Visual appearance of web sites - presentation of content

Text editing

The text on your web site will largely come from your own promotional material, but if you wish we can edit it for clarity. We run spelling and grammar checks as mistkaes can be irritating! We'll also try to check for accidental use of homophones (words that sound alike but witch have different spelling and meaning).

Photos and other graphics

The presentation of graphics on the web is slightly different to other media because of the importance of minimising file sizes. Many people still use dial-up connections to access the web and a page load time over 30 seconds is unlikely to be acceptable to them. We will choose the best format for images and optimise their colour depth and resolution to give the best compromise between file size and appearance.

For photos that need a little help we can also crop, resize, stretch the colour range etc. to improve the final result. Or if you don't have anything suitable to go on the web site we can source stock photos to suit your needs.

Colours and fonts

We favour simple colours and high contrast (generally black or dark grey on white) for most of the text content on the page - for readability. Large-size fonts are preferred for the same reason. The choice of sans-serif or traditional serif fonts is less clear; either can be used (or sometimes both, to indicate a change in the type of content). Commonly-available fonts like Arial (Helvetica), Verdana and Times are preferred since they will display in much the same way over a wide range of computers.

These proposals are nothing new of course - look at Google or Amazon.com - and they're not written in stone. Ultimately it's your web site and we'll create it the way you want! Fortunately using a content management system (CMS) changes to colours and fonts can be made almost instantly and applied to all pages of the site.

Page layout

Page layout really depends on your content, and may change from one section of the site to another or even from one page to another. We'll need to discuss this with you based on the unique content of your web site. Layout changes can also be done using CMS.