Websites Explained
Why is the web so popular?
Whether it’s for business or leisure, for information, for purchasing, for competitive advantage or for increasing productivity: people are using the web more and more. And they are enjoying it.
At the start of 2000, the monthly amount spent online in the UK stood at £87m. By the end of 2005, this had risen to £2.3bn and by the end of 2006, it stood at £3.3bn. Per month. Every month.
Usability
Usability is a measure of how easy a website is to use.
You want a user who loves your site; who wants to come back again and again. If you are selling something, you want the purchasing experience to be logical, intuitive and straightforward. People hate ‘battling’ with websites to get what they want.
A famous usability expert, Jakob Nielsen put it like this: “On the Web, usability is a necessary condition for survival. If a website is difficult to use, people leave. If the homepage fails to clearly state what a company offers or what users can do on the site, people leave. If users get lost on a website, they leave. If a website's information is hard to read or doesn't answer users' key questions, they leave.”
And they don’t (necessarily) come back.
Usability is the absolutely priority in the websites that we build.We give it priority, because that’s what your visitors will give it, and it makes good business sense.
Accessibility
Accessible websites are easier to access for all visitors – including those with disabilities such as sight, sound or physical.
The main way of measuring the accessibility of a website is whether is meets certain levels of criteria set down by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). The UK government recommends that all non-personal websites should meet a minimum of the ‘Priority 1’ W3C criteria.
All our websites are built with accessibility in mind, and all our websites will exceed current UK government recommendations. We are ahead of the curve, and we intend to stay there.
AJAX
AJAX is not a common household cleaner. AJAX is an acronym for Asynchronous Javascript And XML, while XML is an acronym for eXtensible Markup Language.
It’s not really important what it stands for – what’s important is what it does.
If you’ve ever visited a website, you will know that navigating and using a website is different to using a normal piece of software on your computer (e.g. Microsoft Word). With websites, you click, and then wait for the page to re-load with a new page. Using a website becomes click, page re-load, click, page re-load, click, page re-load. Which is fine – it works well, but it’s not the same as the other desktop applications that you use.
AJAX allows you to interact with web pages without having to have the ‘re-load’ part. It makes websites appear more slick and more application-like.
Developing AJAX-powered websites is a highly technical task that requires top level software design, development and testing skills. But we have all those. So that’s OK. Phew!
Devices
As the internet becomes more and more pervasive, the number of devices that can access it grows and grows. Computers, laptops, PDA’s, TV’s, mobile phones and even refrigerators! All these have different capabilities, different screen resolutions and different browser software.
A number of cities in the UK and the USA are installing a kind of ‘blanket internet’ system where people can access the internet anywhere in the whole city. Whether you’re sitting in a restaurant or going for a walk, you will be able to connect to the internet at high speed.
All-over-internet is one thing – having things to run on it is another. That’s what we do – we can build you web applications that do amazing things.Rich media
Rich media is defined as “information that consists of any combination of graphics, audio, video and animation, which is more storage and bandwidth intensive than ordinary text.”
Sounds good. We like graphics, audio, video and animation. But what about the last bit – more storage and bandwidth intensive? Sites like MySpace, YouTube and Google Videos have proved that the days of no rich media have passed. Completely.
And it’s only going to get better. And bigger.
In the end it comes down to bandwidth - the amount of information you can send at a time. When we all surfed the web on a 28.8 kbps (28,800 bits per second) modem, the ability to watch a (reasonable quality) streaming video simply didn’t exist (of course if you had a lot of time on your hands you could download it and play later). Typical internet speeds now run at 8,000,000 bits per second. That’s 277 times faster.
Service providers are even now talking about speeds of 50,000,000 bits per second. At these speeds, streaming ‘higher-than’ high-definition content becomes a reality.Thankfully, we understand all about rich media. We understand how to add it to a site without it becoming a distraction (unless you want it to be!), how to build it so that it looks a part of your site and not an afterthought and how to make it work for the greatest number of people. You may have heard of terms like ‘flash movie’, ‘quicktime’, ‘wmv’, ‘DRM (digital rights management)’, ‘resolution’, ‘compression’. We understand them, so you don’t have to. We’re happy to explain them – just remember to tell us when to stop…
Content
We’ve all seen it many times. “site under construction – check back soon – site last updated Jan 15th 2002”. Or (from the ‘news’ section of a website) ‘14th August 1998 – New Contract Awarded’.
The point is that with websites, content is king. In fact, content is KING. If your content is non-existent (or hopelessly out of date), so is your website. It may as well be a black hole.
But content is difficult because it changes. The new product you are launching now won’t be new for very long.
And websites are difficult to update, aren’t they? Nope. Not any more.
Content Management Systems (CMS’s) take the hard work out of updating your website. That’s the good news.
The bad news is that not all content management systems are created equal.
Many companies call something a ‘content management system’ when all you can do is update the news items on a page. That’s not a ‘content management system’ – that’s a ‘news updating system’. A content management system should have certain key capabilities:
- The ability to create new pages. Anywhere on the website.
- The ability to add content to those pages using intuitive methods (i.e. WYSIWYG – What You See Is What You Get – and so on).
- The ability to add content KNOWING that you will not destroy the overall branding and graphics design of the site as a whole
- The ability to create stand-alone pages ‘hidden’ from the overall navigation.
- The ability to protect those pages so they are only visible to certain users.
- The ability to change the order of pages within the navigation structure.
- The ability to easily upload images, audio, video and other files onto the system for incorporating into the website (the ability of the CMS to know what content is valid for certain pages).
- The ability to create ‘editor’ accounts for certain people – give permission to edit only certain pages of the website.
- The ability to generate excel-compatible reports on data generated by or part of the website. E.g. users registered, most popular videos, etc.
- Integrated search engine
A note on WYSIWYG:
Many companies quote WYSIWYG as one of the main feature of their CMS but be careful – often all that means is that you end up doing all hard design work!
Imagine you are adding a new picture gallery to your site - which would you rather do:
- Upload your new images
- Create a new page
- Spend hours on a WYSIWYG editor laying out your images so they are all in the right place and link through to the correct ‘larger’ image while making sure that you don’t break the overall layout, branding or look and feel of the website
Or:
- Upload your new images
- Create a new ‘image gallery’ page
- Select the images you want on the page
WYSIWYG is great in certain places (text entering etc) but as you can see it’s not a substitute for having the content management system knowing what kind of page you’re trying to create (and therefore knowing what information to ask for).