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WEB SITE DESIGN CONCEPTS Good content is the most important aspect of successful web site design. Supporting your content, you need just the right combination of technology and graphics. In that sense web site design is both an art and a science. It has to be functional and work correctly, but it also should be attractive. A well designed web site is much more than just an on-line brochure. What makes the Web such a powerful medium is that it is interactive, and it provides instant access to an incredible depth of information. Good web site design should take full advantage of both of these capabilities, and provide your visitors with easy access to the information, products or service you provide, while making their whole experience stimulating and satisfying. A well designed web site must be easy to navigate. It should always be obvious to your visitors how to get where they want to go on your web site. It should be impossible to get "lost" on a web site. A well designed web site supports and enhances the goals of your business or organization. A web site is not an end in itself, but should be conceptualized from the beginning in terms of how it will help you accomplish your goals. WEB SITE DESIGN PROCEDURE 1. Free Consultation We begin with a free initial consultation via e-mail, by phone, or in person if you are located in the Twin Cities area. We will identify the objectives of your business or organization, and then review the products, services, information or resources you have to offer. We will evaluate the need for your own domain name. Based on this we will provide you with a scope document that summarizes the objective of your web site and outlines the content and navigational structure, free of charge. 2. Review Your Existing Materials We will review with you your existing forms of advertising and the methods you use currently to promote your products, services, or information. We will also evaluate the source for the content of your web site: product and price lists, newsletters, manuals, articles, forms, policies, charts, and your company or organization information. In order to make your web site dynamic we will also consider time sensitive information that you want to publicize: announcements, schedules, events, meetings, sales, and special activities or campaigns. You may also want to schedule periodic content updating for certain portions of your web site. 3. Create the Web Site Based on the scope document, we can proceed to the actual design and construction of your web site. The actual HTML code, forms, graphics, links and so on will be utilized to the extent that they contribute to your web site's effectiveness, appearance, and functionality. We can use graphic material you provide to us and we can create graphics for you. Included in the creation of all our web sites at Minnesota Solutions is the appropriate use of HTML Meta tags and effectively presented text, which will help your web site get high listings in the search engines. This is critical to getting traffic to your web site, and can make the difference between success or failure. We will find the best keywords relating to each of the pages of your web site, and incorporate them directly into the HTML code. This is how potential visitors will find your web site when they enter these keywords into the various search engines. 4. Uploading and Testing The last step is to upload the initial version web site to our Hosting Accounts. We will thoroughly test it in order to validate all the hyperlinks and e-mail addresses, and to make sure that all the forms, buttons, Java scripts, etc. work properly. At this point you can review your web site and request any changes you would like us to make. We want you to be happy with our work. We will also test your web site in three additional areas:
This is a very important aspect of a well designed web site. Why? Read on.
Even different versions of the same browser can make the same web page look different. We will view your web site through the latest two versions of Microsoft's Internet Explorer (including AOL's version) and Netscape's Navigator to make sure the layout is acceptable in all of them. 4.2 Monitors display colors differently. Another challenge for web designers is to create graphics and text which look good under an incredibly wide range of monitor color capacities. A typical scanned photograph produces an image file with over 16 million colors. Unfortunately, most monitors today can display 64,000 colors, and many older monitors display 256 colors or in some cases only 16 colors. An image that looks fantastic with 64,000 colors on a new monitor can look terrible through an older monitor that displays only 256 colors, because the older monitor "dithers" the colors it cannot display. If you have ever seen images on a web site covered with dots or bands of colors, this is the cause. Six common factors contribute to dithering and image degradation:
Creating graphics that look great under all these conditions can be quite a challenge. While some dithering of photographs is unavoidable on monitors that can display only 256 colors, we test all our graphics to make sure they look the best they can under most viewing conditions. 4.3 People use monitors with different screen resolutions. The most commonly used is 800 x 600 pixels. However, many newer PC's and Mac's come with monitors that display 1024 x 768 pixels or more, and many people with older PC's have monitors set at 640 x 480. Browsers will actually move the images around and the lines of text will stretch or shrink, all depending on the monitor's resolution. 4.4 What about WebTV? This poses a new challenge, as Web TV squeezes web pages into a screen only 544 pixels wide, and then enlarges all the text to boot. We will test your web site's pages at all these resolutions to make sure it's appearance is acceptable for each.
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browser compatibility