The main design purpose of a website is to attract attention, and give the correct company or organization image. If your company or organization already has a brand image, logo or color plan, then these must be used on your website. This helps support the branding, and if the brand is already well known it will generate your website instantly familiar.
Website design issues
Web Design Experts can give design from scratch. More generally we work with existing logos and color schemes provided by the client. We are also happy to make a website to a client defined design. When making a website, making graphics from scratch is a time consuming (and hence expensive) course. A client can reduce the website cost by given to us with good quality images in electronic format.
Website design - appearance
In our experience, a Do-It-Yourself (DIY) website can look very good. This is the part of website design that anyone with a good eye for design, and plenty of time, can create a success of themselves.
A good looking website does show to give a small positive contribution to a user’s perception of the company or organization. But a poorly functioning website (with missing links, hard to steer or slow to load pages) gives a very poor impression of the company or organization. There are free link checking tools around on the Internet to avoid broken links. Website navigation must be checked to see that it works - and also that it works without a mouse!
Website design - load times
Most web designers appear to have Broadband or faster connections. But several users of the Internet are still using slow modems on a dialup connection. Slow loading pages are not all right for any website that is aimed at home users. Remember that many of these users are also paying per minute so waiting for a slow loading website will cost a little more but make a large amount of negative feeling.
Web Design Experts checks most pages of websites they make using a dialup account to check for suitable load times. Any professional web designer will also use events to speed up page loading - for example by using the alt tag for images. All images will also be optimized for web usage.
Website design - browser issues
Websites are viewed by all sorts of people, on different kinds of computer (PC, MAC) using different screen sizes and different browsers. Unluckily for the amateur web designer, a website may look different on different browsers. Worse still, a website designed to look good using a large screen and Internet Explorer, may look terrible on a small screen and Netscape and may be invisible with the Opera browser.
A professional web design company must test out your website using a variety of Internet Browsers and operating systems. All the websites within Web Design Experts are tested to check they are written using valid html. They are also looked at on the most common Internet browsers, as several of these have non-standard implementations of html or various errors that require avoiding.
Website design - screen size issues
The website must be designed to work on small screens as a large percentage of the population still use these. There are several websites around that say "this website has been designed to work best on a screen resolution of ..." - are the users really expected to directly change screens or adjust their screen settings just to view one website! Good website design means ensuring the website is viewable and negotiable on all common screen sizes.
Website design - accessibility issues
Within Web Design Experts we also make sure that all websites are accessible to all and most comply with the Bobby accessibility criteria. This is actually already required by present disability legislation, although very few websites conform to this necessity. Apart from being ethically correct to make websites that are viewable by all people, there is a very big business benefit to doing so. Google, the most significant search engine, is blind! If your website is nearby to all, it will be highly ranked in Google and you will get higher positions in search results.
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