Web design

example illustration small business web design

 

By choosing to work with us, you will gain valuable insight. We communicate transparently about our process and tools. And through the rich conversations that we know we'll have, you will soon find that you know much more about online marketing than you did before you hire us. This experience will help you make better decisions as you implement online marketing campaigns and/or choose other web service providers. After working with us, you will sense the quality and professionalism of a service provider effortlessly.

Hiring us is cost effective because we want your website to do what you intend it to do. We begin and end our work in your project implementing every single thing we believe will advance your objective, either because it has worked for us in the past, or because suddenly we have an insight. With a website designed by us, you will not need to hire another service provider to improve the website, or a search engine consultant to evaluate on page search engine optimization. We implement UP TO DATE optimization guidelines issued by the leading search engines. We implement these in every design, and we have a strict quality control process to ensure that every element counts. Even if we use a third party prebuilt template, we will optimize the website to signal search engines about the website's subject matter. Do it yourself and cheap web design abound. But the cost of improving something poorly done is often much higher than hiring a quality service provider to begin with. Assuming that your business survives despite you having made a poor decision, no money can make up for the time lost. In some cases, you will not even be aware of the costs of a bad decision because you have not experienced the right path. Here are some of the features that characterize our work:

  • Cross browser compatible web design: this ensures that website visitors will view the same design regardless of the browser they use when they load your website. Once the final draft of the website has been decided, we adjust the website's styling files to reflect the same design when your pages are loaded using the most popular browsers. The browsers that we support are Chrome, Internet Explorer (version 7 and above), Firefox, Safari, and Opera.
    • A little background on browser mechanics: right now, each browser has its own mechanics; in other words, not all browsers respond the same way to a web design specifications. The W3C organization, World Wide Web Consortium, continuously works to promote the standardization of the web. And although browser companies work to reflect these standards, it takes time and resources to update browser engines. The best example of the challenges that slow down the evolution of a given browser is Internet Explorer. This browser did not begin to support the latest styling standards, CS3, until Internet Explorer 9, which had many problems, and it was not until version 10 that this browser supported styling features like rounded corners, shadows for boxes and text, and others cool features. On top of the time delay in the development of a browser, as web designers and website owners we confront the challenge of having website users that for whatever reason use old browsers to load the website. For the redesign of a website, we can look back at statistics of the browsers most commonly used by the visitors of the particular website, and channel resources to reflect a beautiful and professional design for these browsers. But when there is no data to make this decision, or a new website is designed from scratch, we must code adjustments to reflect the intended design throughout the most popular browsers. 
    • About our struggles to standardize a design for popular browsers: we spend the most time adjusting a web design to look as intended in Internet Explorer, 7, 8 and 9. Often, we have to use what are called hacks, meaning javascript code or certain features of the given browser to achieve the desired look. And then, the design for the now CS3 compatible version 10. This translates to extra work hours making this adjustments, and in some cases, researching what adjustments to make.
    • Common sense web design trivia: A simple design takes less time to put together, than a more flashy design. For example, rounded corners, shadows for boxes, gradients, and other features that make a website more attractive, take more time and effort tom implement.
  • Fluid web design: this is a design that fits the size of a window, and that changes as the browser's window is resized. 
    • Why is this valuable: you can expect to load a design that will likely fit most display screens. For our web designs, we set 768 pixels as the minimum width parameter, and 1200 pixels as the maximum width parameter. If the website is loaded from a 24 inches screen you have a centered web design that extends 1200 pixels wide, and if you load the website from an iPad you have a website that requires no scrolling even when the user has the table in a vertical position, but that adjusts if the user changes the tablet to the horizontal position. In short, there is no need for an alternate design to meet the rise of tablet users that visit your website.
  • Search Engine Optimized Web Design: a search engine optimized web design, and / or website, is a website that includes words and phrases related to its products and services. This information is embedded in the website through various elements. For example we can use keywords or phrases in the image tags title attribute and alternate text attribute. Another example is including these words and phrases in the title of intra website links. A newer guideline to optimize for search engines is the use of microdata tags. This tags are intended to signal categorical information about a website, for example the type of content included in the webpage such as business events, children's events, organization, type of organization, etc. 
    • Why is this important: for the proper filtering of a website by search engines. Correct signaling to search engines about products and services increases the chances of a website to appear amongst the results listed for related searches. If you are planning other online marketing tasks, like off page SEO, having an up to date search engine optimized website will contribute to your efforts.
  • Flexibility:
    • we can use a third party template: As a small business, we know that sometimes our budgets are limited. Instead of a customized design, we can use a third party template for your website. As you choose a design, we would discuss the limitation of the design you've selected, and what we think we'll need convert the template into a fluid design. For the most part, third party web templates are cross browser compatible
    • we can do a custom web design: If you require a customized web design, we'll follow the normal process of website development. Initially we present you with three designs that embody what we distilled from our conversations with you, websites you like, research of other market players, and anything else we think would enhance the website. Before we present you this visual designs, we brainstorm on the structure of the website, and present you with a flowchart like skeleton of the website. Our intention is to forecast design elements that account for overall website structure.
  • Creative: we are creative and can design innovative layouts and graphics in the extreme. No matter what you are looking for, we are not afraid to think outside the box.