Give 'em what they want.

The most important thing about your website is the content: that is, the words and pictures - which for the most part, must be supplied by you. It doesn't matter how great your site looks, if your visitors cannot get to the information they want quickly, they will soon give up and go elsewhere. It is therefore important to make sure you do provide your visitors with the information they want - not just the information you want to give them!

The information you provide on your site should be useful, and easily accessible. We can make the navigation easy, but the usefulness of the information is largely down to you. Most business people have an in-depth knowledge of their particular field, and it can be very beneficial to publish such specialist knowledge on your site. When people see that you know what you are talking about, they are more likely to trust you, and other respected sites are more likely to link to yours. Of course, it takes a lot of effort to write all this stuff, but it is worth spending some time on it because it really does make the difference between having a good site which reflects well on your company, and having a mediocre site which gives you little or no competitive advantage.

When it comes to graphics and animation, you need to be careful. We generally recommend avoiding animation in most cases because although it might look nice, it will slow down the performance of your website, increase the amount of storage space and bandwidth you use (which means it costs more to run your site), and after a while it will get on peoples' nerves. Many sites these days have an 'introduction' page - with some fancy special effects to try to give it a bit of a 'wow' factor. This is fine if you're advertising a new blockbuster movie or computer game, but for customers who want to get at your information in a hurry these 'intros' can be extremely annoying.

It is also important to remember that the people who visit your website will have all sorts of different computers and all sorts of different web browser software - so your site will look different to some of them than it does to you. For example, some web browsers will not display images, and some people switch off the more advanced features like scripting, in order to speed up performance and for security reasons. There are also special browsers for those with vision problems, which read out the page contents to the user. We can design your site with these things in mind, so that your site will still work under such circumstances.