Web Applications for Business
Barkingweb Design
Understanding Web Design
You may have the most wonderful product or the richest content but without a well designed web site to carry that product and content to your audience you will fail to provide an effective web presence. The experience for the people that visit your site must be immediately engaging and continue to hold their attention as they scan the point of entry. Typically, your visitor will spend no more than 20 seconds evaluating your site in a number of ways before deciding to continue with the journey and enter the site or leave. Those first few seconds are when the visitor decides if they like the 'look and feel' of your web site.
Look and Feel
'Look and feel' is a term used to describe how the visitor sees your site and how they feel about the site when they start to move around it via the navigation tools that are provided. Because of the non-linear way in which you can move around the internet, literally jumping not only from page to page anywhere in a web site that provides hyperlinks to allow that movement, but also from site to site across the entire globe. Such an ability to move so freely makes the internet a very powerful medium, but a side effect of this linking can cause the visitor to become disoriented and lost within a badly designed site. The feel of the web site is the level of comfort and reassurance that you provide to a visitor when they move around via navigational links. A consistent layout, clearly marked navigation and page content, reassure the visitor that they can freely move around the site without getting lost. Next time you visit a site check to see if you know where you are, where you have been and where you can go, as you move around.
Subtle and simple
If you look at sites that Barkingweb has built you will notice that you know exactly where you are all of the time and you will also notice that there is a subtle use of color balance and typeset across our sites. Layout is structured and clear, there is not too much text without a break and the imagery is excellent. These are all good design practices that make a visit to one of our sites enjoyable as well as informative. Visitors that can find what they need quickly and those that prefer to click from page to page all revisit the site because the design caters for their needs. Web sites should deliver what the visitor wants, without fuss, delay or causing indecision or anxiety. They should even be fun!
Innovation, Usability and Accessibility
If you have arrived at this paragraph from the home page you have an interest in Innovation, Accessibility and Usability. Innovation is the fuel that drives us at Barkingweb; we enjoy challenges and we are constantly looking for ways to improve the web experience. There are a host of technical issues behind a well built web site and Barkingweb spends a lot of time ensuring that your web site is compliant with many of the devices that people use to view web content. We export our styling and dynamic code to external files where we can and optimize all of our graphics to ensure that our web sites download quickly and as efficiently as possible. As new software and languages become more popular and compliant we adopt them to improve the maintainability and scalability of our sites. This means that you can often manage your own maintenance without hefty contracts post site launch.
Accessibility is important. The web is for everyone whatever their disability or choice of viewing device. We follow federal government legislation and make every attempt to provide device independent and non-visual means of accessing our web sites' content. If you have a particular concern with access to web content then let us know. Our web sites are usable, which ensures that we cater for as many people as we can, in many different ways, by making our sites robust. Where technologies are used, such as Javascript or CSS, we ensure that our web sites degrade gracefully; that means that the content is preserved and still readable if functionality is lost.
There is so much more....
There is much more to design that these few paragraphs but I hope we have given you a taste of the issues that we think form a small part of successful and productive web site design. If you have any comments on our designs or would like to recommend improvements please contact us by phone at 425-881-8136 or drop us an email at Barkingweb. We would love to hear from you.
And Finally.....Design Inspiration
Check out some of these links for great ideas and inspiration for your own Web project. Start at Adobe's Customer Showcase page where you can see real life Web projects created using the tools employed by Barkingweb. Then you can hop over to FLASHFORWARD to view the latest film festival winners, where you can get some great ideas for interactive content and see some wonderful Flash Web sites. If you are stuck for design ideas you can check out two very cool stock image providers in Dreamstime and iStockPhoto, which have thousands of images to fire up the imagination. For a demonstration of the power of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) visit the CSS Zen Garden and wonder in the knowledge that every single Web site that you see there is exactly the same html but styled with different CSS. Once you have seen this site you will understand why we are so keen to use CSS extensively in all of our Web sites.
If you want to know more about Accessibility and Web standards you can visit W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium, where you can find huge amounts of information on the techniques and best practicses used by Barkingweb and all good developers. As a fun thing, go to the validators page at W3C and run your current Web site through the validation process. You will be surprised by what you find out about you existing site's accessibility and standards.
For those of you that believe, as we do, that Flash and Silverlight can be used for good in the World, check out these inspirational Web sites: Nike, Adobe's Video Gallery, Microsoft's Silverlight showcase, Hard Rock, Google Video and Red Bull. Have fun and be inspired!