link to Grapevine video production homepage

Website design & content creation

adept's homepage, which is regularly updated and refreshed with new content and variations on the design! 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. .

web_acre1To 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. 

tandy special needs trainingFor 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?

link to adept stoke on trentDesign: 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.

entry section to quite a deep, password protected, database-backed training siteWhen  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.

web_celGrapevine 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/

Jakob Nielson on

Introduction to Usability

Top Ten  Mistakes in Web Design

Writing for the Web

How users read on the web

Flash and web-based applications

List of Alertbox articles

User Interface Engineering on

Your needs or mine?

Putting the user first

Quick and dirty usability testing

Decision styles

Overview of UIE site resources

Some more sources:

CSS Zen Garden 

A List Apart

One of the many sources of opinion on the graphic elements of page design

Web page design for designers:
 

link to Jacquel Ltd, event planner and conference organiser site. All by Grapevine
image from Kyrgystan Community and Business Forum site - images and graphics by Grapevine
image from site Orchard site, images and graphics from Grapevine,
link to adept sheffield site
Image from video company website, designed, written and implemented by Grapevine
image from feedback form for weblog, all by Grapevine
angelsound audio website - in development in collaboration with site owner
link to learning area of website, which is pasword protected with a randomised login screen
ecitb web page with vox pop view
sfc toolkit web image

Grapevine Communications Cambridge England tel 01223 460644
e-mail:  info AT grapevinecommunications co uk