The design of your website is crucial. When customers visit your website you will have a crucial few seconds to make a great impression before they simply get bored and go somewhere else. A good website will grab the users attention, get them reading, and convert their visit into a sale.
Who needs a website?
Lots of people have websites. The Internet is a massive marketplace seething with millions of potential customers. As a business, it’s imperative you have a website and it’s developed to it’s full potential. Sure, businesses have websites where they sell their products, advertise their services and more, but you don’t have to be a company or have a product to sell to get started. People at home have sites too. Maybe you have a hobby such as dog walking, stamp collecting or knitting? You could set up a blog to write about your experiences, interests and share views with like minded individuals. The possibilities are endless.
What makes a great website?
Having any old website designed and created by one of your mates down the pub, or a “friend of a friend” isn’t good enough. The buck doesn’t just stop with what you see on your screen, unfortunately. There’s a lot more to web design than meets the eye. It’s crucial that your site meets the following.
- Accessibility. Your site should be accessible to a multitude of users. This means implementing features for the blind, Indeed, UK law now imposes penalties for companies whose websites are not accessible to all audiences.
- Beautiful and engaging. This goes without saying. A boring website will result in people moving on and looking somewhere else.
- Usable. The interface should be simple to navigate and easily usable by all users. Text should be easily readable, links clearly marked and so on.
- Compliant. Your site should adhere to modern web standards so that a wide-range of user agents such as mobile devices, browsers and so on are able to view the website correctly.
- Content freshness. A good website will have constantly changing content that is interesting to read and relevant to the site subject.
- Extendability and maintainability. A good website will be developed to enable easy future updates and extensions with ease.
- Search engine exposure. Everyone wants to be on the first page of Google results and a good site will help achieve this goal for you. Sadly there are a lot of black-hat search engine optimisation people who promise “miracle results”. As with anything, that’s too good to be true, and the only way to succeed is the correct way – our way.
- Performance. A website that includes poor database queries, initializes loads of monolithic libraries and unoptimised images will be a slow one. You need someone who knows how to optimise every aspect of your website and spot and fix performance bottlenecks.
How are great websites built?
Put simply – by hand. Like a good piece of furniture, or art, websites are best built piece by piece from the ground up. There are plenty of software packages that enable amateur computer users to create websites quickly, but they don’t necessarily produce the best result. The best websites will be written from afresh, to your exact requirements. No two websites are the same, and the best results can only be achieved when a professional coder with years of experience in XHTML, CSS, Javascript and so on codes a website line by line from scratch.
Enter Fivetwelve
This is something I’ve been doing for years. I live and breath techno-babble, code and whatchamacallits. I know the Internet like the back of my hand and I know just how to make it work for you. I know exactly how to semantically create a site so that it thrives in Google search results, and how to combine popular Internet technologies such as Twitter and Google Maps to create useful mash-ups for you.
If it’s a website you want, you’ve found your man.