Building Web Sites

A web site is your 'window to the world'. Your site should focus on your (or your organization's) individual needs; it should engage your visitors, provide clients with information relevant to doing business with you and should provide a wealth of resources. In other words, you need to provide good reasons for visitors to visit and re-visit the site. This does not necessarily mean information that you provide; it can be in the form of useful and relevant links to the web sites of others - Government agencies, Tax Offices, Industry Organizations etc. Search engines such as Google and Bing will rate such sites more highly than those which are 'thin' on detail and you will get more traffic and thus more business.

Example - eCommerce

The figure below shows one of the web sites that we have developed. It is rich in content and receives more than 1000 individual visitors a day. It is an e-commerce site as computer software is sold from the site. The site sells items 24/7 and payment is organized through PayPal. The purchaser receives an email after payment and can immediately download and install the software.

Here is another site. This site was developed using the same content management site as the one above, by changing the text style, graphic and its positioning, a completely different look and feel results.

dCAD web site

Objective focus

You gain a wealth of information from the statistics about you web site which are collected by your hosting service. This enables you to determine those pages that are most visited and indicate those pages in your site that you need to work on to engage visitors more strongly. The figure below shows some data about the country of origin of visitors to this web site. This information greatly helps in targetting our Google advertising making sure that we do not waste marketing dollars on regions that do not visit our site.

Countries

Sites can feature restricted access

Here is site that restricts entry to those clients with which a consultancy engages. Clients are issued with unique user anmes and passwords and gain access to different parts of the site.

Creating web sites

In the past couple of years, there has been a seismic shift in the way in which web sites are created and maintained. In the past, 'web designers' initially used to program sites in a language called HTML. They then moved on to the use of software tools such as Microsoft's FrontPage and tools from adobe systems to speed creation of web sites. Now, most professional web designers use what are known as Content Management Sites software (CMS) to create database driven web sites. These sites have the considerable benefit that once established, users are able to maintain their own web sites, changing content each day if necessary without the need to rely on or pay others to update content.

Example

The figure below shows an example of a web site created using a content management tool called Drupal. If you would like to visit the site, click on the image below. Use the tabs across the top to navigate the sit. This site was built in 30 minutes as the company already had a logo and a copy of the information that they wanted to put on each page. The principal of the company was given a user name and password and using the in-built word processor she is able to change content at will.

Common content management tools in use for creating web sites are Joomla and Drupal. This web site is maintained using Drupal. You might care to find out more about content management web sites by visiting Wikipedia and searching for those terms.

Joomla

We offer:

One-on-one training in the use of content management software to create web sites. The cost is $550 per day, but before we do that and, so we can do some preliminary work for you, please provide us with a scope study (what it is that you want you web site to accomplish) with some stories (information about your company) and some photos illustrating the work that you do. We will prepare some material, including setting up a sample site. The aim is to make sure that you leave us with a functional web site by the end of the day! Alternatively,
We do the work and develop a complete web site for you using one of these content management tools. We hand it over and train you to maintain the site without the need to employ outside firms.

Reference sites

http://www.landscapetutor.designcad.com.au - Moodle online learning site. Moodle is a very powerful tool for student directed learning and can be uitilised by Universities, Colleges and private companies. We can assist setting up Moodle sites and in the creation of materials.

Moodle