A good design needs:
A site needs to have a good appearance that will stick in a client's mind; it needs to be web standards compliant so that anyone and anything can view the site as you intended; and the textual content should be relevant and clear.
Doing all this ensures that visiting your site is a positive experience and will invite surfers back when they need more information, or even if they have some spare time to browse.
This is because by investing in something which is web standards compliant and by using cascading style sheets (CSS) you can have a site which is perfectly accessible to all internet users, irrespective of disability whether blindness, partial sight, colour blindness, deafness, keyboard or voice only users.
The Special Educational Needs and Disability Act 2001 Code of Practise requires all of these to be taken into account and by using standards compliant code you really don't have to panic that much, since you already have most of it covered whether having your page transposed into Braille or a text-reader describe an image on your site.
It also means that your site can have the same appearance whichever web browser you are using, whether you are looking at it using a brand spanking new voodoo PC, or a 10 year old machine buzzing on your desk or even a PDA or a WAP browser on a mobile phone.
By conforming to web standards, pages are also smaller in size and thus download faster on any internet connection. The makings for a happier web surfer :).
Apart from the obvious need for information to be relevant and good in quality and clarity; I suppose I can tell you something about the Welsh Language Board Grants for businesses in Wales.
The grant's purpose is to encourage the use of the Welsh Language in Welsh Businesses. This in turn does include the business' website. Therefore to be suitable for a grant, you need to have a site which encourages the use of Welsh, or simply a Welsh version of your site with equal weight as the English version.
The Welsh Language Board meets for applications for grants and I understand the closing date for applications this year is the 10th of September 2004.
Did I mention that I am fluent in Welsh?
I think it might be an understatement to say that I know graphics programs. I am very well versed in Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Corel Painter, CAD and am a good authority on networking graphics on many formats. Even if I do say so myself. ;)
Potential clients can easily turn away from a website if it is compliated to navigate or if the imagery and graphics just don't gel.
If you compare a site which has an immaculate corporate feel with pictures of joyful, smiling families and happy employees to that of one with token images of clip art dotted throughout the site: one will encourage a surfer to look more, the other will make the surfer bored and eventually lose their attention (and business).
I previously mentioned CSS as an element of web standards compliant coding. Apart from making pages smaller in size, formatting anything you can shake a stick at and permitting a website to have a cohesive and more finely finished experience; you can manipulate how the page is viewed in any media, including paper.
I have had a real hatred of trying to print a page from a website where half the text has fallen off the edge of the paper or where I get pages interleaved with almost blank sheets of paper. CSS allows formatting to be turned on and off depending on what format is being used. Have a look at this page when printed out or in a 'print preview', with thanks to CSS.
You can also change how this site is viewed by selecting alternative themes in the right-hand pane.
I think it also fair to mention an online menace which breaks a lot of rules if not handled properly. I talk of course of Macromedia Flash. It is an excellent tool to stream video and compressed audio to any platform that can handle it. If you have animation which is too big or visually obtrusive in any other format, it must be the best medium.
It does however fall short when trying to be as accesible as possible. It has little limitation to which platform it's running on, whether Linux, MacOS, Windows, etc.., but a jittery animation is certainly not a nice experience.
It does comply to Web Standards (that I keep droning on about) but the format stops it from being as accessible as it should be; unless you take all of this into consideration. For instance, an IBM Homepage Reader
The buzz word must be server-side scripting. Short of being cryptic, this enables the designer to actively manipulate the appearance or content on pages and to use every program and file to his or her disposal in the site.
For example, ASP, PHP, Perl and Python are languages that are supported on most servers. With them you can place a date on a page; choose to display random images; random colour schemes; actively include files; incorporate data from spreadsheets or databases; use external data to fill pages, make images, graphs or Adobe Acrobat Documents; customised error pages; secure password areas and files; give the site its own search function. By the by, I know these languages like the back of my hand.
With that last one - giving the site its own search function: there is a very cool way of piggy-backing on Google's search API. What I've shown in the Computing > Searching area of my minisite is an example of piggy-backing the Google search engine.
It is commonly accepted that the first thing surfers look for in a site is a search function. It is also commonly accepted that if a surfer cannot find what they're looking for in a minute or so, they're going to look at another site.
By piggy-backing, you have the full google engine working for you. Checking and suggesting spelling, finding relevant pages in order of importance. All in your site domain name (i.e. mydomain.co.uk), your site's formatting and style. It will not be apparent to visitors that you're using Google. You will just have impressed surfers that are using your search function.
The only catch is that you need to wait for your site to be indexed by Google. You cannot rush the process, whatever any website-indexing companies preach. If you try to, your extra submissions in fact get ignored by Google robots. You can get a premium method of indexing, but that's how it is.
Once the site has been indexed by Google, the search can be enabled and you have a fully searchable website. Other search engines also update their records from Google: so you will then be indexed by every search engine.
Yeah.