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HTML5 and the web - get your business seen by millions of potent

Web designers vs Web Developers

You may have heard the terms 'web designer' and 'web developer' and wondered what the difference is, if there's a difference at all. Web design and web development are two different disciplines: A web designer will typically deal with the 'front end', which includes the visual aspect of a website, the HTML and the user experience, or UX.

The web developer will be responsible for the 'back-end' which means they will write server-side scripts that result in any functionality the wbsite might have. There is overlap though, and often a designer will be capable of developing and the developer will be happy designing.

The web - what is it and how do I access it?

The World Wide Web or 'Web' for short is a network of web pages that can be accessed via a huge network of computers known as 'The Internet' (note the difference - the two work together to allow people to access online resources, but are not the same thing!). The internet allows computers to connect with each other and display content from one (a server) on your connected device.

'The Web' was born in the mid-1980s, the brainchild of Tim Berners-Lee, a physicist then working for Cern, and was conceived as a way of sharing resources remotely via hyperlinked documents. It was launched to the public in 1991 along with the first 'browser', a program that interprets web code and presents it in a user-friendly way, allowing anyone to access any of the documents linked via 'The Web'.

To access the web and all of its bounty, you need a device capable of running a browser, a browser itself, such as Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox or Safari and an internet connection. To view a website page, someone with all of the above needs to open their browser and type in the 'domain name' or URL (uniform resource locator) into the 'address bar' to go directly to that website, or if they don't know the URL, or to browse a number of websites relating to what they're looking for, they would navigate to a 'Search Engine', Google or Bing for example.

Search engines are programs that continually index what's available on the web, using small programs knows as 'spiders' or 'robots' to scour the web for any files they can find, reporting back on their content and other information contained in those files (webpages, images & other documents) and the search engine then records that information and uses it to categorise websites, ranking them on their relevance and quality in order to decide which sites to show you when you search for any given 'search term'.

Originally, webpages were limited in what they could do, and were simply a way of sharing information with limited interactivity - a far cry from today where they are fully immersive and an integral part of each of our lives, to the point where internet access is now considered a basic human right!

What are the advantages of making use of a website to promote and market my business online?

One advantage of promoting and marketing your business by means of a website is that you can promptly and easily make updates to your online promotional material. Unlike print marketing and advertising you can come up with a new marketing initiative in a meeting at 9am, by lunchtime it can be live and you will know whether or not it's likely to be a success by the time you go home at half five, changing or updating your offering the next morning should you wish. You can also react to market forces or opportunities in the market, being among the first movers when an opportunity presents itself. Print advertising simply wouldn't allow you to do this, the lead times being significantly greater.

It also reduces the amount of time and money you spend on outdated campaigns. Once your offer changes or is no longer available, with a print campaign all of your posters and flyers that you've painstakingly had produced at great expense need to go in the bin, with great cost to you and a significant cost to the environment. With a website, you simply get in touch with your webmaser/web designer/website manager and they will quickly and cleanly make the change for you online, and you are ready to go with absolutely no waste. And should you have chosen to have a content managed website (CMS) it's even easier - you simply log in to your site and make the changes yourself.

How do we go about building a website, and what web design is involved?

The process that ends up with a successful, beautifully designed, fully functional, well marketed and promoted usually begins with a great idea. Whether this idea is a product or service, or something to plug a gap in the market, a way of making money or something that entertains people - this idea is the key to making your project a success. You need to have a realistic expectation of what success looks like and a plan of how you're going to get there. You could have the best website in the world, and if your idea is a duffer, it's going to flop.

Once you have this idea and plan, an idea of how you're going to measure success, backed up with a good bit of market research you can think about how you're going to push your idea online. (The internet has become that significant that to not have a website in this day and age is not an option!). That's when Maddison Creative web design Newcastle comes in. We can help you with expert industry knowledge of what works and what doesn't. What can be achieved, and how we can achieve it. What you're going to need, how long it will take and how much it's all going to cost. We will generally then come up with a site structure, with a number of levels, and a flat design/visual/creative. Once these two key elements have been agreed then we set to work putting the two together and voila! You have a website. The hard work doesn't stop there though. Many people think that you build a website, and you can then sit back and watch it work its magic year after year. Unfortunately it's not like that - a website (and its search engine performance) are a living, breathing animal. You have to tend to it, update it, improve it, add to it and love it, otherwise it won't perform to it's maximum and you won't get most from it.

From a practical point of view, you need a domain (an address for your website so people can find it), you need a hosting company to provide you with space on one of their servers (a computer that you can access via the internet) and you need the files you create, nicely arranged into folders. Once you have all these, you attach your domain name to your server, and software that allows you to FTP (File transfer protocol) or upload your files onto your server. Once they're up there then the world can see your site and you're off!

Maddison Creative web design Newcastle can arrange all of this for you - we have great relationships with a number of hosting companies, and we use the latest FTP software, so it's not something you need to worry you - it's included in all new website packages. If you have an existing website and you like to keep the domain name and/or hosting provider, that's not a problem either, we can simply use your existing setup to upload the new site to.

Can you update and develop my existing website, built by someone else?

Yes, not only can we build you a website from scratch, but we can also work with what you already have to increase performance, update any branding you might have, or bring the technology up to speed. Essentially we can give it a new lease of life!

How have mobile devices influenced web design, and what are responsive websites?

Two in every three minutes spent online are spent by users using a handheld mobile device (phone/tablet), while thirteen percent of adults in the United Kingdom browse the web only on their mobile phone, whereas 11 percent browse the web only on their desktop which highlights the trend in the diminishing reliance on desktop computers in favour of mobile devices. Over the last two years, tablet use to browse the internet has increased by around 33%, whereas in the same time frame mobile use in browsing the web has increased by almost 80%, whereas desktop use in browsing the web has diminished.

This has influenced the way that web designers are now required to build websites. Because of the high likelihood that someone who arrives at your site will be using a mobile device, it is now the norm to design for 'mobile first', which means that everything functions and renders beautifully on a mobile device first and foremost, and then secondarily we will consider how it looks and feels on a desktop. It seems like a long time ago that companies were happy for users to browse the full version of their website on their smartphone, having to scrollabround the page and zoom into areas they were interested in looking at in closer detail, struggling to navigate using tiny text hyperlinks.

One practice, when smartphones were becoming popular, was to create a totally separate version of your site for mobiles, but as technology has developed it is now possible to use css to adapt your website to the device it is being viewed upon, so the user is effectively seeing exactly the same page irrespective of their device, it is just rendered differently because it is pulling in different styles. A website built in this way is known as 'responsive'.

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