What You See Isn't All You Get

A Comment on Sensible Site Design

Web Services Research Paper
Jack Zeal, Lead Developer

If concepts such as "modularity" or "standards-compliance" seem more abstract and complex to grasp than simply describing colors and text, you're not alone. Without strong technical knowledge, your website's design is considered solely in terms of the look and feel visible from the outside.

But imagine saying to your auto dealer, "I don't care if it's all welded solid on the inside, as long as it's RED!"

You're going to be spending a lot of money on your website.both directly on development and marketing, and indirectly by investing your company's image and future in it. By looking beyond the visible design of the site, you can not only improve your site's chances in the search engines, but save money over the short and long terms.

Search Engines are Blind

Research Trends Ecommerce, Web Design, and Development:
Over the years you've seen many gorgeous sites. Odds are, you'll reference some of them as models when you ask for professional web development. But if your dream site is an all-Flash package with translucent menus and graphical text only slightly less elaborate than a stained-glass window, I'll bet you didn't find it via Google. Often, look-driven sites make heavy use of content wrapped in graphics or as Flash or Java applets. While attractive, these are completely unreadable to a search engine. When it comes time to promote your new flashy site, you're at an automatic disadvantage. Additionally, these plugins tend to cause problems for users with limited-capability web browsers, like mobile phones, game consoles and WebTV units, screen readers for the blind, and even regular users on slow connections who won't sit and wait for video or Flash. While some developers honestly believe they're showing a compelling image for their clients by overusing these tricks, they're neglecting the true audience of the site: the customer you're trying to attract.

Needs Change

Few websites are static, yet many website designs seem to assume they are. Over the course of a website's life, the company it represents will usually expand its product lines and contact methods. They may wish to go from simply catching user feedback to actively selling online or maintaining user-community forums. There are smart ways to handle change, but they need to be built in from the beginning.

Designing pages in a modular fashion will allow you to add extra pages in minutes instead of hours, and reduce wasted effort keeping repeated page components like navigation bars and headers in synch.

There's also a matter of choosing the right underlying technology. ColdFusion-based sites, for example, will require special support from the hosting company.often at an extra cost.and specially-trained developers, who are in short supply, compared with a similar PHP-based site. Those additional hassles over the long term have to be weighed against the benefits the technology provides.

Standards Shift

The late 2006 release of Internet Explorer 7 and the continued growth of Mozilla Firefox have clearly deliniated one fact: the browser marketplace isn't homogenous anymore. While it would take a psychic developer to figure out HOW the next browser coming along will break your site, good back-end design can keep it from becoming a crisis. Modular pages can ensure that you only have to fix a single copy of problematic code, even if it appears on many pages. Reasonable coding practices can avoid the use of browser-specific features and "legalities" of specifications. Clear, "self-documenting" code can be fixed later without having to decipher the last developer's twisted logic. These are not exceptional features to ask, and can actually help your developer save time and money on the initial product. But even innocuous requests-like deliberately making the code difficult to read to make it difficult to copy-can stymie these practices.

Do It Yourself

Even if you've got a professional web-development team on hire, there are times when it makes sense to do some light tending of your site yourself. Setting a sale in your shop area? Adding a new "latest news" blurb? Why pay a professional $150 an hour? If you design the backend right, you can make those changes right from the browser. But if you don't, you may be saddled with having to upload modified files, or worse yet, prying apart balls of Flash or manually hacking databases. Some developers may see bad design as a way to ensure future maintenance business. We see it as a scam.

Let Someone Else Do It

Odds are, you really don't want a completely custom web site, but you don't realise it now. Many of the complicated parts of modern websites, such as shopping carts and forums, can be implemented with ready-made components. By doing this, you achieve several major benefits:

Cost savings through rapid implementation
A proven, robust product from day one, avoiding embarrassing bugs on your brand-new site
A widely-used package will have the customer base necessary for support and add-on development. Even if you want something special, there's a chance someone has already developed or fixed it for his needs.
A familiar look-and-feel which may be comforting to easily confused or mistrusting customers

In many cases, the off-the-shelf solutions can be customized to look and feel exactly how you want, or with a few compromises. A smart web developer will ask you, "Is it worth $20,000 in development to build 100% of what you want from scratch, or will 98 percent of the features with a $300 off-the-shelf product do?"

Smart Choices

So how should sites be designed? Simple: Remember all sites have both a front and a back.

Decide what you'll want to change and even include later. Everything from site layout to what type of server gets used will depend on this, so always mention your plans ahead of time.
Think modular. Rearranging the navigation on every page may LOOK cool, but it's going to significantly increase maintenance costs.
Plan to use industry standard tools and languages. Don't just pick a technology because it sounds impressive or comes from a favoured vendor. Check wether it floats in the real world.
Research what problems have already been solved by off-the-shelf components.

Research paper and design of web pages:

-Jack Zeal graduated Summa Cum Laude with a B.S. in Computer Science, yet still cannot convince his brother that you don't save disc space turning off the 'archive' bit.