A website is more than a technical project with a pretty face. A successful website is one that continues to meet your changing marketing goals.
If your site is not meeting your business objectives, we can review it against your strategic plan and suggest improvements or a redesign. For many reasons, especially competitive, it may be time to review its design, make improvements, and then plan for its ongoing maintenance.
What's under the hood? A few years ago, websites were developed through a table structure that mixed in the elements of presentation. If you wanted a change, say highlighting a phrase or paragraph or adding a new manager's name, you would ask your coder to update that particular page. If you wanted all your headings to be red instead of black, every heading needed to be marked up individually. Style changes across the site had to made to each page, making modifications time-consuming and expensive. Most sites retain this table structure, and some web developers continue to code in the old, inefficient way.
Today's design standards call for a separation of page structure, presentation, and on-click interactive behavior. Changes in presentation across the site typically require a change to a single stylesheet, while page content can often be updated easily by the marketing or administrative staff through a content management system. There is no need to engage a web designer or coder to make content changes. Adhering to modern 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.
We can analyze your website for adherence to design standards, accessibility, and valid markup code.
Usability is arguably the most important of all web design considerations. Your fascinating content and captivating presentation will be useless if a visitor to your site can't find what he or she wants quickly. Visitors who are confused or lost on your site or find it hard to use will simply go elsewhere. Usability requires quick page loading, clean presentation, intuitive layout, hierarchical site structure, clear navigation to content on other pages, descriptive page titles, the ability to search on larger sites, use of breadcrumbs for indicating "where am I", text legibility, easy identification of in-line links, ability to print long content without side panels, and more.
We can analyze your website for usability and suggest improvements.
If your website is ready for a redesign, it should start with a project plan that includes your organization's requirements, strategic goals, resources, budget, design guidelines, content selection and editing responsibility, design and development time-line, and provision for maintenance after launch — regardless of your organization's size. Broad participation in the planning process and ongoing review of the design are invaluable to avoid expensive rework during and after coding/implementation.
We can work with you to create the plan and a detailed specification, so that the design and implementation can be completed without delays.
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 work as your consultant, project manager, design team, and development team.
Following the planning stage, we use a 4-phase approach, each phase including integral client review:
We believe that a custom-designed site, well-planned and implemented, will best meet the needs of most organizations, regardless of size, since it is designed based on your strategic goals. If you want your site to be found in keyword searches, our specification of page structure will be search-engine friendly before any code is written. Our structured approach works for sites of 5 pages or 500. While you can save time and expense by dispensing with a project plan and/or by using a template website, the result will best suit some other business — or more likely none. Will that work for you?
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, with support for it added after the site is built.
We use both types of CMS tools depending on the needs of the editors and the nature of the site.
We design and develop standards-compliant websites for organizations of all sizes.
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"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