Is your site accessible?
Many sites are designed using "tables" for layout. In fact, we used tables for many years before switching to Cascading Style Sheets for most page layouts.
Our sites not only look good, they also work well with the readers that convert text into voice for those who cannot read because of visual impairment or other issues.
This readability also extends to the robots that index the pages for the search engines. Using this type of design gives you the best chance of being accurately indexed by the search engines.
Common mistakes that can drive customers away
Poor contrast between text and background
Have you ever had difficulty reading, for example, dark blue text that's set against a black background? This is very common, and is sometimes even seen on professionally designed sites.
Inaccurate spelling or grammar
One of the best reasons to choose Foster Web Services for your web design is our skill in crafting good content. In trying to connect with your customers, we will try to adopt an informal, conversational style. Your pages will not be filled with the misspelled words, incorrect word usage or gross errors in punctuation that we see so often on the web.
Pages that load slowly
We try to optimize the photos and artwork on your pages for the best tradeoff of small file size v/s high quality. For many years we connected to the internet through dialup access. We're very familiar with the frustration of waiting for pages to load over slower connections.
Having to scroll left and right to read the text
A typical laptop computer with a 15.4 inch monitor can show a wider web page than a standard 17 inch CRT monitor. Often, a page is designed that will fill the entire monitor that the designer is using. If it's high resolution monitor, this forces everyone viewing the page with smaller monitors to scroll back and forth, left and right, until they give up or get motion sickness. We currently design our pages to work with standard 17" monitors, meaning that the pages are about 770 pixels wide. Since some people are still using 15" monitors, we try to ensure that the main content will be readable even on those monitors without scrolling back and forth repeatedly.
Failing to link back to the home page
Sometimes when we visit a web page from a Google search, we find no links back to the rest of the site. We then wonder about the credibility of the information. Your customers won't have this problem - we design all our sites with links on every page back to the rest of the site.
Don't take a chance...
First impressions are very important. People will decide whether to give you a call based on their impressions. Don't take a chance. One of our highest priorities in site design is to avoid aggravating your potential customers. We're not perfect, but we strive toward excellence in all these areas of web design.