At skillbank we aim to create simple, classy, effective and practical websites. You need to make some choices about your website, and this page provides the tools to help you make this choice.
Domain name, Key Terms and Titles
To make the most of your website its important customers can find it, and most business comes from search engines like Google. Spend some time thinking about your company and the services it provides. Imagine you are a potential client - what search terms would you use? Your website needs to incorporate these terms. Page titles are very important, so are the actual words and phrases on your site. Suppose your company offers silver plating. The domain name, the page titles, and the text on each page need to reflect this, and you need to write the copy so that "silver plating" (and other terms potential customers would use) occur frequently. If your business focuses on a local area then this also needs to be made apparent - in an unambiguous way.
This document will help you focus your ideas on the development of your website, and give you and idea of charges and costs.
Colour
The colours you chooose make a powerful and profound statement about your business. Its best to choose a maximum of three basic colours for your website; they need to be able to coexist without creating tension or visitors will click away. Huge amounts of money are spent by major companies in choosing the right colour for their advertising and you can benefit from this by reading about the psychology of colour here.
Once you have picked a colour or colours this page from Adobe will help you choose a palette of about five colours for your site.
Layout
The "YAML" framework provides a set of proven robust layouts which enable us to produce standards compliant websites and keep our costs to a minimum. This site shows some of the range of layouts we can create for you using the YAML framework.
Style
Typography is another important factor in creating a suitable page to represent your business. There are five basic types of fonts: serif, sans serif, cursive, fancy and monospace. When a webpage is displayed the browser uses the fonts installed on your computer, so only by using a narrow range of "web-safe" fonts can you be sure what someone elses browser will show.
Serif fonts have tiny finishing strokes at the ends of the letters. Most printed material - newspapaers, books etc - use serif fonts. They convey an impression of being warm, personal, artistic, stately, traditional, conservative or intellectual. They are effective as headings, for main body text and for documents intended to be downloaded and printed. They are more readable in small sizes in print but computer monitors are not able to show them clearly.
Sans Serif fonts like this one appear technical, cool, clean, crisp, youthful, modern or uncluttered. They are effective as headings, for general text and for text with technical content. However, sans serif fonts can also be viewed as cold and impersonal. Sometimes the space between letters (e.g. hijk) can be small, and it can be hard to distinguish between similar characters l10O. Because they display well on-screen they are the best for webpage body text.
Monospace fonts are used for displaying program code samples and number values only; each character takes the same amount of horizontal space, so letters and numbers stay lined up. They are designed to make it easier to distinguish between 1 l O o 0. Some letters, especially the i and l, are made to look wider with big serifs. When they are used for text they give an irregularly spaced and untidy appearance which can make it harder to read.
| Serif | Sans serif | Monospace |
|---|---|---|
| ABCDE abcdefghijklm 01234 | ABCDE abcdefghijklm 01234 | ABCDE abcdefghijklm 01234 |
| ABCDE abcde 01234 | ABCDE abcde 01234 | ABCDE abcde 01234 |