Website Design

“Websites that are hard to use frustrate customers, forfeit revenue and erode brands.”
-Forrester Research, 1998

A website broadcasts and establishes the presence of a company 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It is available to customers at all times, any time, providing information, contact services, and purchasing ability. Poorly executed, a website can and will fail, tarnishing a company with it. But properly executed, it is a business’ best salesman.

Design

All good design subordinates itself to the user, the human element. Powerful architecture serves a concrete purpose while inspiring an emotional response in its inhabitants and visitors. Good web design does the same. It features consistent and sensible navigation, an intuitive hierarchy of information, and meets both business and audience needs. It downloads quickly and makes a visual impact. Good web design makes sense.

Moreover, good web design is good for business. Unique in its position as the digital meeting point between company and consumer, web design is actually interface design. Studies reveal that audiences habitually judge a website based on its visual appeal alone, and are more likely to trust and respond to a company if their site appears professionally designed. In establishing and maintaining a relationship with clients, an appealing, user-friendly design is invaluable.

Development

In web design, it’s all in the details. A page is defined and enabled by the technology behind it, and towards that end we keep a number of tools in our box.

CMS – Content Management System. A CMS allows someone, even without programming experience, to change, update and manage a website. Though we frequently use Drupal open source software, if a client prefers another system we are happy to build in their choice of CMS. These include Wordpress, Joomla, and ExpressionEngine, among others.

The importance of ease in maintaining a website and its content cannot be overstated, and our interest is in establishing a useable setup for clients.

E-commerce, Blogging, Feedback. In developing content – the meat of the matter – a range of features grant a website its purpose and punch. We offer:

• Blogs, Forums and Community Event Calendars
• E-commerce
• Analytics and Statistics Reporting
• Online Video Integration and Management Tools

Internet Marketing and Social Media

Social Media: the buzzword of the times. Never before have users been able to communicate so directly with the companies they see, read about, and buy from every day. The relationship is mutually beneficial – it has long been understood that customers return to those businesses they feel connected with, and that same connectivity allows a business to cater more precisely to their customers’ desires and needs.

In keeping up with each network, we offer a variety of applications to streamline the updating process. Our clients can post news to Twitter and Facebook simultaneously, for example, or synchronize their Blog to automatically render each post into a Tweet.

Hosting

Today’s user expects a rich media experience delivered at lightning speed. Web pages are required to stream content, offer libraries of downloadables, and feature an array of interactive components, all without crashing under high volumes of traffic. Thankfully, as expectations for technology have risen, technology has risen to meet them.

Cloud Hosting. Whereas traditional hosting limits a page’s performance based on set server capacity, cloud hosting replaces physical space with digital space. This means that:

• Your capacity grows with your site, so you never disappoint your customers with a website that’s crashed under the strain of increased traffic, and you never struggle with slow downloads or faltering streams.
• You’re only charged for what you need. Just like an electric or gas bill, you pay for the space you’re using, as you use it.