Designing with W3C Standards
We build websites following the standards created by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Compliant sites make it easier for search engine spiders to evaluate the content on a page, which can help make your site indexed more accurately. Standards also allow your site to look and operate consistently among major web browsers and platforms.
An overlooked but important advantage to standards based web design is accessibility. This applies to people with impairments or disabilities that rely on alternative means of web browsing, such as those who use screen readers to interpret web pages.
Our Approach
The most important thing to remember in web design is that there is a lot more to your site than just how it looks. Some websites sacrifice usability for aesthetics. Others have great content but poor design. When we build a site, we pay close attention to every part of it. No single element is too mundane or irrelevant.
In the end, we need to reach a balance between design, functionality and usability. If one of those areas fails, then the site fails.
1. Discovery
The first step is to define what your site's purpose will be. Are you selling a product online, creating market awareness, or generating sales leads? Next, we need to know everything we can about your business, industry and customers as possible. Finally, we need to gather or create all the relevant content.
2. Outlining and Information Architecture
We take the content and work with you to decide how it should be presented on the site. The content is broken down and categorized and from that, we can now structure the website and determine what type of layout and navigation will work most effectively.
3. Design
We then design a mockup in Photoshop for you to approve. Once we have a final design, we build the site in XHTML & CSS. We use optimized code to keep your site lean and fast loading. If your site requires any applications or databases, we can now build them into the approved design.
4. Testing
A website viewed in Firefox might not look and work the same as in Internet Explorer. That's why compatibility testing is a must. We'll test your site in the major web browsers and correct any inconsistencies we may find.