Web Design & Development Overview - Part I

By Author: Mark Furuta
Total Articles: 273
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There are more than 40 billion websites on the Internet but only a few stand out from the crowd -how did the webmasters did it? By implementing SEO, marketing, branding techniques just to name a few. The process of creating a website and turning it into a very popular equivalent profitable one is long because the competition is fierce and only the strong ones survive.

The main components of every quality built website are:

1. Strategy & Marketing;
2. Branding & Creativity;
3. E-Commerce;
4. Custom Application Development;
5. Search Engine Optimization;

The first component is about setting up a strategy and then market it. The internal analysis of every existing site must be done in order to point out the pros and cons, what needs to be changed as well as what things should be left. The main idea behind this first step is to create a solid plan of website management. The planning must include a very detailed map generation, a process flow creation and an overall consulting as well as reports for executing the established plans. Another major step must be the market analysis ...
... in order to establish the competitors, the custom patterns as well as the conversion trends that will change the market in a significant way.

The second component is about creating or developing an identity which is very important in order to differentiate from the rest of the rivals. Basically here we include business cards, logos, envelope design and letterheads. Interactivity is crucial to maintain the business-client relationship that is why full flash environments are the way to go these days in order to attract clients. Adding fully interactive banners and forms, flash videos will make the site more appealing.

In order to further increase the appeal of any website; webmasters include video demonstrations, flash videos, music, voice as well as attractive labels that stand out. Let's not omit the basics: buttons, icons, and toolbars and so on, these too need to be appealing to the eye.

We will leave the third and fifth component to the second part of our article as they are considered by many the most important components of any website, regardless of content or target.

Moving on to the fourth and last component we will be reviewing in this first part of the article, when choosing to hire a company to build or customize a site you have the possibility to choose the programming environment so that when the time comes to do further modifications, the accessibility will be very high. Not all companies offer choices but the ones that do usually allow their customers to choose .NET, PHP or FLEX/RIA. The first one is designed for the Windows servers; the second one is for UNIX/LINUX while the latter is for FLEX applications that interact with all database structures. Some typical custom application development solutions include the following:

1. Membership based;
2. Social networking;
3. Marketplace & directory;
4. Bidding & matching;

As you can see, a website can be very complex, implementing such techniques will improve the quality and optimization of the website, making it more popular among visitors which are exactly what the owners are looking for as more visitors means more sales. We will continue to review the third and fifth components in the second part of our article. Stay tuned.

About Author: Mark Furuta is the manager of www.digicato.com where visitors can find web design services from a company located in Sacramento.