Elegance Through Simplicity
Sales and recognition on the Web depends on exposure. Your old 20th-century web design may actually reduce your search engine ranking and turn away customers -- like going to a meeting in a light blue doubleknit suit!
Swarms of would-be designers, armed with FrontPage, dump on their clients bloated, bandwidth- hogging, hard- to- maintain code that often won't render properly except in Internet Explorer. This practice pretty much ensures you'll always need them to maintain your site. It often defies indexing efforts of major search engines, and that can be bad for your business.
Use your web browser (Internet Explorer, Netscape, or Firefox) to view your home page and select "View Source". Now, glance at the past and present technology comparison below and see if you don't agree that it's time for a make-over:
- Tables, tables, tables -- to structure pages for browsers NOBODY uses anymore!
- Obsolete tags everywhere
- Bloated JavaScripts to make simple things like menus or navigation work
- Looks like bathroom wallpaper or a kid's videogame
- Content disorganized or crowded into all available space
- Confusing navigation -- can you easily find categorized content?
- Slow-loading graphics or distracting animations
- Structured simply, with valid standards-based CSS and XHTML
- Related content grouped into associative blocks
- Good use of "whitespace" to separate content into easily recognizable blocks
- Graphics optimized for the web and only used where needed to grab the eye or illustrate main content messages
- Simple, consistent navigation
- Little or no JavaScript
- Design "breathes" with window size; looks the same in MSIE and Firefox
FREE! Take our site evaluation survey and see how your site stacks up against good design principles!
Get Results:
"Thank you for the good work."
-- Jacek Zagorski / Shasta NetWorks LLC, (Solutions for Healthcare Providers)
"I can't believe it, I feel like you invented the internet... at least for me!"
-- Alan Kaufman / Alan Kaufman Real Estate
"You are so good... you respond so fast!"
-- Tiffany Ryan / Applegate Valley Business Assoc.
"Our e-com site was left unfinished by our previous Web designer. WGD quickly learned it's structure, enabled our secure store, raised our search engine ranking with a home page face-lift, and documented the whole process for our future reference."
-- Malvin & Kaye / MKCrafts.com, (fine handmade miniature furniture)
Standards-Based Design Benefits
There's a better way: Using up-to-date W3C design standards, I separate structure from content. What does that mean to you? My clean, standards-based designs go up quickly to save your budget (that's important, yes?), will be easier and less expensive to maintain as your web presence grows, and they give you the greatest long-term cross-platform rendering consistency possible with newer browsers.
Standards-based design integrates better with back-end dynamic support technologies, like PHP and MySQL. These tools can provide you with a guestbook, a store and catalog or handle membership registrations. I can even set you up with miniCMS to easily maintain your own content from any PC, anywhere, anytime.
Standards-based design gives you the flexibility to change your site's look and feel without changing your content -- try our theme switcher, noticing that the content stays the same, it just looks different!
