Our web and PC design and development capabilities - web usability, web site navigation and structure design, ColdFusion aka Cold Fusion, DHTML and javascript. We are based in the Medway area of Kent, England, United Kingdom.
Written by Philip Chalmers who is based in the Medway area of Kent, England, United Kingdom.
As our site grows, you may find it quicker to use our search facilities:
If visitors find your site difficult to use, they'll just leave.
The time and money you spent on it will be wasted.
Our Web design for usability tutorial will help you to avoid the worst mistakes and show you where to find additional information.
You often face a difficult trade-off when you're designing a web site:
| Your pages must be easy to read on the screen - or visitors will just leave. | but | You also want the font and colour scheme to be distinctive and you may have to follow a branding or style policy which was established before the days of the web. |
And you need to use a consistent font and colour scheme, to avoid confusing visitors - so it had better be consistently good, not consistently bad.
Use it to experiment for a few minutes - it may save you from expensive false starts and re-working.
As your site grows:
| You need to make it easy for visitors to find their way around - or they will just give up and go somewhere else. | but | You don't want the navigation tools to take up too much space on the page - visitors come to see your site's content, not its fancy navigation tricks. |
Two of the best ways to meet these objectives are:
Both methods are good for long pages of content, because in both cases the menu options remain visible when the user scrolls down the page - try them and see!
Take a look at our sample designs:
Sometimes the only way to make a point is visually, using images and possibly moveable text. Then your page must recognise when the user has clicked something and when the user has moved the mouse, and must take appropriate action.
Two of our pages give particularly clear examples of this:
Sometimes you simply have to pack an enormous quantity of facilities into a small space:
This is an excellent tool for publishing large documents on the web - it provides facilities like those of the Document Map in Microsoft Word:
The toolkit includes a utility for building the table of contents automatically from the section headings in the document.
This little demo shows how cross-frame scripting can be used to present a very simple geographical information system - the page is divided into separate sections containing a map, instructions and statistics about areas on the map.
"The Office Assistant" sketch contains 3 images and a sequence of 20 rollovers. We built a Javascript toolkit which allows the page to define a "script" (in the theatrical sense) and to start, pause and rewind the scene. This left us free to concentrate on what we wanted to appear on the screen at what time, and rely on the toolkit to handle the details.
Any resemblance to persons, organisations or products, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Our DHTML toolkit enables us to develop interactive web pages quickly and reliably. For example:
Our layers test page tests most of the DHTML toolkit's facilities.
Much of our DHTML toolkit's power and flexibility comes from the fact that it is completely object-based, unlike most of the toolkits available on the web.
In other words, we can develop interactive pages faster and more reliably.
Our
IT Dictionary
explains some common Web, Internet and computer terms.
A categorised list of the sites we've found most useful and why.
The easiest way is probably to email us - use
our email form .
Or you can contact us by:
| Post | 32 Pump Lane, Rainham, Gillingham, Kent ME8 7AB, England | |
| Phone | 01634 373205 |