our design philosophy
conveying content is our
top priority.
The web is about conveying content. Without usable
information, your website will be a ghost town no
matter how good it looks or what crazy JavaScript
or Flash you're using. What brings people back to
your website isn't the eye candy, it's not the way the
image changes when you move your mouse over it, it's
the content that you have to offer. Content can come
in many forms; video, text, images, etc. What makes
a website good is when it conveys the content effectively
to the user. Anything more than that is superfluous,
and is just more junk for the user to download. This
also means that accessing the content should be simple
and intuitive. Quirky navigation can be neat, but
if it gets in the way of conveying content, you've
got a problem. The average web user is not going to
take the time to learn how to use your new navigation;
they want the information, and they want it now. So,
our top priority is not that your website look good.
Our priority is that everyone be able to get the content
that you have to offer- easily, quickly, and no matter
what their connection speed, platform, or browser.
looking good is a close second.
Though conveying content is our top priority, your
website needs to look and feel good, too. Let's face
it, the way a website looks is very important, for obvious
reasons. The way your website looks will give people
their first impression of you, your business, your
affiliates, etc. So you want a website that will endear
you to them while you give them what they need: usable
content. We pride ourselves in making good looking
websites. Check out the web design portfolios to see what we
can do.
everyone should be able to
access your content.
Alas, this is never the case. There are millions of
people on the web, using hundreds of browsers, on
multiple operating systems, on a thousand different
computers. Though html visionaries wanted absolutely
everyone to be able to read html, this hasn't really
happened. Some browsers interpret some code one way,
others another. Back in the day, Netscape was the
browser to beat. Currently internet explorer supports
far more of the Word Wide Web Consortium standards
than Netscape. And what's more, there are now plugins
like flash and Shockwave with which you can make entire
websites- without even using html. What this means to
us is that whatever design we choose for your website,
we want to make sure that it displays the content
correctly for the most amount of people possible.
This will not be everyone. But, it is important that
we make an effort. This means that if you've got a
neat trick that works only in Internet Explorer
(and believe me, there are a lot of them), we try
our hardest to make it work in Netscape, too. If it
won't work, how can we get the content to display
in Netscape? If there isn't a way, we may want to
rethink the neat trick.
bandwidth is almost always
a consideration.
No matter how cool your website is; if there's 300k worth
of images to download on every page, your user is
going to get tired and leave. Though corporate America
is on t1 and DSL, there are a ton of users still out
there with 28k modems. It's the nature of the beast,
I'm afraid; we have to consider bandwidth issues.
our design philosophy reflected
in mountbrackenandcampbell.com
If you're someone looking for a web design firm, you've
probably been to a few of our competitor's websites.
They've probably impressed you with their ability
at Flash or JavaScript. Their websites were probably
flashy and full of neat eye candy. And this website is
pretty stinking simple. It's got one graphic on many
of the pages, simple css for the style, and it is
minimalistic to the fault of boring. You may be asking
yourself, why isn't this website decked out with all
the bells and whistles like all the other websites? Why
isn't there a little pair of eyeballs following my
mouse pointer? Where's the flash intro? This website
is simple because the content I want to convey is
mostly text. To see what we can do with flash, or
with html or Photoshop, go to the portfolios. The
rest of the website doesn't really need a bunch of eye
candy, it needs to convey content like our design
philosophy. I was also very wary of selling mountbrackenandcampbell
vs. selling Andrew and I. When you hire us, you're
not hiring some faceless company, you're hiring two
guys who work hard at what they enjoy. The last thing
I want this website to be is pretentious; there are far
too many pretentious websites out there. So there's a
bit of humility reflected in our design.
if you have questions
about our design philosophy, or if you'd like to
comment, please email us via our contact
page. Thanks for reading. |
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