A website is more than a technical project with a pretty face. A successful website is one that meets your marketing goals and brings you more business.
How much business does your current website generate? It should be a primary marketing avenue for most businesses. If your site is not meeting your business objectives, we can review it against your strategic marketing goals and suggest improvements or a redesign.
We design and develop standards-compliant websites for organizations of all sizes. Whether you need a simple professional site or a multi-section corporate site with a database, e-commerce functionality and special security provisions, we can provide it for you through our own team or work as your consultant or project manager.
A search-engine friendly custom-designed site will best meet the needs of nearly all organizations, regardless of size, since its design will be based on usability, current web standards, and your strategic goals.
Design starts with a project plan that includes your requirements, strategic goals, resources, budget, design guidelines, content selection and editing responsibility, design and development time-line, and provision for maintenance after launch. Even a basic plan will facilitate design and implementation, so the site can be completed without delay.
Usability is probably the most important of all web design considerations. Your fascinating content and captivating presentation will be useless if a visitor can’t find what he or she wants quickly. Visitors who are confused or find your site hard to use will simply go elsewhere. Usability requires quick page loading, clean presentation, intuitive layout, hierarchical site structure, legible text, easy navigation to content on other pages, descriptive page titles, the ability to search content and the use of breadcrumbs for indicating "where am I" on larger sites, easy identification of in-line links, ability to print long content without side panels, and more — all elements of good design.
A few years ago, websites were developed through a table structure that mixed content with the elements of presentation, all in pages of html code. If you wanted to make a change, say bolding a phrase or adding a new staff member's name, you would ask your coder to update a particular page. If you wanted all your headings to be larger, or red instead of black, every heading on every page needed to be changed individually, making modifications time-consuming and expensive. Unfortunately, most sites retain this inefficient table structure, and some web developers continue to code in the old way. Search engines do not rank such sites as high as standards-compliant sites.
Today's design standards call for a separation into separate types of files for page content, presentation, and on-click interactive behavior. Changes in presentation across the entire site typically can be made with a simple change to a single stylesheet, while page content — unencumbered by html code for tables and cells and fonts — can often be updated easily without recoding. Adhering to current web design standards makes revisions easier and more cost effective, so that websites remain fresh and relevant, and makes websites accessible to a larger percentage of viewers.
It has always been important for marketing purposes to make websites available to the largest possible audience. The increasing use of mobile devices such as smart phones with small screens has focused web designers' attention on flexible display techniques and alternative presentation.
Likewise, adherence to accessibility standards has helped to make the web available to persons with disabilities, through use of text readers rather than browsers, "alternative" captions on images, text summaries on video presentations, and support for a keyboard as well as a mouse.
Lest anyone think that web standards are forever, it should be noted that major revisions to both the html standard and the standard for cascading stylesheets are in the process of being formulated. Some web browsers have already started to support some elements of them, and web designers like Prince Global are starting to implement them on clients' sites. They offer ways to accomplish effects that were not possible or only with great difficulty previously. Examples include the fading transition in the slideshow on our homepage and the curved-corner testimonial box in the left column of this page. If you do not see these effects, then your browser has not yet implemented those parts of the new standards.
Separating presentation from structure permits the content to be edited by non-technical editors with little risk of causing the page to fail. This has, in turn, resulted in a large number of content management systems (CMS) becoming available in the marketplace. One of the most popular CMS systems is Wordpress, used by bloggers to upload articles to their blogs.
Not every CMS is suitable for every website, but nearly every website lends itself to editing by one CMS or another. To facilitate editing, large sites can be built specifically for use with a specific robust CMS, while smaller sites can use a much simpler CMS tool.
"The work you did on the website was simply amazing. Everyone loves our new look and I know it will help us get our message out there. You met every single goal that we talked about, and it was a pleasure working with you." R. Maltz, Reach Out for Youth
We design and develop standards-compliant websites for organizations of all sizes.
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