LwebG is a web design firm founded in Louisville, KY providing quality e-commerce web design and development services through our nationwide network of web professionals.
If this isn’t your first experience with working with an e-commerce 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 design validates (XHTML & CSS), passes a link validator test, meetsSection 508 guidelines, and has been tested out on IE7, IE8, Firefox 3+, and Safari 4.
If you’re looking for the most stable and robust eCommerce website design solutions, 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 designer’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
- Site map with proper Search Engine Optimization (SEO) through content structure
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. 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. As with much of the information technology industry, many web design companies have been established in technology parks in the developing world as well as many Western design companies setting up offices in countries such as India, Romania, and Russia to take advantage of the relatively lower labor rates found in such countries. Web Design that’s Accessible To be accessible, Web pages and sites must conform to certain accessibility principles. These accessibility principles are known as theWCAG 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
The Explosion of Content Management Systems Content Management Systems have grown tremendously in popularity over the past few years because they allow people with no knowledge of programming to add and change out stories, pictures and even entire pages. When LwebG first started, we would build a website and then take calls from all our clients asking us to change words here and there or change out pictures. But that rarely happens anymore.
Another powerful advantage of CMS is that most of them are “Open Source”, which means that the person or persons that developed them floated them out into cyberspace free for anyone to use. Open Source systems are tinkered with by thousands of web developers who add functionality to them in the form of “modules” that greatly expand the capabilities of these Open Source programs. So typically you can download an open source cms that will provide you with a website without a design and with basic functionality. If you want a nice design you’ll have to either download and install a template or hire a web designer to create a template for your website. If you want to add the ability to produce newsletters or add eCommerce to the site, you’ll have to download – and sometimes purchase – a module that will enable that type of functionality to your CMS website.
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.
There’s nothing we enjoy more than chatting about the Web and how it can benefit your business, so if you’d like a quote or you’d just like to dream a little, call us today or send us an e-mail.
