We perform website design and development in our Lancaster, PA facility. Although we work from Lancaster, we have the ability to work for anyone at any location in the world.

A word about website design and the internet...

The Internet is not just about dot-com start-up companies creating pretty pictures for web surfers, offering the best deals, and offering up the obligatory flash animation. The Web is being used as a tool to access and do business with established companies regardless of their size. Purchasers are utilizing the Internet to research and compare products and services before they spend their money both at the national and local levels. Having a Web presence is about getting information out to people and making it easier and less time consuming for them to make decisions.

A small company may not think it will profit from having a Web presence, especially if it only works locally and already has a yellow pages advertisement, or relies on word-of-mouth (we all have that). These are all fine and dandy, but they don't provide customers with the depth of information that may make them feel more informed about you and your company. Let's say you spend $2000.00 on a yellow pages ad that reaches 487,322 people (the total population of our county). It will cost you .004 dollars to reach each individual. Let's say you spend $800 on a website. According to a survey taken in 2002, there are about 183,000,000 who surf the web in the US alone (over 605 million worldwide). So it will cost you .0000004 dollars to reach each individual (that is about 40 cents per million people). Remember, this is not just an ad either - it is a portal to your company...just as if someone was walking in your front door. So do it right!

A Well Designed Website

A well designed, informative website gives a potential customer insight into your company and allows them to establish a trust before they contact you. Some questions to ask:

• What is it that attracts people to a particular website?
    

• What makes a particular website successful...what will my ROI be, and will it be measureable? 
   

• Why do we need a website...How can a website help our business or make it grow? 
   

• Why is it that people revisit a particular website? 
   

• How can you get people to "bookmark" your website and become a loyal visitor. 
   

• Is it form over function, function over form, glamour and glitz, or the ideology behind a website that makes it work? 
   

• How can we make our site easy to use for our visitors and also maintain relevance with search engines? 

A little bit of everything in the right proportions goes together to form a good website. There are so many types of people with so many different viewpoints that it is  impossible to create a site that attracts each and every one of them. However, it is possible to design for the masses and leave a large percentage of people with a good feeling when they visit your site. 

Key Concepts

There are some key concepts that should be considered when developing your website that will make your site easy to navigate, easy to find, and attractive to visitors. 

• Before you even think about layout, colors, navigation, etc. Make sure you know what it is you want your site to do. What will it accomplish? You need to have some goals in place in order to effectively create a site that will work. Try writing out an action plan that defines your target audience, the information you want to disperse to that audience, how you want the visitor to interact with the site, and how to align your site against competitors.
   

• Don't clutter your website with meaningless graphics. Make sure your graphics compliment your website and don't take over the website. Long load times or too little information are the downfalls of many websites. Nowadays, content is the key to a successful site.
   

• In most cases, animations should be very minimal if the website contains significant text. There is nothing more annoying than trying to view a website page with an overpowering animation tugging your attention away from what you are trying to read. However, animations are fun for the website visitor and can help create a successful website, but only if they serve a meaning or provide some call to action.
    

• Keep in mind certain ADA requirements and try and remember that there are customers out there that have trouble seeing and hearing. Some people also disable image viewing for faster surfing. Website visitors should be able to get all of the basic information they need from the text only or be able to read a message saying they can get additional information if they enable image viewing. Maybe offer larger fonts or downloadable audio of key information.
   

• Navigation through the website should be easy and consistent, never taking more than a few seconds to locate information. 
   

• Spend a lot of time on real content creation. Give very useful information for both the site visitor and the search engines.
   

• Make the experience personal. It is not necessary to make the person think they are reading some official "legal" document, with heavy jargon and corporate babble. Give them information that is easy to read and conveys a true sense of what you are trying to get across. Invite a visitor to your website as you would a guest into your home. 

So... It's a no-brainer...
 
Net-Architech will make your Internet presence special, unique, and useful. Designing a successful website is a challenging but very rewarding experience. We want you to be as excited as we are about creating a website that both your company and ours can be proud of.

If you would like to discuss the scope of website design or proceed with obtaining a proposal for our services, please contact us via email or simply give us a call. You will be speaking to someone who is knowledgeable in the industry and wants to help people out for the sake of just helping out. This may be against the grain of the business world, but have no doubt that we strive to be the best service-oriented company there is.