Extraordinary Web Design

Effective Communication

An extraordinarily designed site starts with an understanding of your business and thorough knowledge of the technologies best suited to help you achieve your objectives. In addition to brand reinforcement, many of our redesigns here at tintedPixel involve reforming the way a particular business interacts with the web. A great content management (CMS) based website can provide information, increased sales, lower customer support cost and is easy to update and maintain. Effective communication, easy-to-use navigation with clear, fast loading content are the benchmarks of a well conceived site.

Understanding Your Business

The first step towards intelligent web design is to understand the business behind the site. Time and effort can be wasted developing a site that does not fit with how a business operates. Our years of experience building websites enable us to produce a site that is perfect for your needs. As outsiders to your business, we see your business the way your customers will see it. This helps us bring a fresh look to your web presence. We will ask questions and listen... then come up with innovative ideas for your site. As we work together, new and exciting ideas will manifest themselves– ideas you may not have thought of or did not have enough web experience to fully consider. Each company is different. By understanding your business we can focus your site on how YOU sell to YOUR customers. We can help you provide those customers with just the information they need to make an informed purchasing decision. In addition, we will help you understand how your competition does business. There is value in understanding the techniques of a successful competitor or company in a similar business.

Well Conceived Design

One glance at your home page is all it should take for your visitors to know about your core business and products. Studies have shown that you have 3 seconds to load your site and capture a visitor’s attention before he/she moves on. A clean, uncluttered design helps achieve that goal.

Other concepts we use include:

Above-the-fold: The most important items appear toward the top of the page and are typically viewed on a 17 inch monitor (1024 by 768). That generally means you have a space of 985 by 530 pixels to get your most important message across.
Clear navigation: Being able to get around your website without getting lost is important in the interest of keeping users at your site long enough to make a purchasing decision. Structuring the site with definable topic areas goes a long way towards creating great navigation.
Site structure: The structure of the site is created using an easily understandable framework. Since the site structure becomes the URL (in static websites) a good structure could even improve search engine ranking.

Standards-Based Code

W3C maintains recommended standards regarding markup, images, embedded content and more. We write all our XHTML, CSS, AJAX, RSS and JavaScript to adhere to those sections of the standards that apply across all browsers and platforms.

Cascading Style Sheets

Cascading style sheets (CSS) allow the design of the site to be separated from the content of the site. It is a key element in standards-based website design. Your style sheet loads with the first pages visited from your site, stays in the browser cache and does not need to be downloaded again, saving time and bandwidth. We design websites using style sheets to give you these benefits:

Faster design and maintenance: Instead of having to keep track of and change every instance of an HTML tag, CSS allows us to change the whole site by just making a few modifications to the CSS file.
Improve content to XHTML ratio: By removing markup and positioning tags from the page, the readable content to total HTML ratio is increased. This ratio is one of the minor factors considered by modern search engines when determining page ranking.

Search Engine Optimization

Good search engine optimization goes hand in hand with good website design. You need to know how to do both to really succeed. No matter what some search engine optimization companies would have you believe, there is no “instant answer” for getting great results. Google says that if you make the best website you can with the most useful content, then quality links to your pages will grow and your ranking will improve. But there are design and code rules that you can follow to improve your ranking. That is where we come in. We know and use all the "common sense" approaches with every design. This includes everything from properly titled documents and well thought out keywords and content to the adept use of meta-tags and CSS