who has received a distinction in web design from City and Guilds in the UK.

With many web design companies the process stops once your website has been built. With us you will receive - at no extra fee – advice from an Associate Fellow at Warwick University Business School on how to leverage your web site to get the best results from your investment.

Associates

Whilst Steve has the skills to design a bespoke site from the ground up, often people require a fully content-managed site using systems such as WordPress. To this end, Gaile Griffin Peers (MBA FCMI) of UP Publications and the Marina Alta Business Club, works with Fontana Design on this type of project. Gaile has had plenty of experience in creating web sites using both Dreamweaver and WordPress and the plugins used in WordPress to build feature-rich sites for her clients.

About Steve

Before concentrating on web design full-time, I was an IT project manager for BT Customer Services where I needed to communicate clearly and publish project data on the corporate web site and in all of the time that I have been creating for and using the web, I have been surprised at the number of sites that are not user-friendly. So I trained with City & Guilds and achieved a distinction in web design.

It's all very well using the latest gadgets and gizmos to impress the geeks on your all-singing and all-dancing web site, but if most people cannot navigate or understand the site, then you have wasted both your time and theirs! After all, what is the purpose of your web site? It should be to engage and inform your customers, not bamboozle them.

That’s why I'm committed to creating web sites that are clear and user-friendly with the aim of helping you, our clients, increase the revenue of your business. For full details of my experience to date, please click here to have a look at my CV.

About Adam

I am an Associate Fellow at Warwick University Business School, where I tutor modules including statistics, economics and marketing on the MBA programme. I have also taught Masters level courses in marketing management and marketing distribution strategy. I also work as a transport consultant, advising governments and businesses around the world on improving their effectiveness through more efficient organisational structure, pricing strategy or improvements to their marketing plans.

Having developed a great-looking and useful web site, in many ways this should be just the start of the process. Together with clients, I help them identify what prices should be charged, whether and how to set web prices differently compared to “walk up“ prices, advise on means to monitor how well the web site is being used (for example, web-only promotions) and, most importantly, how to integrate the new web site into the client’s current promotional activity such as advertising and business directories. After all, it’s pointless having a web site if nobody knows about it!

To see my CV, click here or please visit my web site.

About Gaile

My history as a web developer started in the late 80s with the development of a variety of antique-oriented websites. In the late nineties, using Dreamweaver, I developed one of the first local authority Social Services websites to be designed, constructed and maintained from within the Department, rather than by the main Council web-administrators.

I was the first Social Services member to ever sit on the Council’s Media Development Committee. By the end of my contract the site had over 170 continuously updated pages. In tandem, I established one of the very first Area Child Protection Committee websites in the UK and with them developed books and support documentation. When I became the General Manager of The Learning Centre Ltd (now part of Peterborough City Council) I redesigned the company website and with the help of our IT department turned it from a set of static pages into a fully interactive website.

I currently host over 60 domains on my servers and with Steve Mitchell am a pioneer in Spain for Client Manageable Website Services. As the manager of Marina Alta Business Club, I consult on the many different and effective ways that Wordpress can be used to augment a website. It is important to allow clients freedom of expression, input and interactivity, whilst maintaining a quality corporate look throughout their website.

I believe it is important to recognise the limitations of Wordpress and therefore work with qualified designers, like Steve, to augment the sites beyond Wordpress capabilities and to ensure client satisfaction.

A selection of WordPress sites created by Gaile is available on the Portfolio page.