A good site will need to be the following:

informative - It needs to tell the visitor what service is provided or what items are sold, contact details, and your location if you are if you are a bricks and mortar shop.
If you are a manufacturer it may be an idea you include downloadable PDF's of instruction booklets or technical specification sheets. Any frequently requested information that can be given should be.

clear - Readability is important. There is little point in having decent information if it is hidden with gaudy background images and animated gifs.

up-to-date - People come to your site to find out something specific. If it looks as though your site has not been updated in months they may think your prices are out of date or even question if you are still in business.

easy to navigate - If people cannot find what they are after they will leave and they may never come back. There is an unwritten rule which states that you should not have to click more than three times to get to where you want to go. Whilst this is not set in stone it is a good guideline to follow.

Modern web design is a minefield of complex terms, good practice rules and ever changing technology.
To help with understanding these terms we have written a brief guide outlining a few of the things we need to consider when designing for web.

Search engine optimisation
Often referred to as SEO, search engine optimisation is a specialty in itself. It involves understanding how the various sites such as Yahoo, Google et. al. rank pages and writing the code accordingly to get the highest possible placing on their sites.

Flash
Macromedia (now belonging to Adobe) Flash is a great way of getting multimedia-rich content into a web page. Loading screens help the end-user to let them know the page is loading and how long to wait.
However Flash is a fickle beast and should only really be used in special circumstances. It is great for large companies pushing a specific brand or product such as McDonalds or Coca-cola but not so good for general web sites.
Why? The main reason is search engines cannot read the text in a flash file making the page-ranking suffer. There are some workarounds but they are crude and messy.
Another quite important reason is some companies block Flash files rendering the page blank (or unnavigable if Flash is used for the menu).
Flash is referred to in more detail in the Other section.

Browsers and standards
Designing for web is not as easy as designing for print as there are many variations in how browsers render the page. There are standards set in place by the W3c - The World Wide Web Consortium. Unfortunately Microsoft have decided that Internet Explorer should not follow the rules, particularly with regard to CSS.
For more information on what CSS is and how it works see here.
CSS is great for designers but IE's failure to comply with the rules means workarounds and careful designing need to be done to ensure the page views correctly in Internet Explorer and Firefox, the two main browsers used. To add to the fun IE6 is very different to IE7. For example IE6 does not handle PNG image files with alpha channels, something this site relies on a lot.

Websites need a server to be hosted on. If you have your own hosting already arranged that is fine. We can design your new site and then send you the files. Maintainence of the site will be your responsibility as we will have no access to the server. We will update the site if needed though. If you do not have hosting we can now host your site for you on our fully supported, professional servers. If you do have existing hosting you may find we are cheaper. As always, the cost may be less but the quality is not.
Click here for more details.

If you have a product to sell the internet opens up a whole new customer base. We can provide an online catalogue with full stock control and ordering capabilities. Integrated seamlessly into an existing site, a new site or it can even be the entire website by itself. As an aministrator you will have full control over the content
Click here for more details.