A Weak Link and Your Website Fails.

This article is not meant to scare you off building your own website (... well maybe just a little bit).  This article points out some of the complexities surrounding web development.

Building a web page is as easy as writing a page in MS Word 97 and "saving as HTML". Building an effective website is a little more difficult.

There are a unique set of skills required to build an effective website.  Here’s a sample of items worthy of consideration.

With so many websites to choose from, web surfers will seldom waste time in unprofessional websites. Being aware of web development issues is not barely enough.   For instance, if we take just one of the points above and discuss it in detail …

Professional look to the website
For a professional look you need to account for:

• Layout:  Where the page appears on the screen and where items appear on the page.
• Style:  Balance colours and shapes to support your business image.
• Graphics:  Animations, photos and pictures.  Load fast and enhance the style.

Getting this right takes more than just an artistic eye. There are technical issues to take into consideration as well.  For instance, there are various screen resolutions (640x480, 800x600, 1024x768) various colour depths (256, high colour, true colour) various browsers (Internet Explorer, Netscape) and various versions of browsers (2,3,4). This is just a sample of the variations and the mathematicians of you would know that even with this small sample there are 54 combinations to consider.  So even making your website look reasonable can be a challenge.

Even if you get the design perfect, hosting it with the wrong Internet Service Provider will result in a site that is either slow loading (slow servers) or impossible to reach (servers down).

The process of selecting a web developer can be a complex one.  We welcome the opportunity to discuss these issues with you in person.