Introduction to Website Design & Development

• Identifying a Site's Purpose: information, inspiration, entertainment, new clients, bookings, wedding wishes, love, invitations, sympathy, sport, thanks, brain teasers, events, Christmas.
• Identifying Its Audience: new customers, students, parents or children, teachers, animal lovers, church congregants, Bible-study groups.
• Good Visual Design: easy-to-read text, clear images with descriptive captions, pleasing colors and graphics, creative typography, white space.
• Satisfying Visitor Needs: sign-ups, subscriptions, search capability, downloads, contact pages, visitor requests.
• Usability: making information easily available, clear, and understandable to the user.
• Intuitive Navigation: simple menu links, multilevel drop-downs, combinations of primary and secondary menus (such as on this site).
• Well-Written, Meaningful Content: news accounts, study data, quizzes, political op-eds, short, friendly, and interesting text.
• Fast-Loading Audio/Visual Aids: photos, albums, slideshows, videos, animations, puzzles, Scripture recitations, audio.
• On-Click Popups: zooming photos (
  
  ), show/hide popups,
  The first clickable show/hide text popup has several advantages (click to reveal and conceal them),
  • The user can display more than one toggle at a time, which is not possible with mouse-over popups nor most other popup solutions. The user can show all toggles with one click and view or print the page with all its details.
  • You can use rich text (HTML) within the toggle, which isn't the case when you use "title" or "alt" property popups.
  • There are no popup windows that can block the user's view of main content.
  • The toggle doesn't take up space when hidden, as is the case with most layers or block elements whose visibility status can be manipulated.
  • You have full control over the look and feel of hotspots and toggles. Warren can provide a user-friendly standard popup to get you started.
  text in a container, and The Parable of the Sower  ¹That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat by the lake. ²Such large crowds gathered around him that he got into a boat and sat in it, while all the people stood on the shore. ³Then he told them many things in parables, saying: “A farmer went out to sow his seed. ⁴As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. ⁵Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. ⁶But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. ⁷Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants. ⁸Still other seed fell on good soil, where it produced a crop—a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown. ⁹Whoever has ears, let them hear.” Warren Camp is hard at work controlling output using Macintosh equipment at WCD's California headquarters. text-to-photo zoom conversions.
• Hover Popups: acronym definitions, text in a container When hovering on text, an unlimited amount of text can appear in a container of any size, color, and border. Ask Warren to demonstrate some of this hover feature's many options., and image zoom while hovering.
• Informational Lists and Tables: attractive interactive lists, tables with hyperlinks and images, tables for data and downloads, tables with calendar entries.
• Page Size and Layout: wide vs. narrow, short vs. long, consistency on all pages.
• Checking, Copyediting, Validating: viewing pages on various browsers, copyediting and proofreading, and validating that all pages While contemporary Web browsers do an increasingly good job of parsing even the worst HTML coding mistakes, some errors are not always caught gracefully. Very often, software on different platforms will not handle errors in a similar fashion, making it extremely difficult to apply style or layout consistently.
        Using standard markup and style sheets, on the other hand, offers a much greater chance of having one's page handled consistently across platforms.
        Validation is one of the simplest ways to check whether a page is built in accordance with web standards, providing one of the most reliable guarantees that future web platforms will handle it as designed. pass industry W3C standards.
• Search Engine Savvy: registration and compliance with top search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo).
• Announcing a Site's Launch: e-broadcasts of a promo page, e-broadcasts of a home page, emails with photos, links posted to social networks, press releases to newspapers, site submittals to Google and others, creative handouts and mailers, eye-catching e-broadcasts.

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Check out Warren's web-specific pages:

Web Design  |  Web Development

Informational Q & A  |  Search Engine Optimization

Improving SEO Rankings  |  Tracking Site Performance

Evaluating Google Analytics  | Marketing and Promotion

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If your website doesn't stand out and do a lot of things right, chances are it's not going to achieve your goals. If you need a new site, discuss the possibilities with Warren to get a feel for the effort and cost involved. If you want to renovate an existing site, Warren can examine it to see what you’re doing right and wrong and what you’re forgetting to do. New or existing, his insights and recommendations can help make a difference in the success or failure of your site.