Web Site Design and Maintenance

Your web site is an essential communication element for your business or organization in today?s digital environment. You want to maximize its impact, value and utility for your customers through effective web site design and maintenance. Whatever your size or demographic, basic good practices for web site design and maintenance can help you create and maintain your most successful web site.

Professional Web Site Design

Whether you?re designing a brand-new web site or redesigning an outdated one, your web site design should create an attractive professional appearance that establishes your organization?s brand presence on the web. This can run the gamut from subdued and professional to bright and wacky, depending on your product, service and customer base. Good web site design for a professional engineering firm will differ dramatically from that for a preschool or teen music site, but every web site needs to be appropriate to and work well for its audience.

There are elements common to all good web site design. A professional web site design should:

• Provide fast downloading.
• Be consistent and easy to follow from page to page.
• Identify the organization on every page, with contact information.
• Use a header that establishes the unique identity of the organization and its customers. It is often wise to use photos of real people that customers can relate to.
• Minimize space devoted to design elements, putting the focus on content, not web site design.
• Make content as readable and easy to view as possible. Black on white is best for web site design; don?t yield to the temptation to consider it boring. Patterned backgrounds and colored type can distract from the content.
• Offer top-level navigation to orient the users, telling them where they are and giving links on every page to main content sections.
• Use color to distinguish web site design regions.
• Be easy to use, following recognizable web site design standards, while still creating a unique and dynamic experience.

Efficient Web Site Maintenance

Keeping a web site up to date is vital in the ever-changing world of the web. While customers may overlook an outdated printed piece, they expect a web site to be correct at the moment of viewing.

Good organization is the essential key to web site maintenance ? in layout and design and in file management:

• Your directory structure should follow the top-level structure of the web site for easy maintenance.
• Place documents to be linked in organized document folders, by subject if needed.
• Bring images together in one spot, so they can be easily referenced and maintained.

Separating the web site maintenance functions of content contributors from that of web site technical experts ? such as programmers or HTML developers ? can make web site maintenance most efficient. As most web site maintenance involves content changes ? special offers, product and pricing changes, newsletters, new personnel, address changes, etc. ? it is wise to give access to content contributors, who know what needs to be updated and can revise content without involving the technical staff. This access can be isolated from technical elements, so that content can be updated without affecting the graphic layout or the navigation of the site. With the proper software, such as the Freedom web site maintenance system, content contributors use simple word processing skills to update, with no need for complex HTML or FTP coding. This content/technical separation preserves the technical integrity of the site while preventing a bottleneck at the technical juncture and giving you a web site that remains fresh and relevant.