"Ensuring Your Web Presence Contributes"

Overview

Note, I recently blogged about an unusual aspect of this topic, you can read the entry about long tailed keywords here.

At the user level, many people surf the web to get information, send and receive emails, shop, transact their banking and book travel. All these activities are presented in a way that is friendly and understandable. At the technical level, configuring web servers, implementing security, administrating and designing databases and web programming are complicated. It is the role of a web developer to shield a client from these technical issues, and to deliver the "user friendly" and effective web site that the client requires. Web sites are sent across the Internet as plain text data that contain "tags". These tags carry invisible messages to browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox etc) describing how to present information. Actually, they are not totally invisible, you can see them if you "view source" in your browser. For example, enclosing text inside <b>lorem ipsum</b> tags causes the text to be displayed bold - lorem ipsum. There are many types of tags, some apply to layout and presentation, and others specify some things about the page itself. This plain text is called HTML, Hyper Text Markup Language.

Difference between Static and Dynamic

With static web sites, requests for pages are handled by a web server delivering the content of these HTML files, "as is". They are called static because they don't change very often. With dynamic web sites there is a difference, requests for pages are a bit more complicated. For each request, the page (the HTML) is constructed from information stored in files (such as images), information stored in databases (textual content) and programming logic (both server side such as PHP, Java, ASP etc and with "Web 2.0" more client side - Javascript). All really useful sites (Amazon, Trademe, online banking etc) are dynamic. It would be completely impossible for them to be anything else, as what they are providing is constantly changing and/or the content is dependent on what the site visitor actually asked for.

Which type of site do I need?

Static is good for a one-way flow of information, from your site to the visitors. This suits some situations perfectly. Dynamic will invite your site visitors to become involved and engaged. This generally leads to a stronger relationship with the visitor and there is more likelyhood of your visitor buying your product/service or becoming a member of your community. They are also easier for the webmaster to maintain, you can amend content from anywhere there is an internet connection, without special web authoring tools.

Confused?

We will help you choose the most appropriate type of web site. Contact us now for free no-obligation advice. While developing a web site, we encourage clients to take on tasks they feel comfortable with. The client's involvement is mutually agreed, dependent on their enthusiasm and ability. We are used to dealing with various levels of client over (or under) confidence! Obviously, the more a client is able to do reduces costs.

Regardless of where you are in the world, we are keen to design (or redesign) and create your website. We are software and web developers operating in sunny Nelson, New Zealand. We understand how to make your website reinforce traditional sales and marketing principles to make your organisation successful.

For us, there is only one good outcome from your visiting our site - that is you contact us. You might glean something from these pages and admire the lovely photo at the top (Rocks road, Nelson), but that's no use to us at all. We want to talk with you! Hopefully you will have confidence in what we are saying and get in touch. That is why we have sprinkled many contact us links around!

There is a lot of information about website development in these pages. We assume you have arrived here because you are establishing or improving your web presence. If there is anything we can clarify or expand on, please contact us.

We design web sites so that:

Visitors find your site -

• easily on the major search engines for relevant key words.
• fast to load even on "dial up".
• easy to navigate.
• appears consistent, attractive and enhances your "brand", regardless of the browser being used or screen size (resolution settings).
• shows attention to detail and a sense of responsibility to users' privacy by having a "privacy policy" and "terms of use" statement.

Owners/administrators of your site -

• have a site that sells!
• find it easy to amend and add content and photos.

Technically, all sites use current best practices, i.e. -

• use of html 4.0, xhtml 1.0 or xhtml 1.1.
• separation of content and presentation by using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets).
• all pages should validate with zero errors using the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) validator.
• no email addresses shown that could be harvested by spammers. Visitors can email you by filling out a form.
• no use of deprecated tags (e.g. <font>)
• security issues are addressed.
• accessibility issues are addressed.
• all pages optimized for search engine optimization (SEO)

Contact us now for a free no obligation chat about your web presence.

Our product, a website developer tool

We also sell our own shareware Javascript editor with built in syntax error checking called "ScrypTik". You can visit its own site www.purpleoar.co.nz/scryptik for more information and free download.