Sample Websites:

Click on an image below to check out a slideshow of our websites (live, and without even leaving our site).  We can use this technique on your site - and we can show more slides than what show on the page!

Large church web site - 50 pages

Structural Engineer's site
It's All about the image

Website for a criminal law attorney

A site for a civil engineering
and land surveying firm

Architectural firm site
with lots of graphics

Church site with slideshows - this page is not current for the church - they took over the site to save money, and this is "as was" when they took over.

A wordpress Blogsite - Wordpress is a very flexible and capable blogging system, so much so that it is almost a content management system.

A site promoting a Lawn Care and Landscaping Business

A site for the American College of Sports Medicine supporting active life styles

A site promoting a book and the artists who created it

A site promoting a small bookselling business

Website Design

On This Page

• About Website Design - Our Goals for Your Website
• Sample Websites - Browse live websites

Web Site Design:

Our Goals for Your Website

• Easy to navigate--the visitor should be able to find what he/she is looking for without a lot of button clicking, head scratching and frustration.
• Informative - important information about your enterprise should be readily available.
• Functional - Your web site will provide appropriate tools for accessing information, downloading files, and communications between you and your customers and/or clients.
• Aesthetically pleasing--The site should be easy to read and pleasing to the eye, but not to the point of distraction (unless it is the beauty of your product that is causing the distraction).
• Displays and functions properly in Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8, Opera, Firefox and Chrome browsers with standard and "larger" text sizes.
• As error free as possible. Our editor Kali Johnson reviews our pages for language clarity and grammar.

This site is designed to inform you about web site design, including some of the things you should be thinking about relative to the design of your own site. Please browse our site at your leisure, and contact us with any questions that you have, or to talk more generally about website design.

We are now doing Wordpress Blogs! Wordpress is an open source blogging and content management program. Open source means that  you don't have to pay for the software.  It is very versatile. You can see an example of a wordpress blog here or in the slideshow.

Floatbox is a slideshow display program that we use on many of our websites. It is extremely versatile and powerful. It will not only display slideshows of pictures, but also of mulitnedia, websites, resizable moveable boxes (called non-modal boxes), PDFs, and we can use image maps to make parts of your slideshow image into an html link. We can also adjust many parameters to control the appearance and behavior of your slideshow. Floatbox is also modular, so that only the modules needed for display are loaded, reducing page load times.

Here is an example of a floatbox application on one of our sites. This example also demonstrates how we can put additional pictures besides those on the source page into a slide show.

We can also do a slideshow of videos. For an example go to www.cuuf.org (or click on the "Large Church Website" on the left top) and click on the link "To watch the Unitarian Universalist Video ,Voices of a Liberal Faith; (and other UU videos)" in the center of the page. Note that this is also an example of a slideshow within a slideshow.

The site your are currently on is, of course, our design. And we do use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to control appearance, and layers (also called <divs>) locate various features on all of our sites. Proper use of CSS separates most of the appearance of the site from the information on the site. See the Computer Support section of this site for a simple example of the power of Cascading Style Sheets . 

The changes in appearance in the Computer Support section come about through a half dozen changes in the CSS file and the web template that formats the support pages of the web site, plus a few lines of code adding the extra support menu. Also visit www.csszengarden.com to see the extent to which appearance can be controlled by the CSS. The web page is identical for all of the pages on the zengarden site, only the CSS file has been changed.

Watch out for website designers who locate various features of your site by using tables. Tables were used to position pictures, text, and other features in the early days of the web because they were the only reliable way to position features. Layers have been an effective way to position features for several years. Anyone still using tables has not kept up with the advances in website design. About the only excuse for using tables for anything besides tables of data or information is if you are developing an application that will run on 10 year old or older browsers. Internet Explorer completely supported the features of the div element with release 5.5 in 2000.