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Websites and the World Wide Web - what are they?

The Web, or World Wide Web (www) is a series of linked (by hyperlinks) documents that can be accessed via the internet.

The web and internet are often confused but are actually two different things - the web is the network of documents that is hosted on the internet, which is a giant network of computers that can communicate with each other. The web as we know it came about in the late eighties, an invention of British physicist Tim Berners-Lee, then an employee of Cern in Switzerland. The first browser was made available to the public a couple of years later, allowing anyone in the world to access 'The Web'.

To access the internet, a user requires a computer, an internet connection and a program known as a browser, which allows your computer to interpret web resources. Viewing a webpage requires the user to type in a 'Domain name' or URL into a browser to go directly to any given site, or navigate to a Search engine. Search engines constantly crawl the web for any document they are able to access and record content from each of those pages, ranking them by how relevant and suitable they are to the user searching, based on what they're searching for. Originally, websites were only able to display information with limited functionality, but as the technology has grown, so has the capability of the web and websites to interact with users and to query any number of data sources, resulting in the web being the necessity in each of our lives it is today.

Could you imagine going a day without checking your social media accounts, making a purchase from one of the millions and millions of online shopping sites, or managing your daily admin via an email account or online banking? I certainly couldn't!

What does my business need to do in order to develop our own website and what will the process involve?

Every brilliantly successful website starts off with a brilliant idea. Whether your idea is to fill a gap in the market, a way for you to earn a living, whether it's to satisfy a great need, or whether it's a product, a service or some form of entertainment, the idea is the main reason that your website will succeed or die a slow painful death. You need passion, a great team, discipline, hard work, of course you need all the tools available to you that a website will afford you, but if your idea is a dud then if will ultimately all be for naught.

Once you've completed all your planning, you know what constitutes success and how you're going to measure it, you've done your market research and have the funding in place you can then think about how you're going to make the next step of anctually getting online. These days it is definitely a question of how, and when and not if - the internet has become so fundamental to the success of a business that not to have a website is not really an option! It's at this point that Maddison Creative Web Design Newcastle get involved and provide support with industry expertise, over a decade of launching websites, and an in-depth knowledge of what can be achieved, what works and what doesn't, best-practice, what you will require to acheive your goals, timescales and costings.

Once that's all been agreed, the next step is generally for us to come up with a site structure and a visual (usually flat without any functionality) to give you a feel of how the website will look. Once these two have been agreed and signed off, then we set to work combining the two, and hey-presto! You have yourself a website.

From a logistical perspective, to build, launch and maintain a website, you need a domain, ie www.something.com, space on a server which can be provided by a hosting company , you need your website files, and you need a program to allow you/us to transfer your files onto the server. and you need the files you create. Once they're up there then your site is live for ayone to enjoy.

We can take care of all of this - it's what we do. We've built relationships with some of the best hosting companies to get your the best deals of hosing and domains. We use cutting edge FTP software to transfer your files quickly and securely. All this is included in any of the packages you can get from Maddison Creative Web Design Newcastl, so you needn't worry about it.

If you already have hosting or a domain and you'd prefer to keep it, then it's not a problem - we can work with what's there, transferring over anything we need and talking to providers to ensure that everything we need for your site to work beautifully is there.

Web development and web design - what's the difference?

To build a fully functional, beautifully designed website traditionally requires a web developer and a web designed working together, to cover off all aspects of the design and build. While it is true that a lot of developers are comfortable designing and a lot of designers are comfortable developing the two disciplines are distinctly different:

A web developer is primarily responsible for coding, server-side, in order to allow the website to function. This can include managing the server and the transfer of files and additionally some client-side scripting such as Javascript, but it is predominantly programming.

A web designed on the other hand is responsible for the aesthetics of the site, along with the user-journey and experience. This may also include client-side scripting such as Javascript and HTML, but it is traditionally about the design and layout of the page, imagery, colours, branding and user behaviour.

What are the benefits of advertising my business dynamically online via a website?

One of the great features of promoting your business via the web is that you can add to your site almost instantaneously. You could think of an idea for a promotion one lunchtime and but close of business it can be live, with little or no lead time and no costly printing to contend with.

Unlike printed media and traditional advertising methods, if you publish your website and you decide that your offer is no longer available, your prices need to change or you want to change your messaging, you can do it quickly, easily, and more importantly very cost effectively 'on-the-fly', allowing you to be as reactive and as responsive to market forces as you wish.

Similarly, if you have something time-sensitive you wish to communicate to your customer base, you can add it to your site where it can be made live immediately, and once it's no longer needed it can be taken down just as quickly.

You no longer need to scrap boxes and boxes of flyers, or have expensive TV or radio commercials remade. You simply contact your web manager/designer, let them know what the update is, and they will update hassle free. Should you have opted for a CMS (Content management system) website where you have the ability to update the content yourself, then it's even easier! You simply log in to the admin area, navigate to the page in question, edit your text, hit save and you're done!

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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