Design

Site usability is of paramount importance – users should be able to quickly fulfil their goals in interacting with the site as simply and effectively as is possible. For the majority of projects, where information dissemination is a key requirement, we won’t break established web design conventions.

Utilising top level aesthetic design guidelines captured during the requirement gathering stage we design attractive and intuitively structured websites for our clients. Using CSS (style sheets) and XHTML throughout, allows users to access information quickly and accurately. WORKSsitebuilder will create an extensible site structure (hierarchy / navigation) to allow for the expansion of a website as administrative users add more pages and site content; e.g. addition of sub-levels of content / new sections as required.  Additionally paginated lists for article or news listings and search results are provided.

Content specific page templates – basic and advanced templates are designed to contain particular content types and listings. Site design also relates to the layout of the site in terms of navigation and presentation format. All design work follows best practice standards to ensure accessibility, usability, and optimisation for search engines.

Design Standards

Best practice standards are followed and WORKSsitebuilder site development conforms to accessibility, usability, and design guidelines:

  • Best practice in site design (W3C compliance, appropriate use of web technologies, XHTML strict and CSS).
  • Create an easy to use and accessible (WAI and BOBBY compliant) user interface that meets Disability and Discrimination Act requirements.
  • Ensure the site front end is optimised for search engine indexing, to ensure increased site exposure.
  • Cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility; as standard we design for the latest versions of Internet Explorer (5.5 to 7 on Windows); Firefox; Safari; Opera; Netscape. (Additional browsers can be designed and tested for however this will add additional design overhead).
  • Enforced addition of alternative (alt) text on all images and links ensures site accessibility as admin users upload new content to the site.