LwebG is a web company founded in Louisville in 1998 providing Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana and Tennessee with quality business web design and development services through our offices in Louisville, Columbus and Nashville.
If this isn’t your first experience with working with a web design firm, you’ll notice a lot of differences when you work with LwebG and it begins with the programming. Every web site we designvalidates (XHTML & CSS), passes a link validator test, meets Section 508 guidelines, and has been tested out on IE7, IE8, Firefox 3+, and Safari 4. This means your web site will perform properly in every browser and on every platform, including PDAs in part because there are no tables.
If you’re looking for eCommerce website design, you’ll be pleased to know that LwebG specializes in eCommerce employing the two most robust eCommerce platforms in the world, Magento and Drupal Commerce.
Need something that will function on smartphones? Our mobile development capabilities are unmatched and our SEO team can make sure your customers can find you online.
Interested in learning more? Then continue….
The Importance of Good Web Design
Proper user experience incorporates a number of disciplines to impact the overall experience a person has when viewing the work your web designer has created. It involves a sequence of interactions between you, through your web design, and a web site visitor. When you design a website, you have a series of objectives you wish to accomplish and it is your web design company’s job to apply the proper web design elements to effectively communicate those goals and maximize the effectiveness of your message.
It’s also your web design firm’s job to satisfy the needs of your web site’s visitors quickly and efficiently. People like to click, but they don’t like to have to click more than 2-3 times to find the information they seek.
User Experience Elements in Web Design Include:
- An aesthetically pleasing web design, applying the right amount of visuals, including graphics,photography and videos where appropriate
- Proper use of text to describe your company and establish reasons a person should do business with your company
- Clean and accurate navigation to enable viewers to quickly find the information they seek
Our web design team specialize in creating stimulating artwork that inspires viewers and motivates them to become customers utilizing CSS Web Standards programming and html.
The History of Web Design
Tim Berners-Lee published what is considered to be the first web design in August 1991, not Al Gore! Berners-Lee was the first to combine Internet communication (which had been carrying email and the Usenet for decades) with hypertext (which had also been around for decades, but limited to browsing information stored on a single computer, such as interactive CD-ROM design). Web design companies develop websites in a markup language called HTML, and early versions of HTML were very basic, only giving a website’s basic structure (headings and paragraphs), and the ability to link using hypertext. Web design using HTML yielded a new and different result from existing forms of communication – users could easily navigate to other pages by following hyperlinks from page to page.
As web design progressed, the markup language changed to become more complex and flexible, giving the ability to add objects like images and tables to a page. Web design features like tables, which were originally intended to be used to display tabular information, were soon subverted for use as invisible layout devices. With the advent of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), table-based layout is now considered very outdated. Database integration technologies such as server-side scripting and design standards like W3C further changed and enhanced the way web design is done. As times change, websites are changing the code on the inside and visual design on the outside with ever-evolving programs and utilities.
With the progression of the Web, tens of thousands of web design companies have been established around the world to serve the growing demand for such work. And no two of them are alike. Unlike other website design companies, LwebG consists of web designers, web developers, graphic artists, writers, photographers and business professionals. We know what we’re doing and we know how to help your business.
Web Design that’s Accessible
To be accessible, Web pages and sites must conform to certain accessibility principles. These accessibility principles are known as the WCAG when talking about content. These can be grouped into the following main areas.
- Use semantic markup that provides a meaningful structure to the document (i.e. Web page)
- Semantic markup also refers to semantically organizing the web page structure and publishing web services description accordingly so that they can be recognized by other web services on different web pages. Standards for semantic Web are set by IEEE
- Use a valid markup language that conforms to a published DTD or Schema
- Provide text equivalents for any non-text components (e.g. images, multimedia)
- Use hyperlinks that make sense when read out of context. (e.g. avoid “Click Here”)
- Don’t use frames
- Use CSS rather than HTML tables for layout
- Author the page so that when the source code is read line-by-line by user agents (such as screen readers) it remains intelligible. (Using tables for design will often result in information that is not.) However, W3C permits an exception where tables for layout either make sense when linearized or an alternate version (perhaps linearized) is made available. Website accessibility is also changing as it is impacted by Content Management Systems that allow changes to be made to webpages without the need of obtaining programming language knowledge.
It is very important that several different components of Web development and interaction can work together in order for the Web to be accessible to people with disabilities. These components include:
- content – the information in a Web page or Web application, including natural information such as text, images, and sounds; and code or markup that defines structure, presentation, etc.
- Web browsers, media players, and other “user agents”
- assistive technology, in some cases – screen readers, alternative keyboards, switches, scanning software, etc.
- users’ knowledge, experiences, and in some cases, adaptive strategies using the Web
- developers – designers, coders, authors, etc., including developers with disabilities and users who contribute content
- authoring tools – software that creates Web sites
- evaluation tools – Web accessibility evaluation tools, HTML validators, CSS validators, etc
eCommerce Web Design Since 1998
LwebG has been developing ecommerce solutions since 1998 and we’ve worked with virtually every end use application applying virtually every “open source” ecommerce mechanism available including Magento, OsCommerce, X-Cart, Zen Cart, VirtueMart, Lite Commerce, DashCommerce, and more.
Here is an example of a simple and inexpensive open source ecommerce solution that we’ve developed, Scentsational Candles. Our first ecommerce web design solution for built for Office Time Savers in LiteCommerce. We’ve built this site for Gun Holsters Unlimited in Magento. Another more intricate e-commerce development solution in OsCommerce is Century Beauty Supply. We’ve recently done work for the world’s largest e-tailer, Swiss Colony.
Our preferred ecommerce engine is now Magento Commerce. We’re still celebrating the recent launch of our newest ecommerce website built with the Magento engine, at Great Sleep. Great Sleep was built for one of the world’s largest bedding manufacturing companies. And here is a wonderful Magento website that has been developed by our lead developer for Indiana University,www.eppley.org.
Our web site design team specialize in creating stimulating artwork that inspires viewers and motivates them to become customers through the use of front end applications like CSS andXHTML. Our ecommerce web design team creates ecommerce systems that are rock solid, secure and easy to use through the use of PHP and ASP.NET in concert with SQL or Access databases.
If you’d like a quote, call us today or send us an e-mail. Estimates are always free.
