Web design and usability
Websites can look good without sacrificing usability and navigability.
'Web design' is one of the most vexed terms in the site creator's lexicon. We consider it to be just part of the site construction process (which is why we do not term ourselves 'web designers'). It is, however, one of the most important steps, and it is where much of the magic behind a successful site lies.
We specialise, though not exclusively, in sites that offer very real content to the end user. That means arriving at a site design where that content can be readily found with the minimum of steps, both within the site, or from without (e.g. from Google or another search engine).
Text comes first
In arriving at such a solution, it is important to bear in mind at all stages that the Internet is primarily a text-based medium. For that reason, we do not advocate the creation of sites in full using multimedia solutions such as Flash, though these do have their places as components of a site. Multimedia sites, besides being proprietary solutions subject to no external standards, do not allow the richness of textual linking and indexing that HTML and XML-based sites do.
Here is a site - CourseInfo - that allows many different approaches to the same information. Besides the standard graphical navigation structure, it contains a 'Yahoo-style' browser, a simple A-Z, a free-text search facility and a criterion-based search. In every case, the main pages are replicated as a simpler 'text-only' version that meets disability guidelines and incidentally, is highly indexable by search engines. (This site scores highly on Google for many terms that are important to the clients.)
Art and graphic design
All this may seem very dour - we have got this far without mentioning artwork in any real way. This is not to diminish the graphic content of a website, it is merely to stress that, as any good print designer would recognise, the graphical content must necessarily serve, not dominate, the readability of a site.
Good art design is, however, necessarily vital. It is this that gives each site its unique identity. And besides the creation of a good working logo for the web, a striking and usable set of navigational graphics and many other components, these have to be arranged into a harmonious whole that does not interfere with the user's web experience. It is much harder to give a site identity where these elements need to be simple and unobtrusive than when it needs to be laden down with 'eye-candy' (which, we admit, many media sites do genuinely require).
So, in many cases, we can do little better than to cite Mies van der Rohe - 'Less is more' - while allowing the possibility that sometimes more is more...
