Current Page: Home » Web Design

Web Design

Firstly, there are A LOT of badly designed websites on the World Wide Web. This can be due to two main factors, how the website looks, and how it was coded. If either of these has been poorly done it will adversely affect your website.

For many businesses websites can be the first point of contact with its customers, it is of utmost importance to make a good first impression… a bad website will turn off potential customers believing that if you have a poor website you also offer a poor service or product and they will seek an alternative source for your service or product.

I could go into more detail but I wouldn’t like to bore you on the aspects of how a good web design should look too much on this page.

The next more important thing is how your site is coded. Bad code will limit how well your website is rated by search engines. At Colourjam I adhere to all web standards to ensure that your website can be viewed on many different web browsers and screen sizes.

Web design is usually a term that encompasses a large amount of stages in the production of a website.

Stage 1 – Create a design with visual appeal. A recent study revealed it can take as little as 50 milliseconds for someone viewing your website to decide if they like it or not, so making that initial impression is very important. So from looks alone, if your site looks bad it won’t be living up to its full potential to get you business for your product or service.

To achieve stage 1 at Colourjam the client would usually give me a good idea of what they would like including colours, layout and links to any websites they like. From there I would create a layout in Photoshop and then send the layout to the client for their feedback. New versions would then be sent back and forth until the client was happy with the look of their website.

Reaching this visually appealing design is only the start of what is required from a website. A website that is designed to be successful needs to adhere to a few ground rules:

• The site should clearly show what product or service is offered.
• If there are numerous product or services they should all be displayed prominently.
• The site should be easy to navigate and not confuse the user.
• How to contact the business should be clearly visible.
• The site should not be cluttered with useless information.
• The body text of the site should be easy to read.
• It all sounds simple but it’s amazing how many sites would not even use a couple of the items on that list.

Stage 2 – Turn the visual into a website. At this stage the visual that was agreed with the client is turned into a proper working website. The site is coded to meet all current web standards, to help get the site listed in search engines, and make the site viewable on the plethora of web browsers available (for example Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari).

The client would then be sent a private link to view the finished website as it would appear on their web address. The feedback process would start again here with any updates completed to the clients requirements.

Stage 3 – The website is launched and made live for the public to view. The site is also submitted to various search engines to speed up the process of adding your website to their index.

Stage 4 – After your website has been online for a few weeks the site is checked to see how it performs in search engines, and how popular it is with the public. Steps can then be taken to alter the site to optimise it to its full potential. This is often called Search Engine Optimisation.

Stage 4 can often be an on going process to keep your site optimized to list well in search engines.

Please view many positive client testimonials that are happy with Colourjams quality of work.

Content Management System (CMS)

If required Colourjam websites can also come with a content management system. This system is a private area which allows you to update your website yourself. So if you regularly update your news page, gallery, links etc you can have complete control. If your website uses e-commerce, the CMS will allow you to add products and track orders.

Click here if you would like to learn more about Content Management Systems at Colourjam.