[dennissimcott.com]
Dennis Simcott
New Age Art
[theyellowvilla.com]
The Yellow Villa
Turkish Holiday Home
Web Design
The methodology
It is essential that your website is built with your needs in mind. It is often the case in a web project that those holding the 'vision' are not those who actually create the website, and it is extremely rare that a client will give a complete and explicit specification. Therefore, to ensure that the end product is as close to that vision as possible, it is essential that the developer and the client work together as closely as possible during the design stage. Depending on the size of the project and the clarity of the client's vision, this stage could conceivably take up a large part of the project's lifetime.
Even after the design stage, you would expect to review the work in progress both regularly and often, to prevent any possible divergance between vision and reality.
As with all the work I undertake, a concrete and immutable specification must be drawn up and agreed to before I accept responsibility for a project. Whereas this will probably be after numerous consultations, once it is agreed upon, it cannot be changed without a new contract being drawn up and new deadlines agreed upon. The problem of "creeping elegance" that so often afflicts software projects is detramental to both developer and client, and such an agreement at the outset is important if this is to be tackled.
Client inclusion
Not only must your IT solutions meet the varied and complex needs of your clients, but you must also make sure that those clients' experiences are as trouble free as possible.
Like that of any computing application, the user interface of a website must be thought through properly. Ease of use, efficiency and layout are amongst a host of heuristic qualities that are often ignored, but which are vitally important to a successful user interface. Too many companies create websites that restrict the potential customer base by virtue of their design, or which confuse those customers with unintuitive navigation. The vast majority of these restrictions are caused by browser incompatibilities, with many more caused by bad use of javascript or flash.
The one universal thread that runs through all these exercises in bad website design, is that their solutions are simple to implement. With accessibility guidelines and web standards in mind, there is absolutely no reason why any website cannot be accessible to all; regardless of which web browser they use, or what disabilities they may have (e.g. visually impaired).
Technical details
Web design requires a number of basic skills; good web design requires knowledge of various standards as well. The languages I usually use, and the W3C standards I prefer to adhere to are as follows:
- XHTML 1.0 Transitional,
- CSS 1.0 and 2.0,
- web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG).
Sticking to this list is the first basic step of good web design, whether static or dynamic. The inclusion of as great a number of prospective clients is as important as good content in the work I do. The absence of Macromedia Flash in the above list is deliberate. The use of Flash is a design decision that should not be made lightly; when used well it can transform a website, but the situations in which this is true are quite specific. A website is not made good simply by virtue of the use of Flash, and those who believe this often destroy usability and accessability in the process. For that reason, if Flash is requested and I believe its use is correct, I will put the client in touch with a multimedia house that can fulfil their requirements.
