Effective Website Design
The main design purpose of a website is to attract attention, and give the correct company or organisation image. If your company or organisation already has a brand image, logo or colour scheme, then these should be used on your website. This helps reinforce the branding, and if the brand is already well known it will make your website instantly recognisable.
Website design issues
Cornish WebServices can provide design from scratch. More usually we work with existing logos and colour schemes provided by the client. We are also happy to create a website to a client defined design. When creating a website, creating graphics from scratch is a time consuming (and hence expensive) process. A client can reduce the website cost by providing us with good quality images in electronic format.
Website design - appearance
In our experience, a 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 make a success of themselves.
A good looking website does appear to give a small positive contribution to a users perception of the company or organisation. But a poorly functioning website (with missing links, hard to navigate or slow to load pages) gives a very poor impression of the company or organisation. There are free link checking tools around on the Internet to avoid broken links. Website navigation should 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 many users of the Internet are still using slow modems on a dialup connection. Slow loading pages are not acceptable 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 create a large amount of negative feeling.
Cornish WebServices check most pages of websites they create using a dialup account to check for acceptable load times. Any professional web designer will also use procedures to speed up page loading - for example by using the alt tag for images. All images will also be optimised for web usage.
Website design - browser issues
Websites are viewed by all sorts of people, on different types of computer (PC, MAC) using different screen sizes and different browsers. Unfortunately 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 awful on a small screen and Netscape and may be invisible with the Opera browser.
A professional webdesign company should test out your website using a variety of Internet Browsers and operating systems. All the websites within Cornish WebServices are tested to check they are written using valid html. They are also looked at on the most common Internet browsers, as many of these have non-standard implementations of html or various errors that need avoiding.
Website design - screen size issues
The website should be designed to work on small screens as a large percentage of the population still use these. There are many websites around that say "this website has been designed to work best on a screen resolution of .." - are the users really expected to immediately change screens or adjust their screen settings just to view one website! Good website design means ensuring the website is viewable and navigable on all common screen sizes.
Website design - accessibility issues
Within Cornish WebServices we also ensure that all websites are accessible to all and most comply with the Bobby accessibility criteria. This is actually already required by current disability legislation, although very few websites conform to this requirement. Apart from being ethically correct to create websites that are viewable by all people, there is a very big business advantage to doing so. Google, the most important search engine, is blind! If your website is accessible to all, it will be highly ranked in Google and you will get higher positions in search results.
