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Web Site Design
I am not a high-flying designer - I am more of an HTML coder; but I am capable of producing simple, functional, web designs. I often enlist the aid of a friend who is a highly experienced professional graphic designer to provide the basic "skin", which I then use to construct your pages from. Also I have other friends who can provide technical web programming services. So I can provide you with a high quality web design with lots of functionality. I would only factor in the cost of my friends' work without adding my own markup, although I would of course have to charge for the cost of building the rest of the site from the basic design. The net result to you is no extra cost over what I would charge if I could do such a high quality design myself.
There are a number of things to bear in mind when selecting a design for your company web site. Some important matters are often overlooked in the quest for a stunning eye-catching desing and advanced functionality. For your web site to be a business success (not just an artistic and technical achievement), it must be:
- easy to find - i.e. it should be well-positioned in popular search engines and listed in major web directories, and the domain name should be easy to remember, and spell. You could use two domain names pointing at the site - an easily memorable name for branding, and a keyword-rich hyphenated domain name for the search engines.
- quick to display - don't forget that even though you may have broadband, many users do not! Research shows that if users find a page takes more than 10 seconds to download, they will probably go off elsewhere! This means that code should be lean and mean, preferably hand-coded, and an external stylesheet should be used for layout. I used such principles in this site. The issue of fast page-loading will become less of a problem as more and more people switch to broadband, and use more powerful computers, but to date there are still many users who do not.
- easy to read - tiny print is all very well and trendy, but not everyone can read it and not everyone knows how to alter their browser font size settings or use a browser with zoom capabilities such as Opera.
- must be easy to find one's way around - navigation should be simple and unambiguous.
- information should be presented in small bite-sized chunks - remember the days of web pages that kept on scrolling for yards and yards! I confess that I am guilty of placing too much information on some of these pages - that is a legacy from an earlier site of mine, and I have not yet had time to split up the files and re-organise the menu.
I have put my primary attention in the time available to making this site workable rather than a work of art! In many cases, users are simply looking for "information, information, information", and quickly. Much depends, of course, on who the site is aimed at.
Company image is, of course, extremely important and great care has to be taken to convey the appropriate image through skillful styling. Moreover, eye-catching original design will, of course, make a site more memorable and often bring repeat visitors. However, in the search for such factors, the commonsense principles I have listed are often forgotten about.
Most of my experience of web site design has been in the area of making modifications to existing web sites rather than designing them from scratch. However, I have built this site from scratch (all hand-coded) - the design, I think, is simple but clean. As mentioned above I sub-contract design work to an experienced graphic designer, and for added functionality I sub-contract the work to some experienced web programmers.
Design Issues >
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alasdairbroun.org.uk
is hand-crafted* using
pure organic html
with CSS and SSI,
and is hosted on a
Unix Server running
Apache/1.3.29
*except for various
special features such as
newsfeeds, blogs, chat, etc.
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