Our Web Site Design Process

At Alan Enterprises, we work extra hard at designing pages that promote not only our clients products and services, but also their business's personality, the intangibles that bring customers in the door. We do this by focusing on the fundamentals of web site creation. We focus first on:

SEARCH ENGINES, LOAD TIME, LAYOUT, TEXT and NAVIGATION

Then we look at:

BACKGROUNDS, CUSTOM GRAPHICS, PHOTOGRAPHY,
FLASH ANIMATION and ONLINE VIDEO

Then, after the site is all done, we heavily promote the site through our own directory, myhometownlinks.com. This popular internet directory receives thousands of visitors every day! This is an extra that you will not receive anywhere else!

Search Engines:
We then design the site from the ground up with the search engine positioning in mind. This is not done as an afterthought. You cannot consistently position yourself into the top 20 search spots by treating search engines as an afterthought.

There is more to search engines than just registration. Many firms promote registering you on 200 or more search engines. Our philosophy is - who cares if you are registered on Uncle Joe's search engine if you show up in last place on "Google" or one of the other major search engines. Our goal is to make your site show up in the top twenty search results on the major search engines. This is what we call "Search Engine Maximization." There is much preparation involved to accomplish this.

Most firms design their sites to look pretty without giving any thought to the search engines until after the site is finished. This is a critical mistake. It will only be by pure luck that anyone will ever find you with the search engines when your site is designed this way.

We start out by investigating the activity of key phrases that people will use to find your site. We then take the phrases that have the most activity (lots of people using those phrases in their search engine queries) and design the site with those phrases in mind.

We do all of our coding by hand in "notepad" to give us an additional upper hand with the search engine maximization process rather than using a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) software program. By doing it this way, we have total control over the HTML tags that are being used. (Note: We are not talking about "META TAGS" here. This is a completely different subject and we do use them.) There are multiple HTML tags that will give the same visual effect. However, the search engines will weight a page differently depending on which tags were used. Two pages that look exactly the same visually can have dramatically different results depending on which tags were used. Some of the more popular WYSIWYG software programs on the market don't even use the tags that will give your site the highest ranking.

This is not a guessing game. This takes a lot of research and a lot of work. In the end though, we think you will agree with us in that the extra effort is worth it.

Load Time:
The one thing that will drive people away from your site quicker than anything is a home page or first page that takes forever to load. We understand this and strive to make all of our pages load quickly, with special emphasis on the first page. We save the larger graphics for inside the site and we try to place them as low as possible on the page. This gives the graphic time to load while the viewer is reading the text up above. By doing this, more often than not, by the time the viewer scrolls down to the graphic it has fully loaded.

Many times when you go to a page it seems like the loading has been going on forever and there still isn't anything to see on the page. This is because the designer didn't "size" the graphics in the coding, so the browser has to wait until they are fully loaded before it can place the text around them. We size all of our graphics in the coding. This enables the browser to know where to put the text even before the graphic has loaded - thus the text will come up almost instantly when you go to a page.

Still other times a page will come up quickly except for one graphic. It may appear to be a small graphic, but if you right click on it "to view graphic" in Netscape or to "to show picture" in Microsoft Internet Explorer, more often than not you will see that it is many times larger than it is appearing to be on the page. What is happening here is the designer used the HTML coding to resize the graphic rather than take the time to resize it in a graphics program. This results in a much larger than needed file size to be downloaded. We size all of our graphics to the size we want in a graphics program at the highest resolution possible and then save them in smaller and smaller file sizes until there is a noticeable difference to the viewer and then we back up to the next larger file size. This is optimizing the graphics for the web - minimum file size with maximum quality.

In addition to the graphics, another area that will slow down the load time is the size of the HTML file itself. An HTML file that was created using a WYSIWYG software program will often be more than twice the size of a file that is hand coded with absolutely no difference to the viewer. The only person a WYSIWYG software program benefits is the webmaster. It makes the webmasters job much easier. For everyone else, there are no advantages, only disadvantages.

Only by taking the extra time to do the above procedures are you able to minimize load time while maximizing the viewer's experience.

Layout:
When we lay out a site, there are many variables that we take into consideration; browsers, screen size, load time, corporate identity, use of white space, organization of content, fonts, color, and of course, the targeted end user.

We start with the corporate identity. As much as possible, the theme and style used by the client in their other marketing efforts (business cards, brochures, newspaper ads, magazine ads, billboards, television commercials) should be projected from the web site as well. There should be a continuity between all of the various marketing mediums.

Next, there is the initial "snapshot" that the viewer sees. This is the first screen of information a person sees before they scroll down. It needs to convey a corporate image and then create a desire in the viewer to continue on into the site for more information. This needs to all be done without looking cluttered while still drawing the viewer into the site. This is where the effective use of fonts (type, size and color), white space, graphics and background all come into play. This is complicated even more by the fact that unlike television, how a page looks on our computer screen is not necessarily how it will look on yours. The layout is affected by the browser (Netscape, Microsoft Internet Explorer) you use, the version of the browser you use, the size of your screen, your screen settings (800 by 600, 1024 by 768, 1280 by 1024, etc.), the color resolution you are using (16 color, 256 color, true color) and the fonts that you have loaded onto your system.

Many designers, because they have sophisticated systems with large monitors (19" or larger) lay out their pages to look the best on their screens and then use a "pre-format" command to "freeze" everything into place. This results in people with smaller monitors (such as the 13" or 14" commonly found on notebooks that are becoming more and more popular) having to scroll not only up and down, but also left to right to see the whole page.

Then there are designers who go to the other extreme, designing their pages to look best on a smaller monitor. They will often create a background with a dark strip down the left side that is very decorative but that text is not legible on, and then have a light part fill up the rest of the screen for the text to flow on. Unfortunately, many times they do not make this graphic wide enough to fill a large monitor, so what happens is that it "tiles" or repeats itself with the dark strip coming down 2/3 of the way across the screen with the text running directly across it.

At Alan Enterprises, we go to extra lengths making sure the sites we design look good on all computer screens regardless of size or configuration. We also make extensive use of white space and various font sizes and colors to make the information easier to digest. With browsers affecting how a page looks, we check our work in all of the major browsers to make sure everything is showing up properly for everyone. It takes a lot of extra effort checking out our designs on various size screens and with different browsers, but we believe the end result is worth it.

Text:
People surf the web primarily for information. So always remember, content is King! With that in mind, we have some of the best writers in the industry writing the creative text that will bring customers in through your doors. We never lose sight of the fact that the primary reason to have a web site is to make the cash register ring. Others may say you need it to be leading edge, to be with it, to be in vogue. We say you need it to bring in more customers. That is our primary objective. If we do not think we can help you reach that objective, that the internet is not the appropriate place for you to advertise, we will tell you so.

Navigation:
This is the one item that a lot of web-site designers seem to give no thought to what-so-ever, throwing in hyper-links any old place. When people are thinking about how to move from one page to another, they are not thinking about your product or service. In fact, if they become frustrated over the difficulty involved in moving about your site, this frustration may manifest itself in negative feelings toward your company and product or service as a whole.

We have designed a comprehensive navigation button format that is semi-standardized. This enables people to easily navigate our pages without having to think about it. When we say we have a semi-standardized format, we are not saying that our pages all look the same. Far from it. What we are saying, is that like an automobile, the steering wheel, brake pedal and gas pedal are always in the same place. You can jump out of a BMW into a Ford Escort and not give a second thought as to where those three items are. No one however would ever confuse a BMW with a Ford Escort. So it is with our pages. Because of their design, people may navigate through them second naturedly giving their full attention to the content.

Backgrounds:
The background (wallpaper or stationary) is one of the most important elements of a successful web-site. It must convey the image the client wants to project. It must be clean and it must be seamless with no tell-tale breaks in the repeating pattern. It must project the image without being overbearing. Text must be easily legible. After all, it is the background - not the focal point. The background is often the most challenging part of the page to create. No matter how good the rest of the page is, if the background is a flop, the whole site will be a dud.

For corporate sites such as this one, a solid color background is best. The color of the background depends on the amount of text that needs to be read and the image the company wants to project. If there is an extensive amount of text that needs to be read, the color needs to be extra easy on the eyes. If you expect people to print your page to read offline, we recommend that you stay away from black or dark backgrounds with white text. Most people will end up with a blank sheet of paper when they print one of these pages. They will need to reconfigure there printers to print that type of page and nine times out of ten it is not going to happen.

For sites that need to promote more of an artsy or elegant kind of feel, a background with a soft pattern is recommended. Excellent examples of this are the Wooden Angel Restaurant and the Willows Inn.

Corporate sites can have their logo or some other relevant item incorporated into the background, but great care must be taken to make sure that it does not take away from the corporate feel of the site. A good example of this is AMSI, Inc.

Custom Graphics:
Custom graphics can help to set the emotional tone of your web site. At Alan Enterprises, we have some of the most talented graphic artists in the industry. The following is a small sampling of custom graphics that we created for The Unified-View.

Click Here for more examples of custom graphics.

Photography:
Alan Enterprises is one of the few Internet Web Site development concerns in the tri-state area that does their own in-house professional photography. When appropriate, we use rich, beautiful photography in abundance.

Summary

Fundamentals:
At Alan Enterprises, we are masters of the fundamentals. For long term success on the web, we know that mastery of the fundamentals is where it is at. So give us a call at 724-266-5230 or e-mail us for a free no obligation consultation and our web masters will create the site of your dreams for you!

Box 336
Ambridge, PA
15003

724 - 266-5230 Phone
724 - 266-5287 Fax
E-Mail