Website design & content creation
Grapevine designs and develops websites mainly for
voluntary sector organisations and very small businesses, and can deliver speedy, standards-compliant, effective sites meeting communications and accessibility needs, optimised for search engine
listing. .
To the user, your website is your organisation on the web. If your site disappoints, it can affect
how people feel about your operation, your products and services.
So there's no need to say that it has to do more than simply build your brands, reflect your visual identity, or make your brochure material available online.
For most users, a website is all about content. Does it tell us what we want to know? Can we find
information or carry out tasks without too much hassle? Is the site easy, even enjoyable to use?
And beyond the easy, speedy satisfaction of giving users what they know they want, is there a way to deliver something more?
Can you offer extra information, something useful, pleasurable, or diverting - some unexpected bonus from visiting your site?
Design: information flow, and visual
Two sets of interests have to be reconciled - your reasons for building the site, and the needs and interests of the people who you hope to attract to use it.
Your organisation's goals for your website are central; they are the reason for spending time and money on building a site.
When your users arrive, though, they probably won't
care too much about your goals - they'll be pursuing their own.
So it's not a bad idea to start the design process by giving some thought to users' perspectives too.
What might your "typical" website visitors want to achieve when they come to your site?
How can you help them? What were you looking for when you came to the Grapevine site? ( e-mail grapevine with your feedback)
SEO and visibility
Of course, if people can't find your site, it might as well not be there.
Even if you commit substantial advertising and promotional support to your website, many or most of your visitors will likely find it using a search engine, like Google or Yahoo.
So you'd probably want it to be designed and written so that search engines list it when people search for the key words that relate to you and your business. Though,
of course, much of your competition will be trying to do the same thing.
Grapevine builds search engine optimisation
(SEO) into site design from the start, ensuring strong content and appropriate use of key words, alt text, titles and links so that users can quickly
find appropriate content through their searches.
To check if a site is compliant with web standards, try the worldwide web consortium's validator at http://validator.w3.org/
Or to see how your page might look on a range of browsers and operating systems you could try http://browsershots.org/
|