MemorablePlaces.com's
Great Website Design Philosophy

MemorablePlaces.com is flexible in how we design pages. We do however follow some general principles, particularly for those clients who do not have a prior set of requirements in mind. This allows us to build truly great websites.

"We pride ourselves on giving our clients a high degree of customer service and that personal touch that few other website designers are able or willing to do."

Introduction:

A man once said that everything is a compromise and there are no right answers to any problem. While we flatly reject that statement on a philosophical level, in the arena of web design he may well have been somewhat correct. When we compose webpages we utilize a simple and direct style that we believe to be beneficial for readers, the site-owners, future webmasters, and anyone else who will have a hand in any given site. Great websites are NOT an accident. Things are done in a logical way not only on the surface, but also behind the scenes. The websites we produce are tuned to what the client and I think the audience will be and not designed to hype our technical prowess.

Design Styles:

Every webmaster that we have ever met has at least two points of view on what makes a great website. We have never known any of them to agree. Instead of being "wise in our own eyes" when we design a website we take into account the fact that whoever the target audience is should be the very first consideration.

Download Speed As An Example:

When designing pages for a place like GameStats your target audience will be hard-core computer gamers. Most of these individuals will own leading edge systems complete with multi-hundred dollar video cards, super fast processors, and a very minimum of a DSL connection. Most will have Clearwire or Cable modems. The reason is simple. To play today's high speed and visually astounding computer games you can not use a wimpy system or it simply wont provide you with the best gaming experience. Therefore when designing a website for such users it is important to keep in mind that people looking for information on these games are not likely to balk at large or flashy pages and downloads nearly as much as an "average" user.

On the other hand if we are designing a site such as TacticalIntervention.com, a site selling accessories for firearms it is a good bet that the TIS audience will have computers that are 2-4 generations behind today's top of the line system. This is not a slight against them it is just a fact that they dump more cash into their firearms than they do into their computers. To state it in an exaggerated way, this type of audience will not want to sit around picking their noses while a 1.5 megabyte page spools through their 2400 modem! It only makes sense that the pages of different target audience sites MUST be designed differently.

While the target audience is a big design factor, we also take into consideration the wishes of the owner of the site. If they want something huge and graphic intensive, but their target audience is likely to have old equipment we will discus it with them, but in the end the owners have the choice of what they want. The same goes for how the sites look. Not every sight on our clients pages is one we are proud of aesthetically. The final decision is always that of our client. We will not ramrod you into accepting something you do not like.

Browser & Audience Compatibility Considerations:

When designing websites we try desperately to make them visible to 98 percent plus of the world's web surfers. This is actually harder than you might imagine because there are a huge number of browsers out there and may have idiosyncrasies that make this very difficult. It is relatively easy to make a page that will display on Internet Explorer and Netscape in the same way. The challenge is to make it appear the same way on the other less popular browsers as well.

We attempt to program for all of them. Not only do we tune the pages to be readable by Netscape and Internet Explorer, but also the AOL browser, the WebTV browser, and to an extent even by text-only browsers such as Lynx, or archaic graphical browsers such as Mosaic. Not many people use these but why limit ones audience?!?

There are some things we try to stay as far away from as we can no matter what the website.

First we will NOT program for the more esoteric plug-ins. Some very cool and very snazzy add-ons are available and can do some truly remarkable things, but the harsh fact is that most people will not download a plug-in just to see your webpage. Plugins are also problematic for search engines.

Second we try to stay away from Java and Java script as much as we can This may seem archaic to some, but the fact is that, (in our opinion), Java is not friendly to all web-browser application programs and it takes precious time to load and execute. Again, this turns reader's away.

For most of the sites we have designed for, the target audience is likely to be behind the curve in both software and hardware. Our question is "Why make it hard on these people?"

Other Considerations :

There are many considerations to look into when we first begin to build any site. Many times we will spend a lot of time talking to the person who wants their site built so as to get a handle on them and on their audience. This helps us determine just how far we can push the envelope on download times and other things. If the audience is likely to be highly computer savvy we can get away with more than we can if the audience is non-technical.

Regardless of the type of site or the audience we always make it an absolute point to consider several things.

Easy Navigation. We endeavor to make the sites we build easily navigable. We have visited thousands of websites and tens of thousands of web pages during the course of our online time. We have seen pages that make us want to find the webmaster and ask for a white cane because we just can not find what we are looking for. Great websites are not built like that. We believe that we owe it to those who read the sites that we design to make any item easy to find. We do this through several things including:

Making sure that users do not have to go more than 3 clicks deep for any item or information page unless absolutely no other way exists. Our goal is 2 clicks or less. Based on our experience and the site-hit logs that we have seen, it is our opinion that you will lose a significant percentage of readers for every level you force them to go deeper into your site.

Making it obvious to users on the first page what types of products, services, or information are available elsewhere on the site. We believe that imbuing this intuitive quality to our pages makes it much easier for the reader to find what he is looking for and will produce a return visitor.

We cross link intra-site web pages wherever we can. We try to find reasonable ways to link all the pages on the site at least two or three times. This insures that more pages are 'hit' because it makes it easier for people to find what they are seeking. It also has a side benefit of giving readers the repeated option of looking for things on our sites that they might not otherwise have considered. Additionally, linking related pages to each other as well as in a central location means that there are multiple ways of progressing through any given website. This helps readers find what they need regardless of the differences in logic or web surfing style that an individual may use to find things.

Other Considerations:

Download Speed. We take great care to make graphics as small (in kilobyte size) as possible while retaining good resolution, display size, and visual appeal. We also utilize little tricks to make sure most follow-on pages load faster than the first. Download speed is always a compromise. We try to balance it with visual appeal as perfectly as possible.

Visual Appeal. We endeavor try to make our websites very appealing to the eyes. Even sites about simple subjects should have a visual appeal - first to the site owner, then to their customer, and finally to ourselves. A large part of visual appeal has to do with layout and graphics. When a customer supplies us with graphics or photos it is our job to present them in such a way as to make the site look FANTASTIC, uncluttered, and worth coming back to.

Simplicity. In short we like our pages to be simple yet appealing. We like to make things easy to use not only in the design of the page itself, but also in the structure of the directories and filenames. We have no illusions that we could webmaster all the sites we are involved with forever, so we make it easy for follow-on webmasters to find things and we try to make it all intuitive for any future webmaster who might take our place at a later date.

Never Finished:

We could go on and on about what we do and the plethora of decisions and compromises we make in any given site's design, but we hope you have gotten a general idea of the types of things we consider. A great website is really never fully done. There is always room for polishing and as customers get better systems and the applications become more powerful even great websites must be updated from time to time. We design sites so that later webmasters are able to find stuff and I even leave templates so additional pages can be produced in the same fashion.

Summation:

In short MemorablePlaces.com tries to make great websites that are easy to navigate, easy for future administrators to work on, and pleasing to the eyes and minds of both owners and readers. We really do pride ourselves on the "personal touch" that few other website designers can or are willing to do.