Services: Design

DESIGNING A WEB SITE involves careful planning and coordination. After assessing the client's preferences and needs, we proceed to develop an overall concept for the site.

After the site concept is developed we present a proposal to the client. Our proposal usually contains three options - the low-, mid-, and high-level. The low-level option has a few advanced programming features, it is easily implemented. The high-level option contains all the necessary features to make the clients site highly functional with a polished, distinguishing look. It includes advanced programming features, such as calendar, chat, and search. The mid-level option falls somewhere in between the other two.

The client then chooses the best option and we implement our design. During the implementation, we solicit continuous input from the client, to ensure that all the aspects of the site are as the client expected. This may result in some minor changes, but the overall feel of the site is not affected.

Our Design Philosophy

The most important aspects of any site we design are:

• navigation
• consistency
• speed

The navigation must be contained within the site itself, without any need to use the browser buttons. Users must know at all times where in the site they are.

The content of the site must be presented in a consistent manner. Users will know what to expect from one page to the next page, while viewing consistent content.

We realize that many Web users do not have the most modern hardware. Their connections and CPUs may be slow. They may not have enough RAM. Therefore, we design compact sites that download faster. Our graphics are as big as they need to be. We do not use any plug-ins, because we believe everything can be presented with simple tools already available in a browser.

There are several additional factors we consider in designing Web sites. They are software and hardware related. The software issues deal with the incompatibilities between browsers, while the hardware factors relate to the workload put onto the user's computer.

The incompatibilities between the browsers are grave but manageable. We optimize our designs for both major browsers, versions four and later. We avoid using any technological advances that may render improperly on either of the two.

The Web server ought to do most of the work. If there is any need for dynamic presentation or on-the-fly page creation, we let the server do it. We do not store any information on users' computers. If users need to enter a site with a login id and password, they are stored on our side. We do not use cookies. We only use the user's browser to properly render the delivered page. Everything else is performed by our servers.