What’s Different With Our Site Designs

What’s Different With Our Site Designs?

Any Web site design has a specific goal in mind. You are asking the user for a specific action. Your initial design decision is what exactly do you want the user to do? This should be defined very specifically. Your design should be focused on getting the user to take this action.

Our target audience is the small business in the Portland, Oregon area. Whether it's a personal business or a small corporation, our skills are specifically targeted for you and to help you get a Web site that is effective for your business. Our focus in the design is positioning you high in the search engines so that you get the traffic you want by targeting your product, service, or mission to the needs of your potential or existing customer. This is often the serious challenge for the small business, and that's where we specialize.

We can also so some types of Web site design for clients in other locations, and our Web site positioning experience is available to anyone on a global basis.

The entire site design is then done with us working with you for your specific goal. The Web site is different in terms of other communications in that each page is focused, much like a sound bite, to get the readers attention and to draw him or her to the specific action you desire. The design should also be sticky; that is, you want to keep the user there as long as possible until they take that action step.

The Objective Compromises

Due to technical limitations with the Internet, web page design inherently involves compromises to some extent. The three basic objectives include:

Fast Loading Speed – You want your pages to load fast. For broadband, you should shoot for a 1 second loading. If your users are dial-up, the site should load in ten seconds or less. For a site that loads in ten seconds or less, studies have shown you will typically lose about 7-10% of your users. If the site takes more than ten seconds to load, you will typically lose 25-30% of your users. In summary, if you can’t get the home page up in ten seconds or less, you will lose over three times as many clients. This means reducing those graphics and animations, but still holding a good quality of design. We specialize in design tricks to do this. This page is a 6 second load at 56K.
Using Multimedia – Most sites will need graphics, some level of animation, and perhaps some sound. Interactive sites draw the user in, inviting the user’s participation and keeping him or her there longer. We try to add some level of graphics, sound, and animation to communicate your message while holding the loading time down. We can use GIF animation, FLASH, and Javascript.
Search Engine Visibility – You want your site to get good positioning on the search engines. Search engines are smarter now and generally won’t index on comment lines, text in Flash animations, and many won’t even read meta-based keywords. Keyword phrases are very important, but to work the search engines effectively they must be used correctly in the design of the page. We have special tools to test the pages we design for search engine positioning quality. We've taken three courses in search engine positioning and two in Internet marketing. We constantly update this training.

We have the skills and tools the balance these objectives!

Our Goal

Our goal is to make your pages stand out on the Web and accomplish your specific objectives, motivating the user to take the action you want the user to take.