Some food for thought.

Sometimes it's hard to face the facts, and even harder to inspire yourself to do something about it. As designers and developers, we are responsible to assist our clients in expanding their online market and accurately representing their business. If your website can't get your point across effectively, it's a wasted investment and possibly a waste of time. Overall, a website is about more than pretty colors, flashy graphics and abundant pages of (boring) text. We've come up with some ways to recognize if your website is ineffective, obsolete or in need of rescue.

Bad organization: Poor organization is a factor that will turn away tons of site visitors and potential clients. Organization needs to be intuitive and follow a logical train of thought. Someone who has given thought to using your business or service will be sorely disappointed when they can't find what they're looking for. Your website navigation should be organized into an intuitive hierarchy leaving the main menu with a handful of standard terms (like About, Clients, Contact) to help guide your visitors to (more specific) information.

Lack of branding: How do internet users determine the good websites (or businesses) from the bad ones? Simple. Failure to identify who you and/or your company are is a big giveaway. Look at your favorite websites and you'll realize that they all have effective forms of branding - starting with an attractive, modern, and crisp logo. You're homemade letterhead may be effective on paper, but it would surely be a mistake to translate this boring image to the web where there is infinite world of digital possibilities; and most likely your competitors are already utilizing one.

Excess of information: Your website should be a quick and effective tool for visitors to find the information they need. The average visitor will glance at your pages, scan over some text, and possibly click on the first interesting link they see. Don't give them an excess of information, examples, images and data to sift through, but instead highlight the important points as if you where creating a PowerPoint presentation. It wouldn't be such a bad thing if a visitor followed up with a call after deciding they would like to learn more.

Shoddy graphics: Stretched, pixilated, cheaply animated, tacky, and so much more. These "clipart" type images are only distracting and unprofessional. Trust a pro to interpret your business images and create an effective presentation for the web.

Relies on Flash: Flash animation can sometimes help you create a fun and engaging website, but in doing so you are potentially affecting the goals of your website - to provide a user-friendly experience that is accessible and informative. 100% Flash made websites are usually a bad idea seeing as how they are unreliable, heavy on bandwidth and not search engine friendly. Elements such as Flash animated navigations are usually problematic; if for some reason a user browsing your site can not load or view Flash then a disabled navigation system pretty much renders your website useless.

Browser compatibility: Recently this has been a huge issue in the website development world, but rarely does it cross the mind of the average internet browser. A browser is a software application (Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Safari, etc.) that allows people to display web pages and navigate the internet. All browsers render websites in their own special way, leaving slight differences in appearance depending on your software and even your screen resolution. You should be aware of how your website appears on most modern browsers in order to assure that all your content is displayed, and most importantly, accessible to all your visitors.

by Paul Smith

It is important to realize that, in general, a "web designer" and a "web developer" are two different things. The web industry revolves around technologies, standards, and skills that are constantly changing and improving. In recent years several tools like Flash, Ajax, PHP and Flex have emerged to help web experts create highly functional and unique websites that go beyond simple HTML. Both a web designer and a web developer are constantly learning and updating their skill-sets.

Web design is the art of creating attractive layouts and imagery for the web. A web designer commonly uses software such as Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator and a basic text editor program to bring their ideas to life. Web designers, today, have a greater responsibility in helping the developers for the site produce web pages that are accessible, usable and W3C standards compliant. A good web designer is able to create a visually pleasing design that organizes information efficiently and allows users to navigate with ease.

If you approach a web designer expecting to do a development job, some will tell you that they aren't able to do it while others will subcontract the work. Many will use commercial or open source software to create the basic functionality for your website. This third party software is not always bad, but most of the time limited in the ability to customize and create modifications.

Web development involves programming websites that perform specific tasks, interact with databases and users, process information, analyze real-time data, and much more. Developers utilize a slew of programming or scripting languages to solve problems and create custom solutions including web applications. It is one thing to create an attractive and colorful design idea for your website, but without a developer to translate this design into an interactive space it is simply an image on a page. Anything you can imagine on the web from shopping carts, blogs, Myspace, eBay, message boards, and more have been created by true professional web developers.

So what does Technetic offer? We are proud to say we have solid experience in both web design and web development while encompassing the principals that make them stand apart. We provide professional services for every aspect of the website process from attractive designs to efficient website programming.

by Paul Smith

Below is a list of things to thing about to help your organize your project information and ideas to help your designer or developer do their job quickly and efficiently.

Ask yourself the following questions:

• What would you like your domain name to be (i.e. www.mywebsite.com)?
• What company do you want to host the new website?
• What kinds of information do you want on the site?
• Who are your users? What age group? Location?
• Will your site require regular updates? Would you like to make changes yourself?
• Will you be selling something?
• Will you need a database to store and retrieve information?
• How important is search engine ranking to your website?
• What is the timeline for your project?
• What is your budget?

When planning your website, think about what you want that site to do for your visitors. Check out some websites that rank highly on the search engines in your industry. These are the sites that are utilizing technologies and the newest trends that provide real value and do useful things for their potential customers.

Here are some basics things that you will need to gather to create your website:

• Company or Staff profiles
• Company logo(s)
• Contact details
• Details about Products or Services
• Other content or pages you would like to include
• Your new email addresses and a secure password

A typical website could include pages like these:

• Introduction
• About Us or Bios
• Services or Products
• Contact Us
• Clients or Links

by Paul Smith