Website Design Best Practices
What makes a great website great? There are many answers there, all of them to some degree resolve to using industry best practices. The technology of the web is always changing. Staying abreast of the changes, foreseeing trends, and utilizing sound and proven web design techniques keep our web design company relevant to the marketplace.
Who says a pound, weighs a pound?
As the web has evolved, the actual HTML language it is written in has evolved as well. The World Wide Web Consortium or w3c, sets guidelines and standards for the web. The w3c mission;
To lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing protocols and guidelines that ensure long-term growth for the Web.
Essentially they make sure everyone is speaking the same lingo, so that web designers produce code that web browsers (Firefox, IE) can read. Having a unified standard allows you to visit a website in other countries, in other languages, written by other people.
Our web design company adheres to these standards, creating websites that are flexible, scalable, and accessible to all parties. Look for the xhtml and css links on the bottom of most websites to see if they are standards compliant. As an added bonus, it has been shown that compliant websites typically rank higher than other websites in the search engines.
Separation of Data and Content
Web Templates, bad word right? Well yes and no. What you may think of as a website template is a bad thing; a pre-made website sold to numerous customers with little or no changes. But a template as we define is a great thing; a web system that allows complete separation of content from data. In geek speak this means that the programming code that powers your e-commerce system, or fancy widget, is completely separate from the layout code that defines your graphics, pictures, and text styles.
What does this mean for you? Well in short, it allows you to quickly and easily modify either the design or the program without affecting the other one. Pure Efficiency
Don’t do anything stupid
This one is really important, but sums it up best. Common sense will take you far in the web design game. Research, learn, and apply industry standards, and everything will be hunky dory.