Website Design and Development

Web professionals may disagree on details but few would dispute that a website should be an effective form of communication.

There are numerous factors involved in successful website design. Which can of course, mean many different things depending on perspective depending on the context. Success in terms of an on line shop could be assessed in terms of sales transactions, a personal website, as a point of reference.

It is well publicised that web visitors are ruthlessly critical and assess website credibility by personal psychological factors. This broadly translates into the use of 'popular' colours in the design and the absence of flashing, rotating and scrolling gimmicks that serve only as an annoyance and worse distract and detract focus from pertinent website content.

There is consensus that a website ought to facilitate easy use in terms of navigation and content discovery. Simplicity always tends to be far more effective than the overly complicated. A crisp layout giving the impression of openness and space will meet with greater approval than a cluttered and jumbled unintelligible interface. Add to that the flexibility of introducing the capability of using 'themes' which would allow any part or the whole website to change the layout without having to rebuild the site completely from scratch.

It may be expected that a website would be professionally written in accordance with accepted web standards (WC3 consortium) which is the industry consortium , which in turn would promote greater consistency between site rendering using existing web browser programs. Although the most recent web standards "HTML5" and "CSS3" are not yet finalised and may not be in some respects for several years There is much that can and should be employed already by web professionals, although implementation of standards depends to a large extent on browser support.

A great deal is made of SEO 'search engine optimisation' which simply put is the process of improving or attaining high website natural search engine rankings with respect to specific and relevant search terms. High rankings alone would not necessarily trigger higher revenue, but, it would make the foregoing more likely events, usually as a natural consequence of increased traffic. Search engines such as Google do not publish their ranking algorithms but, it is quite clear that rankings depend upon more factors than just optimization by keywords alone or even linking strategies. Part of Google's mission statement is to deliver 'relevant content' in their search results.

There is no substitute for fresh original content if a site is to become 'favoured' by the cleverer search engines. Most are enamoured by blog type content usually because it is textual in nature. But, what really keeps the search spiders coming back to re-asses the website is relevant changing content.

In a nutshell then, the recipe for a successful website is a clean website design which permits easy and effective use by a visitor. Adherence to website standards, with focussed use of keywords in important areas of the site. Add relevant and original content to the mix and the recipe is nearly complete. There is required a suitable web host which will deliver the website as quickly as the users connection will allow.

We look forward the assisting you develop your web presence with all the foregoing issues foremost in the development process.