Web Design
Effective Web Sites, by Design
Web design is the process of building the graphical and layout aspects of your web site. The ideal web design does not shout out, it sits in the background, subtly but confidently encouraging the visitor to feel confident, to read your key content and to proceed through your web site to your desired goal. This may be purchasing a product, it may be simply getting in touch with you to discuss your services, but whatever the goal of your web site - the design should smooth the way for your visitor and funnel them towards the goal.
Search Engine Friendliness
One of the biggest benefits of hiring Edmonds Commerce to design your web site is that not only will you get a professional web design, but your web design will also be designed with maximum search engine friendliness in mind. This means that unlike many web designs, when the search engines discover your web pages, they will easily be able to figure out what the page is about and will therefore give it a good ranking for those terms. Of course there are many other aspects to achieving good search engine results, but without using a search engine friendly web design you will find it very difficult to get the results you desire.
Fast Loading Web Design
Page load times are very important for keeping your visitors happy and therefore on your site. If a page is slow to load, your visitors will be tempted to hit the back key and try another web site instead. There are many factors that can contribute to slow loading web sites, but an overly graphical web design can be a major factor. Big graphics can look really nice, but there is a definite tradeoff in terms of page load times as it takes a relatively long time to download lots of large image files. This can be made even worse if the web design does not function without the images. If for example the page is not readable until all of the images are downloaded, then your vistors are forced to wait for each page to completely download before they can continue navigating through your site to find the page that they are looking for. Edmonds Commerce will always try to use the absolute minimum of graphics, and will always take steps to make the filesizes of the graphics used as small as possible. This can make a huge difference to the speed with which your web pages load for your visitors. All this without compromising on the professional look and feel of your web site.
Standard Compliant Code
There are two key ways that a web browser such as Internet Explorer or Firefox can interperet a web page. The easiest is when a page is written in error free code. There are a set of rules or standards that are set out for web design. It is perfectly possible to create a web design that does not conform to these rules, but if your design does not conform then the web browser has to do a lot more work to figure out exactly how to layout all of your web site. This extra work for the web browser means slower loading pages for your visitors - something that you really want to avoid. Edmonds Commerce will always stick to standards compliant code as much as your chosen content allows.
CSS: Cascading Style Sheets
Modern web design aims to separate form and function into separate files of code. Your main web page contains all of the content and then the styling and layout is controlled by a separate file called a stylesheet. This method of web design is faster for the visitors as their machine will access the stylesheet once and will then be able to reuse it for each subsequent page - possibly halving the amount of text needing to be downloaded. Furthermore, using external stylesheets gives you much greater control over the design of your web site - allowing you to make alterations across your entire web site whilst only having to edit one file. Many web designers are still waking up to the possiblities of CSS, but Edmonds Commerce will always use standards compliant external stylesheets to give your site the maximum benefit of the latest web design best practices.