There’s a lot of really bad websites out there, and it’s understandable- a lot of clients don’t understand what their web company is doing. And really, a lot of web companies have no idea what they’re doing, either.

It’s especially hard for clients to understand what they’re getting from a web company when a lot of really poor design practices can easily be hidden. See, a lot of what makes a good website happens in the code. And people don’t look at code so much. It’s time consuming to work at the code level. So most web design companies don’t bother.

That’s a mistake, and the client who chooses a web design company without understanding the design and development process is almost certainly destined for failure.

We’re currently working on a new website for a client. Let’s call them Zelda’s Bakery, because we signed a nondisclosure for the client. Zelda hired us to take another web shop’s work and well, make it work. We’re not particularly fans of the look of Zelda’s site, but she loves it, and more importantly her customers love it.

The problem is, her old web design company implemented Zelda’s design in a really cruddy way. Sure, it looks like Zelda’s design. And it sort of works like she’d like it to. But the entire website consists of images and very little text. Additionally, her navigation system uses a ton of javascript that junks up and bloats the filesizes. Since so much of the site is image-based it’s really hard to update. And finally, they’re getting really bad search engine rankings. Google can’t “see” images.

Enter us.Zelda’s new website will look an awful lot like her old website. Which is what she wants. But it’ll now have a nice database back end. The extraneous javascript will be removed in favor of CSS for her navigation menu. We’ll use CSS tricks to minimize the amount of images used throughout the site, too. Some of those tricks involve really cutting-edge things like CSS Sprites. The site will be a lot easier to update, too.

Most importantly, the guts of Zelda’s new site will be extremely search engine friendly. Which, it turns out, makes it extremely friendly to users from all sorts of computing platforms- iPhones, Blackberry users, disabled users, etc. In fact, by taking the time to program Zelda’s website using standards-based solutions we’ll be making her site much more friendly for any user.

Which is really the first step towards making the website successful.

Technorati Tags:web standards, web design

We’ve completed the Dr. Pasternak’s Ear Rescue website. It’s a simple site, but it meets the client’s goal of creating an initial online presence for the product that supports and reinforces the branding. Of course, it is a website that follows web standards, so it’s very well-optimized for search engines. Visit the site at www.earrescue.com

Couch Cases is a show about a neurotic therapist who can’t follow her own advice. We had a blast in production, and now we’re releasing the website (in Beta form) to the public. The trailer is now online, along with cast & crew info, photo galleries, and more.

Visit the Couch Cases website. 

Enjoy!

We’ve been working on a new website for Couch Cases, and the process got me thinking about web design as it relates to video projects. Genius Monkeys was created to give our customers the ability to exploit the new opportunities where video and new media converge. And part of that mission involves website design and development.

By the way, our sister company, Empty Street Productions, handles a lot of our heavy lifting when it comes to website development. Empty Street has been around for over 14 years now, and has built websites for clients ranging from small startups like Netscape (remember them?) to huge multinational companies like IBM and Motorola. They know what they’re doing.

Back to planning a website. It’s not enough to have a slick-looking design. When I started Genius Monkeys, I issued a mandate- the websites we design and build must meet web standards as much as possible.

A lot of our clients don’t initially understand the importance of developing a website that follows web standards. Websites that implement web standards tend to cost a bit more than “old-fashioned” websites  upfront. So why spend the extra money on them? It turns out that there’s plenty of good reasons to do so: 

• They make it easier to add to your website as time goes by
• Search engines love them
• Separating design from content using CSS allows you to make huge changes to your website with a minimum of hassle
• A website built with web standards in mind tends to display better on iPhones and other new web-enabled devices 
• Most importantly, the majority of web users will be able to view and use your website

Most web design companies do not design for web standards. Their reasoning tends to be along the lines of “my customers won’t pay for it”. And it is true that learning to build web standards solutions requires a web design company to completely rethink how they approach a web design project. It’s a whole new way of working, and it requires a huge amount of discipline.

Generally speaking, web designers who only work in “visual” view- who are used to dragging and dropping items around when they build a website- are unable to create websites that follow web standards. To create a web standards website, you need to be sort of like Neo in The Matrix. You need to be able to “see” the code and how it will appear once it is deployed.

And that’s a tough job, but a very rewarding one.