Frequently asked questions

Yes. Populate is a hosted content management, that means we always host your site. This allows us to have a constantly evolving system where upgrades and support are automatically applied. This gives you the benefit that you don't need to employ a developer to keep the a system updated on your own server.

Yes, all we need to do is edit the Domain name settings to point the www tag of the domain to our server.

You can either leave the email where it is allowing you to manage it as you did before, or you can move it over to us. If you want us to manage your email you then have the choice between using basic email where you get up to five POP3 boxes as part of your subscription fee or we can set you up with a Microsoft Exchange server using our sister company (Price depends on the number of mailboxes you require)

Yes. We can take your existing site and all of its content and recreate it within the Populate system allowing you to add pages, edit existing pages etc. At Populate we pay a lot of attention to making all of our sites as Search Engine friendly as possible, so we usually take the opportunity to advise on ways the html and site structure can be amended to improve the way a search engine can get to the content of your pages. Because the amount of work required can vary massively from site to site we have to quote for each of these jobs separately, please use our contact form and we will be pleased to provide a cost.

We are confident we can develop anything you might require at a very competitive price. The initial reason we developed Populate in the first place rather than follow the usual route of an off the shelf product was to allow us more versatility and control is response to our clients requirements. If you have a specific project please use our contact form to give us an outline of your project and we would be pleased to provide a quote for the project.

Populate is very feature rich and allows the addition of content in a visual way by normal users. The Populate system has been set out from day one to provide a cost effective solution to content management but at the same time to allow a feature rich toolset with managed support and hosting.

No, because of the nature of server side scripting you are not permitted within the standard system to use any server side code that is not developed by us. This is to protect the integrity of the server and to ensure the maximum security for yours and all of our customers sites and data.

As part of the standard package you will be able to use the filemanager to upload specific files to your site. The filemanager also allows you to edit you html templates and CSS files though this should only be done by a sufficiently qualified person. Direct FTP access can be arranged if required.

All the templates we build are specifically designed to be as Search engine friendly as possible. The page titles, H tags, page content, links etc are all configurable by you and all designed so that they have the potential of being well placed within Google and the other search engines. The position of the any page of your site in search results is ultimately determined by the quality of the content that is added and to the strength of the content of your competitors sites.

Populate features dynamic remapping of alters URLs. As you change the URL (an important place for keywords) for a page, product, section or blog the old URL is kept. If a search has indexed the old URL and a users finds the page through a google search the visitor is automatically redirected (301) to the new URL maintaining search engine position and ensuring the visitor s experience. An extension of this system allows us to map old URLs to their new equivelants when migrating sites into populate in order to maintain any search engine position they already have.

Populate features a dynamically generated Google sitemap and an html sitemap for use by visitors. With the administration area you can also add Google analytics tracking code and any additional meta including a verify V1 tag for use with Google webmaster tools.

We can perform any level of Search Engine Optimisation you might require and can advise you on how to get the most from your Populate based site.

Populate is aimed at companies that need the content of their website to be changed by relatively unskilled staff on a regular basis.

If at the end of your hosting and support contract you want to leave the populate system we have export routines that will export a zip file containing a static version of each page within your site (including any CSS, javascript and image files) ready to install on a new server.

You will no longer be able to use the administration system to edit the content of your site and certain dynamic features such as the internal search, sitemaps, checkout sytems etc will no longer function but the work you have put into the content will not be wasted.

We can also liase with your new developers to export your database of products, pages, contacts, etc ready to be imported into your new system. This is a manual process and as such may have a cost attached.