Web design
Does your organisation need a website? You may have one already but its design and methods of accessing content may be out of date. Or, you may not have a website at all. I can see through the entire process of getting your organisation online, from design to going live. Websites can provide a range of functions - from a simple web presence to complex project sites providing a central location for key documents and a meeting point for team members. I am committed to making websites that are accessible and useable.
The website design process
- 1. Determine the site's potential audience and its functional requirements.
- 2. Discuss the look of the website, its colour schemes, branding and logos.
- 3. Generate design drafts.
- 4. Organise web hosting and search tool registration.
- 6. Generate code, incorporate search tools, community functions, links to dynamic content.
- 7. Test and validate code.
Not too long ago websites had to be complex and fancy looking. Web designers wowed clients with animated intros and menu buttons that blooped and buzzed as you hovered over them. That's all changing now. Legal and commercial considerations mean that many organisations are obliged to provide web pages that download quickly and cleanly and are viewable by users on all sizes of screens - such as on phones and other mobile devices. Also, organisations of many types are obliged to provide pages that are accessible under disability legislation.
As part of this evolution to more useable and accessible web pages the technology used is changing too. Five years ago most webpages were created using HTML tables. These used the grids of tables to lay out elements on the webpage. It works as a method of building web pages but compared to newer techniques it adds unnecessary code and makes the page slower to download. Because the content of the page and its presentation are inherently linked it also makes pages difficult to read for people with eyesight difficulties who use audio content readers.
That way of designing pages is changing with the acceptance that content and presentation should be separated - HTML for content and CSS (Cascading style sheets) to govern how that content appears. This means the code is kept clean and neat and does little more than present text and images in a very simple way, while a separate CSS file tells that content how it should look in the browser. The advantage of this is a reduction in bandwidth used to download pages, the ability to create 'liquid' layouts that resize to any browser window - important given the rise of devices other than the desktop PC - and for those with eyesight difficulties the option to have HTML content translated to audio.