Working With US
While every site is different in terms of organisational and technical requirements, here is a brief overview of a typical website workflow process:
1. Consultation
Each and every website that Karmabunny Web Design undertakes is looked at with fresh eyes and with a perspective driven by the client's goals. Effective early consultations are of vital importance where this is concerned.
As well as nailing down technical and functional requirements, early meetings tend to be excellent for developing a commonality of thought towards a project.
Our role in this process is to ask questions that will raise your awareness of the web as an effective medium and to educate where possible.
2. Planning
Before any design or construction work can be done there is a certain amount of planning that must be carried out by Karmabunny Web Design:
- We create a sitemap detailing the pages of your website
- We discuss and settle on a navigation style
- Technical requirements are laid out (Database driven elements, minimal browser compatibility, screen resolution issues etc)
- We discuss available resources (Images, design elements)
- An accurate quotation and timeline is created and approved
3. Design
The design stage is probably the most exciting stage of your website's production. It is here that our understanding of your requirements and indeed your project's personality is truly tested.
We create design visuals that allow you to evaluate the look and feel of your site. These visuals are discussed, critiqued and re-worked where necessary until all parties are enthused and ready to build the final product.
4. Construction
Once construction of your site is underway you will be kept in touch with developments every step of the way.
Web Standards
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and other standards based organisations have laid down a set of rules regarding the construction of websites known as Web Standards.
Designing and constructing with standards compliance is now available through Karmabunny Web Design and delivers many benefits to individual users and the World Wide Web as a whole.
These benefits include:
- Wider website accessibility (normal users, vision impaired users, motor skill impaired users etc)
- Simplified production techniques
- Decreased maintenance costs
- Increased viability across future web based platforms
- Faster page loading times
- Improved indexing on Search Engines
For more information on web standards visit The Web Standards Project website.
Web Design Recommendations
- Let the viewer read in peace: when a user finds a piece of information let them read in a relaxing environment. Avoid anything that might interrupt the user both directly or peripherally.
- Have consistent navigation: your user should be able to orient themselves quickly regardless of what page they find themselves on. Remember users will often arrive bang in the middle of your site from a search engine result.
- Design for all users: your site should be viewable across all popular browsers and monitor resolutions.
- Use white space: white space or negative space can be used to describe the space between the elements such as text, graphics and paragraphs on a web page. A good use of space ensures that the page causes less eye fatigue and gives focus to the elements of the page.
- Form should follow function: as much as we love exciting graphic design it should never be allowed to get in the way of functionality.
- Structure your pages to facilitate easy scanning: present your text concisely with numerous paragraph breaks, bullet points, clear titles and bolded keywords. Your user will love you for it.
- Provide clear contact details: allow your user to contact you easily and let them know where you are located in the world (not just the virtual one...).
- Avoid splash entry screens: don't make the user click through an entry screen before they get to the content of your site. The beauty of your well designed entry screen will be lost on an impatient, goal driven user.
Website Planning – do you have a plan?
Before you begin to create (or re-create) the content for your website, it is important to sit down away from a computer and put down on paper some clear goals for your online presence.
- What type of site do you want (i.e. web-brochure, information source, service provision etc)?
- What do you hope to gain from your website (i.e. in-roads into new business opportunities, a higher profile etc)?
- What do you want a user to take away from a visit to your site?
- Who is your target audience?
Then you must think about your target audience and ask yourself:
- What do they want to find when they visit my site?
- What information is going to be of use to them?
- Are my audience's hopes consistent with my goals?
CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) in website development
What's the big deal?
So, you keep seeing references to CSS in your favourite blog or forum, or maybe you've overheard a couple of IT guys discuss it in hushed and reverential tones.
Over the last couple of years the buzz around CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and its importance to the future of developing a set of workable web standards has been loud and proud. Indeed there are many web developers (myself included) who rate their success or failure on a given project by how clever or elegantly simple their use of CSS was.
What's all the fuss about? What is CSS and why should I care?
CSS is a complimentary language that allows a web developer a greater amount of control over the way in which html (the foundation language that web pages are constructed in) elements are displayed. That is, it can make web pages look real pretty. This might be something as simple as saying 'please make all my headings orange' or as complicated as creating a complete page layout template.
Ok, but there's always been great looking websites out there, so why is this method any better than those used in the past?
Well, when html was created it was meant to be predominantly a structural language that allowed content (text, images etc.) to be tagged so that it had some sort of meaning to whatever device was viewing it. So a 'H1' tag tells a web browser that 'this is my most important heading'.
The problem is that no one really thought (or cared) too much about how to make this content look good. So for years web developers have been squeezing the last drops of style out of html by using tricks and hacks not originally meant for the language. By handling all of the stylistic choices, CSS resolves this identity crisis and lets html be just what it's always wanted to be – a structural mark-up language.
Once again I hear you mutter: "So...(?)".
Well, apart from the enormous sense of well-being it gives me to create a beautiful site using a minimum of complicated html, the real-world benefits of using CSS during a website's construction phase are:
- Increased Accessibility: using CSS allows you to be more strict about the quality of your html which means it will work well across multiple platforms like mobile internet devices and (importantly) screen readers for the vision impaired.
- Google will love you: your site will have cleaner and more meaningful html because you have removed all of the stylistic markup from the code (CSS is handling this separately). For this, Google will reward you with better indexing and a higher ranking (honest!).
- Faster Loading times: your code will be leaner and your site will load faster.
- Easier website maintenance: because your style is kept in a separate file (a Cascading Style Sheet), changing the colour of (eg.,) all of the links throughout your site can be as simple as changing 1 six digit code in one spot! You never have to touch the html at all.
There is a lot more I could say about the virtues of CSS, but to summarise I would say that it is a very important part of the future of the web.
Indeed, the World Wide Web Consortium (w3.org) cites CSS as one of the key technologies that will drive the web to a level of accessibility where everyone (regardless of culture, abilities, etc.), everywhere (from high to low bandwidth environments), will have access to the web on everything (devices ranging from personal computers to mobile devices and appliances).
Pretty cool huh?
