article: will it work?

I visited a potential client, Jason, who told me that a website design salesman had told them that "Any Site Costing Less Than £1,000 Won't Work".

At first I was taken aback by this becuase it is just not true. I felt it was part of the patter to get the client right-minded about the price he was going to charge. Then I thought about it further. He did have a point. Creating a working website is not a trivial task. It requires considerable know-how and lots of testing.

Small businesses are often wooed by would-be designers or hobbyists who offer very low prices. The salesman had obviously come across this and had probably lost potential sales as a consequence. But he had recognised the true nature of the issue: a professional website is just that, it is professional, and professionalism comes with a price tag. I can understand how the salesman arrived at his point of view.

Here are some of the issues that have to be resolved in creating a web site that works.

Web Browsers

There area number of major browsers in use: Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape. There is also a small following for Opera.

These browsers are still in use in a variety of versions:

Internet Explorer versions 4.00, version 5.0, version 5.5, version 6.0
Netscape Navigator version 4.2, version 4.51, version 4.7, version 4.78, version 6.0, version 6.1, version 6.2,
Opera version 6

Each of these versions has some bugs, functions that don't work as published, and inconsistencies in how they handle things. There is no single standard that they all adhere to. (Yes, there are standards but they don't meet all the criteria in the standards!)

The problem with designing websites is that unless you take precautions to code the site properly it can fail or 'jumble-up' in some of these browser versions. The result?--- your visitors don't see good site.

The bugs are too many to remember and so testing a site in key versions is necessary to check that it works OK.

Monitors

As monitors have developed their resolution and the number of colours they can display has changed. And there are also laptops. PC's and Macintosh computer monitors work differently.

Current Colour Depths in use are:

True Colour (alias 32 bit)
High Colour (alias 16 bit)

Resolutions In Use Are:

800 x 600 pixels
832 x 624 pixels
1024 x 768 pixels

Window Size

Many visitors have various menus, toolbars, icons etc distributed round the edge of their screen. Browser windows like other windows can be resized.

This means that website must be designed to cater for ALL of these options if visitors are to see the site properly, rather than cut off at the right hand edge or with colours not displaying properly (called dithering).

Fonts

Web browsers cannot display a wide range of fonts. They typically handle up to six predetermined fonts. And the fonts handled by PCs differ from those handled by Macintoshes. For example, Internet Explorer can handle Times Roman and Arial whereas Macintosh computers don't have these as standard.

Websites have to be designed to take account of this and only use available fonts, and must also specify alternatives in case a particular font is not available.

Worse still, if you design your own site and use a nice font on your computer to make the site look great, this font may not be on the visitor's computer and the site will often look naff or not even display sensibly.

This means that website must be designed to cater for the fonts that Browsers can display properly.

Operating Systems

There are a number of versions of operating systems in current use. The main ones are:

Windows 95, 98, 98SE, Millennium Edition, NT, 2000, XP.
Macintosh OS
Unix, Linux

There are different versions of browsers for these. Thus Internet Explorer Version 4 is slightly different on PC, Macintosh and Unix/Linux. And it has a different set of bugs on each!!

The Lure Of Web Design Packages

Packages such as Microsoft FrontPage can cause big problems in inexperienced hands. For example, these use features that are only supported by the most modern browsers. You create a cool dynamic effect that works brilliantly on your computer, but the web visitor is using an earlier version of the same browser (or even a different browser) and the effect doesn't work. This is a real killer when used on a menu: your navigation is gone.

A Cool Site That Takes An Age To Download A Page

The visitors have a variety of modems such as 28.8k, 56k, cable, DSL. Web pages load at different rates on these.

If a page is 'heavy' it takes an age to download. What makes a page heavy?

Graphics/Photos that have not been optimised for use on the web i.e. their file size reduced using special techniques.
Too many graphics on the page that in total add to a big amount of material to download.
Too much code. Using too many snazzy techniques on a page can dramatically increase the amount of code that has to be downloaded.
A bad use of Flash. Flash is a product that creates animated websites. Often they take up to a minute to download the home page. Click - the visitor leaves before the page loads.

The Bottom Line

Without good knowledge of what each browser supports and what kind of equipment your visitors are likely to have (or do have) then designing a web site that works is a minefield to the uninitiated.

Also the site has to undergo extensive testing to make sure it works as intended or at least acceptably degrade.

So What About Your Site?

The salesman made a good point. There is a lot of work in creating a web site that works, even if it is a small site.

Where Web Pages 'R' Us differs is that we don't have large overheads to support. We also recognise that prices have to be affordable to the client. We are prepared to ask a lesser price rather than do a lesser job. I often say that we create £1,000 sites for £500.

The time it takes to create a good looking working site doesn't differ radically from the time it takes to create a site that doesn't work, providing you have the skills and know-how, and we have both.

So, in summary, when the salesman said "Any Site Costing Less Than £1,000 Won't Work" he was quite perceptive. What he didn't know was that at Web Pages 'R' Us we do create web sites for less than a £1,000 and they do work.

We can audit your site and give you a report outlining the issues present on your site. The audit doesn't cost much: usually between £25 and £100. What's more we can renovate your site to overcome the issues in most cases.

Give us a call on 01453 890 988 or +44(01)453 890988.

to top