Web Design by ictinsite

It’s entirely worthwhile to spend the money on a new website, here are just a few of the reasons that you should invest in web design by ictinsite.

Like anything, investing time, money and effort will ultimately pay off. This applies to all aspects of your business. For example if you own a shop on the high street there are a number of things you do to entice your customers in to your shop. Not only do you buy great stock to sell, but you ensure your shop front sends the right message, to the right people. You’ll probably use point of sale to pull customers into your shop, and you have easily seen offers above your products, presented beautifully on your shelves. The same can be done with a website.

Imagine that it’s a shop front. If your website looks tired at first glance then you will push any potential customers away before you get a chance to even talk to them, or have them browse your offers. You need to ensure your website appeals to the people you are targeting. If you have an online shop that sells mugs, then having a picture of a kitten may look interesting, but it will not mean anything to the customer you are trying to attract.

In a shop you have to ensure that you do not clutter the aisles with racks of clothes or products, you ensure that your customers can navigate around the store without any hassle. A less stressed out or frustrated customer is far more likely to spend a lot more money, and if the experience is good, they are likely to come back again. You need to ensure that the navigation of your website follows the same principles. Your navigation should be easy for the average user to understand, there is no point making it a challenge for customers as many will give up trying at the first hurdle. ictinsite are experts at web design and we understand how the average users move through a website.

Back to the shop analogy, think about the amount of times you have searched high and low for a particular product before you give up and go to the next shop because you know where they keep it on the shelves. Your website should be the same. It needs to have clearly defined areas that have the products and it also needs to have the products themselves displayed in a way that looks appealing to the user.

Large e-tailers often have customer reviews of products, as well as a detailed description of said product. One thing you have to remember is that internet users cannot physically touch your products so its important to describe everything about them to the last detail, this can mean having specially designed pages that include a review function for customers, and allows you to make adjustments easily. ictinsite are experts at designing fully functional e-commerce websites, and content management driven websites.

You wouldn’t have the same products all year round on your high street shop’s shelves, so you shouldn’t do that on your website. Variety is the spice of life someone once said, and it should be the same for your website. You need to be able to change products easily, and write new descriptions when you put something new online, or if you have a sale. At ictinsite, we know business and we know that if you need to make a change, that it should be simple. With our custom web design we can keep it simple, but give you the power of a highly customer focused and sales driven website.

When you start a high street retail business you generally get the chance to rent out your shop space. Well at ictinsite, we decided that we should give people the chance to do the same for their online business. with our range of low cost leasing packages you can spread the payments of your new website across 36 months, giving you a great way of starting your business if you don’t have a great deal of finance available. This is great for a start-up business, and for those who want to re-brand or just have a new web design.

There are lots of ways we can help your online business be successful, for more details on how we can help, give one of our friendly advisors a call on 0845 053 3111, fill out our contact form or email us at sales@ictinsite.com.

Changing your web design

It’s something that we’ve all done, that day when you realise that your website looks tired, and has nothing interesting on it: A redesign. There are many reasons that you may want to change your design, and you need to think carefully about the impact of your web design changes, so here is our best tips for that all important new look.

If you have a high traffic website, you need to think about what impact a huge change would have. Many a website has fallen at that hurdle before, where they have received a backlash from their users because they took away what they were used to seeing. These users are integral to your sites survival, and need to be taken into account. That being said, if you are going to make your web site look better then its time to invest in a web design company like ictinsite.

If you have a popular website, it may be an idea to change just the ‘skin’ of the site, that is the visual look, but retain the site functionality and navigation. But if you have to make your site more user friendly or customer focused, then you need to look at the navigation and usability more closely.

You may want to change the way your website is built. If you have a 2 page HTML website that you have outgrown as a business, then you should look into a content managed website as that will give you much more flexibility in the long run. A content management website allows you to edit the information within your website much easier and allows for expansion. Most content management systems are easy to use, and you can easily build a number of ‘skins’ for your website to change when you see fit.

You could make changes to your website by modifying the CSS file only. This is a good option, but be wary and back everything up. It’s much better to seek the assistance of a qualified web design company because if you make a mistake it could be extremely damaging to your business. Trust ictinsite to keep your businesses web presence at the top of its game. We can provide everything from low cost web design to high spec fully bespoke content managed systems. You need to ensure your target audience will be happy with the changes. Even a small re-design could affect your traffic flow. You need to rely on a company who will individually project manage your web site redesign.

It’s vitally important that if you do decide to change the design of your site you should make a full back up. At ictinsite we ensure everything is taken car e of for you. We make sure that the transition from old site to your new site is smooth and that all your data is backed up securely and safely.

For details on our web design packages please contact us on 0845 053 3111 or fill out our contact form.

Choosing a font or your website

Thing of when you write anything on your chosen word package. You use a font that feels comfortable to write with and it easy to read through. Where web pages are concerned, the font you choose can dramatically affect your readers. The range of fonts on an office package is vast, however, it’s very rare you get a choice of which font you would like to see on a website.

But why can’t I use comic sans?

Aside from being a terrible looking font, when a website is designed the webmaster typically specifies a particular typeface for the site. Although its not embedded in to the site itself, the web design company will put a reference to the font into the page. This would appear on your style sheet as something like ‘font-family: “Verdana” ;’

The font itself does not get embedded in to the page itself, but if you visitor has that particular font style then his browser will show it the way you intended, however if they do not have the font, then the user’s browser will show a default font instead. This is generally the reason for web designers to choose commonly available fonts.

when a font is specified on the style sheet, its quite important that the developer takes into consideration that most people have Ariel as there font, or something different but just as common. This is where taking into consideration the style sheets come in to play. By using the line ‘font-family: Arial, Verdana, sans-serif ;’. What this means is that the computer has Arial installed, then the browser will use that first, but if it doesn’t then it will try to use Verdana.

Ideally what you need to do is ensure you have the right fonts that cover the largest amount of users.

W3C Validation

HTML and CSS Validation basically refers to a method of ensuring your website is free from errors that may affect usability and the general viewing of your website.

An HTML validator in particular checks to ensure your site’s HTML complies with the standards set by the W3 Consortium – the organisation that regulates web standards. There are many types of validation tools available online that will check your website for errors only, and some, more advanced versions will give you an idea of where your code needs improving. A CSS validator checks your cascading style sheets in a similar way, ensuring that it complies with the CSS standards set by the consortium.

One major problem many web site owners find themselves with is inter-browser compatibility. Often you will view a website thought Internet Explorer 7 for example, and menu items and other sections of the site will not be aligned properly, or be broken, but if you viewed the web site through Firefox 3 it will appear as the developer intended. This could be because your page contains HTML or CSS errors. One remedy can be to upgrade the browser you are using, or you could change your browser, but because Internet Explorer is used by the vast proportion of web users its best to ensure that it is compatible with this, then work on making the your website design work with others.

When errors appear in a web sites HTML or CSS, most browsers tend to ignore the problems and open the web page – errors and all. Problems can arise when search engines try to sift your website for keywords and approaches broken sections. Like browsers, search engines will probably make independent decisions on certain parts of the page, resulting in your page not being indexed. This is just another reason to ensure your website validates error-free. By doing this you can ensure correct indexing of your pages.

By ensuring your website meets the web standards, users will find what they are looking for and this will encourage new users to stay around longer. Users can tell if a website is poorly coded, if things are missing, and if there are image errors (denoted by a red cross in a white box), and other businesses will not be interested in being associated with a badly designed website.

How often should you validate your website?

People validate there pages every time they make a minor change to their website, and some others only validate their web site when they are having a major re-design.

At ictinsite, we take care to ensure all of the web site’s we design are built to W3C compliance. For great rates for web design contact ictinsite on 0452 053 3111 or email sales@ictinsite.com