Ambient and Transparent

Normally for a project that is either being scoped as custom or requires integration, a website development company needs to invest some time into making sure the project and work required is well understood before proceeding to offer a formal quote. We have learned through our experience that bypassing this step is detrimental to the success of the project. We’re looking at this from the client’s perspective and from our own. It helps us to know exactly what we’re committing to and the client also will have a clearer picture of what we’re building so there are no surprises.

Other companies may provide a ballpark figure or estimate based on past integrations they have done but the risk factor in that type of an estimate is very large, and usually results in a strained client/vendor relationship because of additional charges that come up when assumptions are proven incorrect. We prefer to quote based on requirements, not assumptions, and we take the necessary steps to ensure that all possible requirements are documented clearly and understood - this method has proven to work each and every time.

Typically, there are a number of questions especially with the integration part being related to the eCommerce and how that will relate to one another especially with the information being dynamic and transactions dependent upon this information. Some samples of questions related to integration are:

• What is the nature of the data?
• In what format can the data be provided?
• Ensure data maps directly to destination or platform?
• Within the data set, which items are updated and why?
• Is the data constant, or are there additions and deletions?
• How should destination handle additions and deletions?
• How should destination handle exceptions?
• What monitoring or notification needs to be in place?

There are a number of other questions that we usually encounter when diving into this a little further. For us at the preliminary stage of scoping, the analysis may reveal that more things to consider or that the work is straightforward. One thing guaranteed is that there will definitely be a more accurate proposal.

For further information on scoping custom or integration projects, feel free to contact one of our internet consultants at www.E-Nor.com.

written by Shiraz Asif \\ tags: site logistics, web design

Well you’ve finally come to the conclusion that you need a website. Great stuff! A website is an effective marketing tool for your business. Literally millions of people go online now to find what their looking for instead of flipping through the antiquated yellow pages. So where do you begin?

Enter Li’l Johnny, your nephew, aka the computer geek of the family. Li’l Johnny is an exceptionally bright kid, with a very rare talent in “doing computer stuff”, and this makes him the perfect candidate to take on the job of designing your website. The hours and hours he spent fiddling around in Adobe Photoshop zooming into images, resizing them, warping them, and applying all sorts of crazy, sometimes ill-contrived effects serves as the foundation of his knowledge. The skills he honed in scanning your family re-union photos, editing the group image of your family, cutting out old Aunt Beth and replacing her with a tree stump, have most certainly prepared him well.

The trick is to get Li’l Johnny inspired and in the right frame of mind by buying him something he wants… like those cool new Nike shoes, or tickets to a football game for him and his buddies. Once he appreciates you, he’ll be in the right frame of mind to produce the right design for you.

So with a great attitude and a renewed love for his favorite relative, Li’l Johnny will get hard at work and slap together a design that will totally blow you out of the water. Finally the day arrives - It’s everything you ever imagined, the perfect representation of your business…

Or is it?

Perhaps we should look at this from another angle. A professional website design takes into consideration several factors, none of which involve removing annoying relatives from family photos, as enticing as that might sound

Li’l Johnny, while sincere in his efforts, isn’t aware that a successful website design takes into account the following factors:

1) Goals and Objectives - Designing a site with loosely defined or no measurable goals is a waste of time. To achieve design success, take the time to identify specific goals and objectives, and ensure a mechanism is in place to test against those benchmarks. Investing in tracking or surveying software to qualitatively and quantitatively monitor the site.

2) Target Audience - This is the most important aspect of website design. A successful user experience will result in repeat visits, referrals, and a positive atmosphere on your site. Even one bad experience, and your customer is lost. Focus on who your target audience is. Identify their likes/dislikes, their background?

3) Web Standards - Ensure that the site is designed to meet the latest level of web standards. Even the smallest mistake can result in alienating a huge percentage of your customer base, because the site won’t function in their browser, or their monitor resolution. To achieve the greatest level of flexibility, make sure the code is streamlined, and effectively employing Cascading StyleSheets that separate content from presentation. Keep an eye out for Usability and Accessibility standards.

4) Usability - Your site may look nice and be technically sound, but is it usable? Information should be easily accessible by a broad base of users, each of their own level of expertise and background. Users should be able to navigate the site with minimum clicks and find the information they are looking for easily.

5) Keywords - Have you done any research on what your target audience is searching for online? Did you make sure that these keywords are prominent on the site and in your content? Did you know that most site visitors, don’t actually read the content…they skim through it. Keeping that in mind, keywords should be placed strategically throughout the site, to achieve maximum visibility. This is a major aspect of implementing an effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO) program.

6) Marketing - do you have a solid plan in place to market your website once it’s complete? Even with the nicest design, a website is useless unless your customers visit it. How effective would it be to have a beautiful store, without any customers in it? Same principal…

7) Maintenance - A site is only as good as its content, and content should change on a regular basis. How should that happen? Should you hire a web design company each time updates are needed? That doesn’t sound very appealing. Instead, invest in an infrastructure allowing the you to easily update content/information regularly.

Let’s let Li’l Johnny focus on his grades in school, or perhaps he can do a website for your family. Leave your business to the professionals.

written by Shiraz Asif \\ tags: usability, web design

If you are a frequent user of the web, you’ve surely browsed a site styled by Cascading Styles Sheets. CSS has made a huge difference in the world of web design. They offer you the ability to change the entire look and feel of a site without having to edit countless sub pages. In the next few paragraphs we will see why CSS is practical and how it is being used to revolutionize web design as well as taking a look at an example of CSS in action.

Anybody who has written html code is familiar with the html [font] tag knows that it is used to make changes to the letter styling, size and color (to name a few). It is a vital tag for the novice webpage designer. However, it can pose some problems in making updates and design changes.

Consider the following example: A site with 3 pages where each page has 3 paragraphs. The first paragraph is written in a 10pt. red font while the second one is written in a 20pt. green font and the third is written in 12pt. black, bolded, and italicized font. We now have a problem! Aside from having an eyesore of a site, if we decide to change the current style we have, we need to edit 3 different pages, each with 3 different font tags. Now imagine this for an entire website! You can see that this will be a very tedious task. This is where CSS comes to the rescue. Had the styles on this site been managed using CSS, you would only need to edit a few lines on your style sheet and the changes would apply (or cascade) throughout the site.

The use of CSS is not limited to the editing of fonts. Far from it. You can change the style of your entire site using CSS. Margins, background colors, image properties and custom bullets are just a few of the style elements that can be modified using CSS. This allows for a consistent look and feel across the site without the hassle of editing every single page. Furthermore, CSS can be used to adjust the placement of objects on a site. As CSS becomes more widely used as a standard, tables will become a thing of the past. This allows for much more freedom in design and makes changing the position of elements of a page much simpler than dealing with tables.

We will now look at an example of CSS in action. Here we have a copy of the New York Times home page on April 6, 2006. As you look at this you may ask, What is the CSS doing on this page? It looks like a regular page to me. In fact you’re right, the end result will be the same weather you use style sheets or not, however it is the process of getting to that result that differs vastly.

Let’s take a look at the same page without CSS.  You can disable CSS inside of your web browser.  You may find yourself wondering if you’re looking at the same page, but if you scroll down you will see that the content is the same. This massive change was brought about by removing the link to our style sheets (three lines) from the header. This shows us the power of CSS as well as how simple it is to include or remove from our code. Had this page been created without using CSS it would have taken a hour at least to replicate the same thing we did by removing a few lines.

You may find yourself asking, Well what does this mean for me as the proprietor of a website? I don’t manage it, what do I care? It comes down to this: a site like this will be much easier to modify if the bulk of the design changes can be done by editing one or two style sheets as opposed to every single page on the site. This in turns means less hours spent modifying it, which in turn means you pay less for the same work.

Still not convinced? Consider this: CSS is revolutionizing the way we make web pages. It will soon become the standard. Designing a site purely controlled by CSS requires planning but will pay off in the long run. It will take us into the next generation of websites.

For more information contact E-Nor today!

written by Team Marketing \\ tags: CSS, web design