Affordable Custom WebSite Design
How can a custom website design help your business?
The first impression of your brand is your web site. Does your website design speak to its intended audience? Does your design effectively convey the strengths of your brand? Is your site built with future scalability in mind? Is it converting visitors to buyers? Does it meet your business needs? If not, think about a redesigned web site - one that is beautiful AND effective!
Lenox Web Design provides affordable, high quality and effective custom website designs for small businesses, non profits and churches. The website is custom designed to fit your needs exactly! We have offices in Massachusetts and new York City.
The design of a web site consists of a number of important factors that must be considered. You need to think about custom layout and composition; what colors do you want? Do they go together well?; What about texture. The proper use of typography/fonts is very important in getting your message across; the use of images illustrations and Flash are very important, not only to how your site is perceived but to how fast your site loads and for search engine optimization. Do you compress the images for fast loading?
Cascading styles sheets (CSS) give you much more control over the aesthetics of you site and provides many benefits. With CSS and XHTML, you can create exciting, effective and beautiful web sites. For some terrific examples, go to CSS ZEN Garden. There is a archived list of 210 (at last count) of beautiful web designs at http://www.mezzoblue.com/zengarden/alldesigns/. These designs show you what can be done with CSS, typography and images!
The Layout and the way the main menu is set up can affect the ability of the search engines to find you so search engine optimization (SEO) is important to keep in mind when you design the layout. It's hard to design the site first, add content and then go back later and SEO it. That is just backwards.
We expect and require your input on the creation of your site. Since you know your business better than we ever could, we look to you to provide the content and the photos/images. We will give you guidance on good copyrighting techniques for viewers as well as for search engine optimization.
At Lenox Web we believe your custom website should be a marketing tool for your company. Not only must it look good, but it must meet your organization's objectives. It must be effective and create new business opportunities. It also must be affordable. You don't need to spend a lot of money for a great website.
- If you are a business, does it generate new sales?
- If you are a non profit, does it generate new donations?
- If you are a church, does it increase your outreach and new members?
We build every website with search engine friendly architecture, the highest level of usability, and most important, with your goals in mind. We strive to give your web site a high search engine position by the latest in search engine optimization techniques and we make it affordable.
Your custom website must look the same in all browsers. Does it? When we build a site, we check the rendering in all major browsers. Some designers look at only one browser when designing a site. But you need to look at at least IE6, IE7, Safari, and Firefox. IE8 has only a 0.4% market share as of February 2009, so it is not a major force yet, but it will also need to be checked.. We do this because not all browsers render the HTML the same. In fact IE6, which still has 17.4% market share as of February, 2009, is notorious for this. The result is that your site may look good in IE7, but be a real mess in IE6 or Firefox.
It is widely accepted that fast-loading pages improve the user experience. If it loads too slow, the viewers will abandon your site. Also. Google's will soon incorporate landing page load time in the cost of your ad. Load time is the amount of time it takes for a user to see the landing page after clicking an ad.
To make sure that pages load fast, we compress all jpegs and we use small images on the pages. Linking to larger off-pages images is fine as the larger images are loaded in the background. Here is a link that spell out the best practices for speeding up your web site. We follow these practices.
An excellent reference source for anyone doing website design is the List Apart. They have tons of great articles and topics covering many subjects. It is also a good resource for clients doing research. Another great reference for both web designers and clients alike is the Digital Web Magazine. Especially their pages on web design.
