Web Design – Design
The design of a web site, whether a it be corporate, information portal or e-commerce – needs to allow for three key elements;
Content | Style | Structure
Web Design – Content
The website content or information is its foundation. It is what a visitor is looking for when visiting the web site, whatever form that content may take, textual, audible or graphical. You as the web site owner possess this material, either written down formally or instinctively as something that you know. Our role is to support you in distilling this information and then transferring it onto your web site in the most effective way..
Web Design – Style
The style or aesthetics of the web site, will determine a visitors perception of you as an organisation. It can create the right impression or a negative one. We will work with you on the suitability of the site design, either re-enforcing an existing corporate livery or using the web design as an opportunity to progress with a new web design style. Northland work closely with our clients to ensure you are completely satisfied with a design style of the site before we progress on to building the structure.
Web Design – Structure
The structure refers the functionality of the web site, how visitors navigate through the various pages, options to move from one web page to the next, ensuring page load times are within acceptable levels for the end user profile and accessibility requirements are catered for. Need a web site and don’t know where to start ?
Website Design Tips to Make Your Site More Attractive
Websites have earned tremendous importance since the onset of Internet. With thousands of businesses running online, the need to have an appealing and attractive website ranks high to web designers. A website represents you and your business. It is thus important to have a well designed website so that it can lure many visitors to keep coming back to you. A proper well-done design will assure you that the reader will go through the entire site.
Here are a few website design tips that will make you make your site look attractive.
The color scheme should be attractive: it should be attractive enough to hold the attention of the web browser. However, take care that you do not use bright and contrasting colors. Try out various color schemes and contrast before you actually use them on the website. Make use of at least two or three complementary colors and make appropriate use of them. To get more help on the color scheme you may take assistance from a professional or you can browse the net to look at some good, appealing color combinations.
The background color of your website is important. You should be very particular in choosing the background color, as it needs to complement the text color. You cannot use dark color for both text and the background. If the background color is in light blue, for example, the text should to be in a dark color, preferably dark blue and vice a versa.
Use correct page size:
The page size is measured in pixels. You may want to use pop of windows, custom size, or a small size. Being sure about your layout will help you choose the proper web page size.
Create a logo:
it will help you stand out from the herd. Come up with some trendy tagline that will remind people of you. Always add an “About Us” page so that you that the reader gets to know more about you and your company. This also helps to leave a mark on the visitor.
Take care of your grammar and spellings:
If your content is full of mistakes, it will annoy the reader and he may doubt your ability. Always proofread your content and make sure there are no grammatical or spelling mistakes.
Make the website look appealing on every browser:
If not, take required steps or you might miss prospective visitors. It is good to test your website before up loading it to check how it appears.
Always have something new to offer:
To have loyal readers and more visitors, a Website is an ongoing event and thus you need to keep it upgraded ever so often. Make it a point to upgrade your site every fortnight or at the most, every month. Staying put and offering the same stale content will make you miss traffic.
Be unique in your layout and content:
Aping others way will only make you part of the herd, and you will never be able to create a reputation for yourself. Taking the above steps will assure you success in your online business. Make sure you come up unique each time the same visitor browses through your website.
What You Need To Know About Accessible Web Design
The Internet’s real power becomes apparent, when everything it offers is accessible to one and all. It is of paramount importance that this factor of accessibility extends even to those users, who suffer from different disabilities.
The term website accessibility is all about making the Internet accessible to people with physical, aural or visual disabilities i.e. constructing such sites that do not exclude such people from accessing content and services the site offers. It is also important to keep in mind the laws relating to universal accessibility that are in force and the guidelines to help keep your websites accessible.
Web accessibility is an equally important issue for web developers, designers, who need to make designed sites accessible or business managers interested in learning the impact of how web accessibility laws affect websites. Looking into accessibility a little more deeply, it is found divided mainly into three different categories, which constitute accessible web content, accessible web navigation and accessible web interaction.
Web content is termed accessible, only if it can be viewed/accessed by people suffering from disabilities. In accessible websites, in addition to getting the information available on the page, people with disabilities are able to use all functions that non-disabled users use such as links, buttons, form controls etc. Accessible content needs to have assistive technology compatibility, especially screen readers.
To make it accessible to people, who are visually impaired, a website must contain alternatives for purely visual content and alternatives to auditory content for people with hearing problems. Accomplishing this goal is not very difficult and does not require tools other than the likes of CSS, HTML, JavaScript, Flash and the rest, which are normally used. What is required is that these tools are used in the right way. Accessibility solutions include talking browsers, screen readers and access keys. Talking browsers and screen readers are intended to be useful to users, who have very little or no useful vision.
Talking browsers are special browsers that combine hi-visibility features along with speech output to help those with little or no vision. They are able to present web pages in uncluttered ‘text only’ form and speak out all text, links etc. It lets text become much larger in size than what is possible in standard browsers and also makes use of color along with larger size to indicate various screen elements.
Screen readers are software applications that interpret screen display and represent it to the user with text to speech, sound icons or a braille output. These are potentially useful to the visually impaired or blind, learning disabled/illiterate and are often used in combination with screen magnifiers or other assistive technology applications.
Access keys are particularly useful to people, who suffer from mobility problems and are unable to use a mouse and keyboard, which help for all movements on their computer. Access keys help them to move around the content of a page quickly and with ease. For the able bodied, they act as shortcuts. Moreover, access keys are useless, if users do not know what they are. Therefore, there needs to be a separate page that gives a list and details of all access keys.
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