Website Design by Akulink
What is good website design?
Some people think it's a pretty page, that grabs your attention...
Well... we at Akulink think it's much more than that. Five other elements are equally important:
- The site must be easy to manoeuver.
- It must be optimized for search engines.
- It should be easy to maintain, update and re-style.
- It should work on most browsers.
- The site should keep you up to date on visits, downloads and purchases.
Style and Flair
Let's face it. First impressions count. On the internet, with other sites just a click away, you often won't get a second chance. So yes, we do believe it is very important to put your best face forward. Invest in that extra nice layout, in that fancy logo. It will pay off in spades.
But don't be like the guy in the $2000 dollar suit with the scuffed up shoes with the hole in the sole. Keep your message consistent! All the pages of your website should have a common look and feel. Don't mix font types, colors, styles.
What if you threw a party and nobody came?
Ok, so you get all dolled up for the big night, then nobody shows up to to admire the result? In every day life, you make sure you're getting those RSVP's before you foot the bill for the champagne and hors-d'oeuvres, right?
If you don't optimize your site for the search engines, don't spend another dime on those fancy graphics or those high-priced designers (that's us). Nobody will see them! As of this writing, Google says that they are indexing 4,285,199,774 distinct web pages.
Do yourself a favor: optimize your site to get a preferred position in the "front of the line" when people are searching for your products or services. At Akulink, that why we spend as much time on search engine optimization as we do on design.
Don't always show up in the same suit
Chances are, you've got a couple of suits hanging in that closet, right? Or perhaps even a few different pairs of shoes?
Let's face it. We humans are easily bored. Trivial and superficial as it may seem, you've got to keep your public entertained, or it will desert you.
Just like your clothes, you want to keep your website fresh, both in content and style. That means keeping the content diversified, making it easy to update and making style changes possible. To keep the content diverse, use dynamic content, whether from data base searches, a news feeds, rss or user forums.
At Akulink design, we emphasize using an application development language such as PHP, Cold Fusion or Java Server Faces to implement your website. So that you can change your content on a dime. And simplify your web content management.
If your phone number and address change, or you fire your human relations director, that should not require you to make a hundred changes to your web content. You should be able to change it in just one place.
We also make heavy use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Simply put, this technology allows you to quickly change the look and feel of your entire site. To give it a completely fresh style by changing only one page. Or to make it easily viewable on the latest mobile devices. Do yourself a favor. go look at our favorite design site, which shows you the true, raw power of CSS, by displaying the same web content in a hundred different flavors: visit csszengarden.com, but make sure you have about an hour to kill...
Make sure it works!
When you want to throw that successful bash, you've got to make sure there's ice in the cooler and that the toilets flush. Well the same thing applies to the internet. When people come to your site, they shouldn't face popup-ups that don't pop up, links that go nowhere and drop down menus that cause the browser to freeze!
While these comments would appear obvious, most sites fail to test their sites on different browser types and different screen resolutions. The result is that their beautiful site bombs on five to ten percent of their visitors.
When you choose us to do your design work, expect to have to define your target audience. We'll choose the technologies appropriately, and if we have to "shut anyone out" or give them a less than optimal page display, at least they'll know it's their antiquated browser to blame - and not your lack of knowledge.
So did they like it?
Come one, admit it, you do care what they thought about the party, right? Did they like the caviar? Was the band any good? You've got to know, to see if you can show your face anywhere. And maybe do it better next time.
On the web, it should be no different. Your website should tell you how many people came, and what pages they viewed, and how long, and what they didn't like, and what caused them to buy, and what caused them to leave.
Akulink clients benefit from a proprietary visitor tracking system that make these statistics easily available, and eminently searchable. In a nutshell, it allows you to determine what works - so you can do more of it - and what doesn't, so you can stop it.
Call Serge d'Adesky at 305-446-4986 today for a free consultation, or email us at sdadesky@akulink.com.