Web site Design Nottingham

Designing a web site isn't always as easy as it should be, what should be a simple task often turns out to be a lot more complicated than expected, and getting the site to look the same in as many different browsers as possible is the what makes it really difficult. People will arrive on your site using browsers such as IE, FireFox, Safari, AOL, Opera or perhaps from a mobile phone or PDA and getting them all to see the same page layout is not easy. Not only are there a are a never ending list of new browsers on the market there are ongoing changes to technical standards. To have any chance at all of delivering a consistent looking web page to your clients it must start with an Xhtml compliant and error free structure.

Semantics and accessibility are an increasingly important part of any site and for that reason Css has replaced the use of tables which made developing a page very quick. A set of well constructed pages will be easier to manage when your site starts to grow. It is always best to work from validated templates, it may take a while to create them but the investment will pay many times over.

To make the task of designing your web easier everything you create whether it be xhtml, css, php or javascript the code should always be minimised and flexible so the same piece of code can be reliably used over and over in different parts of the site.

Templates will make sure that every page in its group has a common look or feel about it.

Minimal code will make your pages both consistent and easy to manage. The content or structure will need updating eventually and less code means less work.

A few key pointers and things to consider.

• Create wire frames to define the layout and content areas
• Create templates based on your wire frames
• Validate your templates with w3c.org
• Create any global php and java functions and style sheets
• Create database tables and a global connection string to it
• Reduce everything above into small manageable chunks
• Imagine how google sees each page

Experience always helps, but try to think globally and in groups as even a 10 page web can become an administrative nightmare if not well planned from the start.