We have two primary jobs involved in creating your website: the web designer and web developer, who often work closely together on a website.
For your business we put quality into your:
- Content authoring and editing including standardized code
- Marketing communication design
- UX – User experience
- Web graphic design
- Interface design
- SEO – search engine optimization
- Security
Let’s talk first about:
Designers
Designers are responsible for the visual aspect, which includes the layout, coloring, logos, buttons, typography of a web page. We have core design-developer team skills. Advanced styling/content is provided at an additional fee.
We suggest when consulting others’ opinions they have a working knowledge of markup languages such as HTML and CSS.
The design process relates to the front-end (that’s you, the client) design of your website including writing standardized ethical markup.
Among the Ethics we follow is the awareness of usability and the role digital design involves when creating compliant markup with current web accessibility guidelines. This helps all your customers, and, maintains a global coding and security standard.
Let’s break down what our service offers contain:
Up front and first is content generation and editing. We review and correct written material to improve accuracy, readability, and “fit” for its purpose, and to ensure that it is free of error, omission, inconsistency, and repetition. It also is a key increasing ranking factor in Googles SEO rankings.
Copy editing has three levels that we offer: light, medium, and heavy. Depending on the budget and scheduling of the publication, we set the go-to-print date range.
Your copy is usable both online and in print. The process requires us to revise the raw or draft text of web pages and rework it.
Content editing, also known as substantive editing, is the editing of material, including its structure and organization, to correct internal inconsistencies and discrepancies. Your content may require heavy editing or rewriting as compared to mechanical editing which is the process of making a text or manuscript follow editorial or house style and keeping the preferred style and grammar rules of publication consistent across all content.
We will look for spelling, punctuation, and correct usage of grammatical symbols, along with reviewing special elements like tables, charts, formatting footnotes, and endnotes.
In addition, editing may change punctuation, spelling and usage for a different country. For example, a Commonwealth readership, the Oxford British and American spelling of “organize” may be changed to “organise”, and “colour” changed to “color”. This all defines the UX – user experience.
After the final proof sign-off by you the client, the grammar, keywords and meta information are ready for insertion into the marketing design for publication.
The marketing and communication design on your website identify what works for your target market and overall UX. Which determines if they stay and come back!
This can be an age group or specific strand of culture. We understand the type of website we are designing for you based on our initial discovery consultation and checklist input from you.
For example, B2B (business-to-business) website design considerations might differ greatly from a consumer targeted website such as a retail or entertainment website.
Consideration might be made to ensure that the aesthetics or overall design of a site do not clash with the clarity and accuracy of the content or the ease of web navigation, especially on a B2B website.
We consider your business reputation to ensure the site represents you favorably. For example, we would certainly vet any personal photos and ensure that you signed off on the actual image. Our business savvy and insight goes deep in to the psyche of the customer. We foresee the UX outcome before it happens…with excellent accuracy.
UX and layout are connected. The layout process involves site mapping and individual page wire frames. It generates very clear instructions and labeling to be placed on your website following a logical path.
For example, there were over 100 wire frames generated using a variety of 12-grid options for this website. All of these were laid out in a story board format prior to any coding being done. We saw from beginning-to-end desktop, mobile and its fluidity. Responsive design requires detailed evaluation and planning. Fluid sidebars placed are below body text rather that at the side. And those shopping cart options? Simply put…that’s a plug-in with php coding to make it all work.
Advanced interactive functions may require plug-ins and API coding language skills which is a critical decision in UX design. Plug-ins don’t usually come pre-installed and these functions require skilled installation and properly set up automation, plus maintenance.
This is why layout and function planning to your target audience marketing material is critical. It’s responsive.
Responsive Web Design is our recent approach, based on CSS and device specifications within your page’s stylesheet. Announced in March 2018 Google said they would be rolling out mobile-first indexing which has been an SEO ranking game changer. Being Responsive requires attention to a few more details than just-desktops, like typography, motion graphics and code quality.
Typography
Here are a few steps: viewing thousands of fonts, coding to place and final licensing to acquire. Custom fonts mean a lot of hours were invested searching, changing, proofing, changing, searching, coding….by someone. Use our consulting service, or come to us with your fonts styled, coded and ready to go!
Motion graphics
The choice of whether or not to use motion graphics depends on the target market.
Are they expected or received as entertainment? So, think, The Hoff. Do I need his cool? Rental place in Hawaii. Sure. Get a tan too.
However, a target audience with serious formal interests (business, community, or government) might find animations distracting unless enhanced with content relevant video presentations.
The World Wide Web consortium accessibility standards require site visitors be able to disable page animations. Good developer coding makes this seamless.
Quality of code
Our Website designers consider it Best Practice to conform to World Wide Web standards. Failure to conform to standards may render a website unusable, hacked or error prone. Code is closed properly . No more Tag Soup and broken links.
Once these parts have been compiled it is time to assemble it using HTML for static and dynamic pages. Here’s what we build for you:
A static webpage sends a page request to a file stored on a server. The request returns the same content from the server every time. This content is created once, during the design of the website. It is manually authored and proofed along the way by GenXwest and you. Then its published.
The benefits of a static page are :
- Simpler to host, the server requests static content and does not execute server-side scripts.
- Less administration is required with fewer security holes.
- Virtual server hardware is a low-cost high performing short interval processing with of 99.9% up-time.
The Dynamic pages are generated on-the-fly using server-side technology to generate extracted content from one or more back-end databases.
The skillset needed to develop dynamic web pages is broader than for static pages, involving server-side database coding and client-side interface design.
Editing the content itself (as well as the template page) can be done by you and with the use of third-party software. The ability to edit all pages is provided only to a specific category of users (for example, administrators, or registered users). We can administer the changes and help you with access control and backups.
Needing to be the first developer topic, it often arrives at the end of the process because of its discussion complexity, search engine optimization – SEO, has been radically advanced with deep learning and AI. Google search now seeks to learn from you what a good UX experience is.
Information architecture has become more comprehensive than filling in analytics like SEO.
…remember
Summing it up, web design is segmented and requires, training and experience to: synergize – working together conceptually, and then, synthesize – bring it all together with multiple programs, content and skillset. It’s much like a movie production. Ferris Bueller’s day off.