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Why do you want to display a webpage or website?

This is a very important question to ask because it will lead to the design that will give the best results. If you want to display your artistic abilities or your proficiency at animation, or your tendency to spend lots of money and time on expensive trendy software, or your ability to hide links in cute stylish pictures so people can wander around the pages with their mouse cursor looking for the links; then providing information through any kind of text or navigation through your website is probably not too important. Have fun spending money and looking cool - lots of people do that.

However if you have a business, you most likely want to sell things; and to do that you must have customers. If you are depending on your web site or web pages to bring you customers; of course you want it to be the best website; so the site should be impressive. Your customers are looking for information about your products so they can make a decision. Does it make sense to make it difficult for them to find the information by hiding links behind difficult-to-produce images that seem to you to be intuitive and show how good you are? Not really a good idea. Yes, make the site look good and have nice images well placed and put together nicely but don't make it hard for your potential customers to find things. Your links should be underlined - that is the convention. Don't underline text to accent it, if you want to bring attention to an idea in text make the text bold, or put it in italics and make it bold but don't - I repeat DON'T underline it unless it is a link.

If you are using the web to provide information to the public or to students you must be even more careful. A significant number of users do not use the common proprietary browser (see illustrations below) so you MUST make your site cross browser compatible. If you do not, you are excluding others; or worse, forcing them to adhere to expensive monopolistic proprietary software. You must also insure that the information you present is easily found and not hidden behind cryptic icons that only make sense to a small circle of friends or programmers. Your site has to work for everyone - period. A good way to do this is to adhere closely to w3c standards.   What is w3c and why is it important?    find out more about w3c standards

To make a website work you must know who you are trying to reach, what operating system they are using, what browser they are using, and what display resolution they may be using. The way colors are displayed is very important to understand. The chart below shows colors that can be displayed on a wide variety of systems with reasonable consistency. A chart showing the 216 websafe colors can be found here. and a Websafe color chart with background color test can be found here. If you use custom colors they most likely will not be the same on all systems. Some custom colors may look very unpleasant on some of the more basic systems.

We can help you with planning a site and can advise you how to go about getting the best results for your given audience. If you are interested in finding out how much it would cost to have a website done, email your requirements to us and we will send you an estimate. We do not charge for estimates.