AdapDev uses these Design Criteria

Our web site designs are based on the following important criteria:

A further explanation of each follows:

Standards Compliance

Many web designers still cling to old development methods, despite a newer better method of design involving web standards compliance. Make sure your web site is designed as compliant with W3C standards. This creates a web site that will be viewable by any browser, PDA, or even cell phones. Your site may not look identical on these platforms, but the information will be available to everyone. A standards compliant web site will be compatible with new generations of web devices, and provide for easier updates and maintenance in the future.

Additionally, by developing your web site in accordance with current web standards, you will have lower development costs. Only one set of code needs to be produced for a wide range of internet devices. It also produces sites that require very little bandwidth, easily updated and forward compatible with emerging internet devices. All of which result in lower maintenance costs.

What qualifies as web standards compliant code? Put simply, it is markup that complies with W3C standards for web design. For more information about Web Design Standards see The Web Standards Project.

Accessibility

Accessibility has many different meanings as it pertains to web designs.

A core criterion in our web designs is to ensure accessibility through proper implementation of web standards. All of our web sites are designed and built using industry recognized standards, such as XHTML 1.0 and Cascading Style Sheets. What does this mean to the end user? No matter what browser they use, all information content is accessible. This is especially important because increasingly people are visiting web pages with a variety of devices, including cell phones, PDA's such as Blackberry, Handspring Visors, Braille readers, screen readers, graphic browsers, text-only browsers and more. We focus on making web pages which should work for all these visitors.

Another meaning of accessible is Designed to Be Found. Search engines such as Google are the method of choice for the vast majority of users trying to find information on the web.  Accessibility for search engines requires design focusing on the information. This is accomplished by enriching the text on the opening page to quickly and clearly communicate the content and intent of the site. Flash is a wonderful tool for smooth animation and sharp graphics, but search engines can not see Flash. A site with a beautiful splash intro for the opening page has been designed not to be found by search engines.

Accessible also means Designed for the Connection Speed of the User. We all love broadband connections, but not everyone utilizes a high-speed connection.  We simply must continue to design pages for dial-up access so we can provide good accessibility for the largest number of users. Our design process therefore considers the weight of the page as an important issue.

Usability

One of the underlying purposes of a web site is that it is to be Used by People. Unfortunately, many web sites are designed with other issues in mind, such as the designer’s ego or corporate structure. We take the web site users needs into account at all stages of the design process because we believe that the web site should be designed for users.

Studies have shown that web users have an incredibly low attention span. If the user can't find what they want on your site within a few seconds, they get frustrated and leave. By focusing on usability as a design criterion, we ensure that your web site will offer the most efficient, easy to use, and enjoyable experience possible to the site visitor.

Another important usability point is that your site should be Designed to Communicate, not to entertain. Most internet users view the web as an information medium and not as an entertainment medium.

The last usability concept is that the web site should be Easy to Navigate. The most usable web sites are those whose navigation works exactly the way visitors expect it to. We exit quickly the sites that have confusing navigation.

Simplicity

Less is often more...

I believe in good clean simple web site design. Far too many sites are bloated with large graphics, incorporate awful navigation, download slowly, and assume that all visitors have the latest plug-ins on the most modern browsers. I think that fast, simple, and user friendly sites will keep your site visitors attention and help your business to succeed on the web.

In order for your web site to attract your visitors attention, we try to strike a balance between simplicity and appeal. Good design comes from a clean, simple, and fresh design. This not only makes the content easier to understand and navigate, but also reduces loading times for visitors.

The advantages of our design approach based on Simplicity are easy to see:

A few last points to make are that a sloppy looking site reflects a sloppy business. Additionally visitors are rarely impressed with intro movies and splash screens so our recommendation is to forget about them.

Load Quickly

No one enjoys waiting for a site to download; no matter how beautiful it looks when it does finally appear. It's frustrating to spend a minute or two waiting for a site to download only to find it's of limited or no use.

All of our site designs are created with dial-up connections in mind. Therefore, we use limited and carefully chosen graphics. If a graphic is not essential then it is not used.

In case I did not drive the point home above, Web Standards design helps pages load quickly as well. By specializing in creating valid code, using XHTML along with validated style sheets which handle formatting, I ensure that pages are easy to update and fast-loading.