Web Design

Contented Web Design Logo The art of Web Design is far more than creating attractive designs, unlike print layout, more has to be considered when laying out electronic content for the Web, such as document organisation and navigation, user controls, document flow, search engine strategies, and target audience reproduction capabilities.

We can provide a unique look and feel to your website which will ensure that your customers will remember who and where you are, and more importantly make them wanting to come back for more. Our professionally hand-coded pages are produced using the latest technologies to provide standards compliant web layouts that best present your site content and brand to the widest possible audience, and that the end-user enjoys interacting with.

Usability

Usability is a very important issue in web design, it is very easy to get carried away with funky layouts and graphics, with weird and inconsistent navigation systems, but at the end of the day, users are visiting to your Website to find out information on your products or services, or to get in contact with you. If the user finds it difficult to navigate your site, nine times out of ten they will not return or just give up and go to find the information they require somewhere else.

Our deep understanding of computer interface design and web technologies enable us to offer web pages and applications that not only look great, but that offer exceptional user experience.

Accessibility

It is now required by law through the DDA (Disability Discrimination Act) to take “reasonable steps” to make your Website accessible to people with hearing disabilities and visual impairments, and provide a range of auxiliary aids or services which it might be reasonable to provide to ensure that services are accessible.

Section III of the disability discrimination act came into force on 1st October 1999. The Code of Practice for this section of the DDA, which refers to accessible websites, was published on 27th May 2002. Many websites still breach this law. Indeed organisations such as the Sydney 2000 Olympics Committee have already been sued for not providing reasonable accessibility on their websites.

All our Web software is developed with this in mind and complies with the W3C WAI guidelines.

Standards Compliance

To ensure maximum uniformity of page rendering across a wide range of browsers and platforms, our output conforms to W3C web standards. We currently employ XHTML 1.0 Strict, CSS 2.1, and conform to WCAG guidelines for accessibility to a minimum level of AA (Although AAA can be achieved if required).

Conforming to standards not only increases the range of audiences that can view websites correctly, but it also makes them more future proof, and more transparent to search engines ensuring that your website will not loose ranking position due to poor technical implementation.

Performance

We want to be the best at what we do, and so we take the time to look at every issue that can improve the websites we produce. Site performance is one of these issues, and it can become quite a significant one, especially as you start to see traffic to your website increase.

Websites normally perform poorly due to the following issues:

High Bandwidth Usage - Poor graphics compression, badly coded pages, and unpacked Javascript result in more of your servers bandwidth being used
Asset Re-use - Re-using page assets across your website reduces the number of file requests to your server and makes pages load quicker
Bad Coding - this causes the client browser to have to work harder to render the page, and usually means larger file sizes
Too much - large background graphics, badly programmed animations, and too many layout objects on the page can make the client browser sluggish when scrolling the page or selecting controls

All these issues result in more server resources and bandwidth being used, costing you money, and slow loading webpages with sluggish interaction for your visitors. Our technical expertise and experience will ensure that your website will perform responsively with minimal resource usage.