There are a lot of businesses that offer to build websites, but only a select few can claim the following:
- We don’t just claim to use modern web standards, we actual do; including all the industry buzzwords like Ajax, HTML5, CSS3, etc.
- We ensure that all visitors will have a pleasing experience, no matter what computer or browser they’re using (even outdated ones).
- We build on top of well-supported open source software like Drupal and WordPress. This mean that your website will be secure, up to date, and easy to maintain. (It also means that you can find someone else who knows how to take care of your site, in the unlikely event you choose to stop working with us or one of Donny’s deer puts us in the hospital.)
Know someone that wants a website that’s built as well inside as it is outside. Send them our way.
Many businesses fall into a simple trap on their websites: they load up the front page with paragraphs and paragraphs of information important to the company. “What’s wrong with that?”, you might ask. Simply put: your visitors don’t care.
Your front page should focus on what’s most important to your site’s visitors, not what’s important to you. Get rid of the splash page of friendly, smiling stock photos. Get rid of the paragraphs of “About” text that no one will read past the first sentence (yes, your story is compelling; you can tell it to your customer in person after you’ve delivered a quality product/service).
Give your website a purpose. Give customers a reason to visit it, and help them find it immediately when they arrive.
We just finished our branding project with Angie Strickler, The Working REALTOR®. At the beginning of the year we created unique graphics for Angie to use in her advertisements. She wanted to position herself as hardworking, reliable, and approachable and a friendly illustration was the best way to get her message across.
We are now excited to announce the launch of http://www.TheWorkingRealtor.com/. Our goal for the website was to make it both easy to find listings, and to learn more about the area.
Several years back we created a new website for The Mercy House. The old website was outdated and sorely lacking meaningful information. As a mission oriented church located in Anderson, Ind. they needed an updated website to keep in touch with church members and the surrounding community. We created an informative website using Drupal, which was the best free content management system (CMS) at the time. Looking back on the website now, it is very drab; but at the time is was rather indicative of the mood of a small, young church struggling to get by.
After a while, as leadership changed, it became more difficult to keep the website updated. It was no longer meeting the needs of The Mercy House and no longer reflected the overall mood of the community. It was time for an update.
When speaking with the pastor about what he wanted there were two main ideas. It needed to be easier to use and update than the current website; and it should have, “Lots of large background images.” The former problem was easy; we rebuilt the site using the up-and-coming WordPress CMS. The latter desire (large background images) was more difficult. When using large background images a designer runs up against a couple different problems. The first is size, if an image is too large it slows down the loading of a website and annoys the visitors. The second problem is that of window resizing. If your image is a fixed size and a visitor opens his browser window to a larger size what does he see? Does he see the image repeat itself? Does he get a stark line where the picture ends?
How do I make it look like a gigantic image while keeping the file-size reasonably small? This is why I love being a designer. It was a tricky problem but as seen below, I finally came up with a solution. The background image is technically the size of an average browser window, however about three-fifths of the image is actually just white. Lots of white reduces the size of the image significantly. It also solves the window-resizing problem. Since the right and bottom edges are solid white all we need is white for an extended background.
Google is officially ending support for Internet Explorer 6 in Google Apps. This affects users of Google Docs and Google Sites beginning March 1, 2010, and will affect users of Google Mail and Google Calendar later this year.
This is a welcome change. Providing support for a decade old web browser is severely limiting what we can do on the web and driving up development costs unnecessarily. Hopefully this move by a major player such as Google will goad enough people to upgrade that we can finally leave IE6 behind us.
In the meantime, if you haven’t upgraded you browser recently, perhaps it’s time you do so now. You can upgrade Internet Explorer to version 8, or try another browser, such as Firefox or Chrome.
