Web design principles
The design cycle
Requirements analysis
Before the actual design process, there is a process to follow known as the requirements analysis stage. This stage is were the developer gathers as much information as possible from the client for the design of the new website. This collection of information includes a one-to-one interview with the client or other forms of data collection such as questionnaires. When the client's needs are known, we move into the design stage.
Design and implementation
The design stage is where the developer starts to code the website. If the client has all the graphic files for use in your website, these can also be included in the design. The text that the client's audience wants to view will also be invaluable to your website after it has been checked and formatted and that it is valid for the intended web audience. After the design stage is finalised, the next step would be the user testing stage.
Software Testing
User testing involves the developer testing all the pages for conformance and that the code intends to do what it is meant to do. When all the testing is done, the user acceptance stage follows on.
User acceptance and Delivery
User acceptance is the stage where the project is presented to the client and seek the client's conformance. After the client is satisfied, the website is handed over to the client and the maintenance process follows on.
Maintenance
A maintenance contract may or may not be aquired through us, but after the delivery of the website is being made, it is important that the website is maintained by a professional developer.
Scaling the application
It is possible to build from scratch a cost effective, bill board style website, offering your services and any other information you might want to impart to the Internet user.
After having built the basic website, you might want at a later date to scale your website by either adding server side scripts that will provide a dynamic website or to create an advanced backend database to store and retrieve data kept in the database.
* Web hosting is available in conjunction with third party hosting company.
KISS - Designing websites that work
The acronym KISS stands for "Keep It Simple, Stupid" is often used in the software engineering context in Web Applications or WebApps to keep things simple and avoid complexity wherever possible. It is often the case that websites that are complex in design (either in backend or frontend design), tend to fail in delivering the true message of the website or fail to meet the clients requirements. This would also cause websites to be more complex when scaling up further or simply would drive potential traffic away. Using Human Computer Interaction (HCI) knowledge from one of the best HCI experts with the combination of web application techniques, I will be able to produce websites that are easy to use and will deliver its message to the user.
We offer bespoke solutions to your needs, no templates and no JOOMLA
Many web companies are now offering cheap web solutions by using JOOMLA. JOOMLA is a content management system that creates a website by the use of ready made templates and all the page contents are accessed by using a database. Though JOOMLA might be a good idea for small websites with low traffic volume, it will not be suitable for larger websites with many pages accessing the database or with websites that have a high traffic volume.
The main reason being is that the web server (such as IIS or Apache) can serve static pages much faster than dynamic pages or database accessed content. This could cause bottlenecks in your server and slow down the webserver to a crawl meaning that visitors will go elsewhere. My advice is therefore to use database content when needed and use it sparingly.
HOME RUN websites
Home run websites is a criteria used by HCI experts that classify what makes a website successful. The four main things that users want are in HOME, but to make the website a superb site, RUN criterion needs to be applied.
- H - High Quality Content
- O - Often Updated
- M - Minimal download time
- E - Ease of use
- ---------
- R - Relevant to users needs
- U - Unique to the online medium
- N - Net centric corporate culture
Flash Vs HTML based websites
There are many websites that are flash based. Flash technology is suitable for small presentations or animations, but not to design fully blown websites as it does present problems to a wide spectrum of users. There are several problems following this design ideology and this is an idealogy that I myself and other HCI experts will not adopt for the reasons laid out below:
- It is not accessable for people with disabilities.
- Flash is very demanding in bandwidth and will take longer to download for users who use dial up connections.
- It is not interoperable by W3C standards; requires the user to download a separate plugin and does not implement HTML tags.
- It is not compatible with "text only" browsers.
When to use flash
Flash is mainly designed to be used for media presentations that can consist of tutorials, step by step instructions or animations.
Web designer background - Graphic artist Vs Web Engineer
A web designer background can vary from person to person. For instance, there are web designers who have an artistic background and therefore work with absolute values (fixed size pages) and make the page graphically oriented. The other side to this are people in the engineering background who optimize pages making them search engine friendly and design the pages following W3C standards. Since I possess both backgrounds, I can deliver websites that look good and adhere to W3C standards.
Designing websites with absolute or relative values for displays
Designing a website needs careful consideration to its users. One of these issues is how the user would see your website. Many web designers design websites using absolute values; using a fixed value to fit the website on your screen. Most agree that a 800 pixel fixed horizontal design is more than enough. What about the people who uses small screens or mobile computers such as PDA's to access your web content? Even people with bigger screens find that the design is very small because there is a lot of wasted space on the screen. On the other hand, using relative values would solve this issue; i.e. non fixed values. Relative screen designs will make sure that your browser will adjust the web content according to your screen size thus using all the screen space available to you.
Using browser safe colours
Browser safe colours imply that some colours are not quite represented accurately by a browser. The end result of not using a browser safe colour is that the colour might be interpreted differently on other popular browsers such as firefox, mozilla and opera.