Website Design
Forty2 provides custom website design delivering World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards-compliant, W3C accessibility-compliant designs that are visually engaging whilst also remaining blazingly fast to load and easy to navigate. Our website is a good example of what we provide - fast to load, easy to navigate, accessible to the visually impaired and fully standards compliant. We consider these aspects of our custom website design critical to a successful website for the following reasons:
- Fast loading - leading market research shows that website users are not willing to wait more than 8.6 seconds for a website to load or more than 2 seconds if incremental loading is used with the remaining loaded within 30 seconds maximum. What happens if it takes longer to load? They leave and don't come back.
This website is typical of what we strive to deliver for our clients - using incremental loading, initial content and layout load time is under 1 second on 56K dial-up, with remaining visuals downloading in the background in under 20 seconds. After the first page load, all subsequent pages will load completely in under 1 second on 56K dial-up.
Interestingly, research shows that users are even more critical on retail E-Commerce load times, with only 4 seconds being the maximum wait time. Additionally, 75% of users turned away by slow performance will never return and 30% of those will form a negative impression which they will tell friends and family about. - Easy to navigate - it is vitally important that websites are easy to navigate and do not make the user hunt for content or have to learn how to use them. Tried and true navigation mechanisms, like the vertical-style menus on this site, work best, as they have become a standard and people know what to expect. When it comes down to it, users on a business website are there to find information or perform a transaction and really don't care so much about how pretty the site is - your business website is not a place for artiness to run rife unless, of course, your business is art.
- W3C standards-compliant. This is important for a number of reasons:
- future proofing the website so that as new browsers come to market we can be sure it will display perfectly. No re-design or re-development costs and downtime when the next Internet Explorer or Mozilla version comes out!
- readable without modification on many different browser devices such as mobile phones, Internet kiosks, text-to-speech readers as used by the vision-impaired and more. With mobile phones now starting to offer 3G Internet connectivity, more and more people are navigating the Internet on these miniature devices. Being able to adjust the visual display on-the-fly into a readable format on these tiny screens is imperative if your website is going to be viewable. Further, these devices use new browsers and, by writing to world-wide standards, we ensure these browsers understand the information in your website.
- naturally search engine optimised - much of the website design market still provides 'hacked' website designs, that is, designs that use website mark-up code (HTML) for visual elements that should ONLY be used to mark-up content to tell us more about the content - this content is a list, this content is a quote, etc. This results in our content - the reason users are on your website - being lost amongst meaningless display markup, making it much more difficult for search engine robots to understand, let alone us, the readers!
- Accessibility compliant - Section 508 and W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Web Content Accessibility Guidlines (WCAG) 1.0 Priority 1.0 compliant. This means people with vision impairment or other issues dictating different interaction mechanisms with your website are able to fully utilise your website. With legal precedent set in Australia in 2000 against no less than the Sydney Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games, it is only a matter of time before more and more businesses are sued for discriminating against people with impairments and disabilities. Importantly, if a website is done properly from the start, this doesn't add to the cost and avoids alienating a significant market.
Be sure to demand that your website passes this test. And, if your provider tells you not to worry - over 60% of Australians are on broadband, ask yourself - do I want to alienate 40% of my potential market? And that's ignoring that the truth is less than 25% of those so-called broadband users are on 2nd generation broadband or better.
