A website is more than just graphics, colors, and text that are syntactically controlled by some hypertext markup language (HTML) in order for your browser to simply show you stuff. It is your broadcasting forum to present your potential clients and viewers with an opportunity to learn about you, your services, and business. It also affords you with an opportunity to learn more about your visitors, make a great first impression and connect with prospective clients.
Perfect Synergy Between Beauty & Functionality
Sure, your site should be aesthetically pleasing, but does it serve your intended purpose and accomplish your goals? Is it easy to use? Does it capture enough data to keep you ahead of the latest trends and interests of your visitors? Is it secure? Is it mobile friendly and versatile to work on almost every device without sacrificing important content? When a customer makes a purchase what exactly happens in terms of logistics, payment processing, and communication between you and your customers? Furthermore, how do you measure your success or missed opportunities?
Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works. Steve Jobs
All of these are important questions and you may not have all the answers to the technical feasibility and requirements that are necessary to build and manage your site on a daily basis. We are here to bridge the gap between executing your goals online and implementing all that complicated technical mumbo jumbo. Below you will find a brief synopsis of what you can expect when you work with us for a typical web design project.
User Experience & Interface Design
Commonly known as UX/UI, user experience and interface design delves deeper into the overall purpose, goal, and intent of design. It's a process composed of several other processes that is completely focused on strategically engineering an expected outcome by conducting research from your target audience and designing accurate inputs to give you an expected result.
UX design begins by learning about the business model, doing user research and understanding how a service can fit into the users’ lives in a meaningful way. Zoltán Gócza
Perhaps your goal is to increase conversion rates or user engagement. Maybe you want to find a better way of establishing your brand's identity with a more strategic placement of content. UI/UX captures the essense of why we're designing, who are we designing for, and what we should expect from our users interaction.
Responsive Design
Laptops, tablets, and mobile phones, oh my! With so many devices that have access to the internet it can sometimes be a challenge to design something that best fits them all. The key thing to keep in mind is to try as much as possible not to sacrifice the importance of your content. After all, your users are still going to want to be able to visit your site for a specific reason and that task should be able to be accomplished no matter the device.
Content Management Systems
A content management system (CMS) allows users to effectively manage content (pictures, files, articles etc...) without having to know a line of code. CMS's are great because they save time and are often being worked on by thousands of developers. Their collaboration and continuous iteration creates a stable web application ecosystem; with each developer specializing in improving a particular aspect of the content management system.
What does this mean for you? CMS's lend a great helping hand by providing a template or starting point for us to begin developing your site, which in turn saves time and development costs. While there are many reputable names such as Drupal, Magento, Wordpress, and Joomla, we only specialize in designing sites on the Wordpress or Joomla platform.
Security & Risk Management
It's pretty much safe to say that the internet is full of great resources, services, and sites to get information from but it can also present a tremendous security risk for those who don't implement the necessary measures to keep sensitive information away from prying eyes. Within the last few years, we have witnessed the unfortunate catastrophes of multi-million dollar companies such as Sony, Target, Ebay, as well as bitcoin exchanges compromise very important information.
Such disasters can wreak extreme havoc on your business and severely impair your operations by bringing down your site or even force you to go out of business. And even if you implemented the most disaster-proof applications to try and counter such an event, you still could be vulnerable.
As new threats arise your site's counter measures need to be able to adapt. Therefore, security is an ever-evolving effort. What is safe today may not be safe tomorrow. As much as we try to prevent attacks, there is a chance that a security breach can occur. It is important to understand these risks and have a plan in case unfortunate events happen.
In the event that your site has been compromised, don't worry, we will have already conducted daily offsite backups to get you up and running in no time. While we are not security experts, we do our best to stay on top of any known threats by making sure your services are up to date and backed-up. Since we have been in business, none of our clients have been affected and we'd like to keep it that way.
Accessibility
Understanding accessibility seems pretty straight forward until you've launched your site and found out that you have new prospects in another country and whenever they try to access your site it's just plain old slow. A site that has accessibility issues will surely lead to missed opportunities and can adversely affect your search engine optimization (SEO) and we definitely want to avoid that. When you choose iCandy Webs to work on your projects, we will take these possibilities into consideration and offer viable solutions that are a great representation of you to your clients.
Quality Support
If there's one thing that we take pride in providing our clients, it's quality support. As a matter of fact, we do not subscribe to any product or service that does not offer amazing support so why should you? After your site has been designed and crafted to pixel perfection, you may be concerned with how to keep up to date with risk management, site security, or CMS updates. Maybe you don't want to have to deal with any of it. Websites can entail a great deal of work even after your site has been developed. You already have a lot of decisions to make so allow us to make this one for you. We will host, design, and maintain all of your multimedia branding needs. Check out our website maintenance service plans to learn more.