Services

All of our services are about creating websites and other online services that are intuitively usable. We also stress the importance of accessibility, search engine optimisation and clearly written plain English content.

User centred web design

User centred, or UX (or UCD), web design is a practical design philosophy that puts the user at the heart of web design. By seeking to understand the needs and desires of users from the beginning of the design process we can create online experiences that are a pleasure to use, and that customers come back to again and again.

There is no business without customers, without users. Users of new media, be it a website or a mobile phone application, are impatient. They will assess whether a website is for them in seconds or less. If they do stay, but encounter problems, they won't come back. Websites need to communicate to users instantly and allow them to obtain what they are looking for easily.

User centred design was developed so as to avoid costly the mistakes that come from not properly considering why and how a user will use a product from the outset.

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Accessibility

Accessibility is way of designing and coding websites so that they can be used by blind and other disabled users, and in ways that are useful to all users.

Websites can be used by blind users using either speaking or braille browsers. The standards also take account of users with cognitive disabilities such as dyslexia. Some of the standards are not associated with any disabilities as such. these include taking into account users with impaired vision and editorial best practise.

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How to evaluate websites for accessibility compliance | Website accessibility

Search engine optimisation (SEO)

We recommend that SEO is built into your UX web design projects. Almost all web users use search engines, typically as one of the first steps in any user journey. If your site is not search engine optimised your site is not in a very real sense user centred.

SEO is often confused with search engine marketing and search engine submission. These two activities have for more than a decade been employed to improve a site's Google page rank. This methods continue to be legitimate, although Google's page rank has been depreciated as factor in Google's algorithm

SEO as part of UX design practise is to understand the way users use search engines to source products and services. Search engines are important to a very large proportion of user journey's. By creating information architecture, labels for navigational elements, and plain English content that is in harmony with user behaviour and perceptions it is possible to draw increased targeted traffic to any website.

In addition SEO pays special attention to employing effective metadata, semantic page names, and semantic mark-up that assists search engines to effectively categorise pages.

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Web content and copywriting

Web content and other linguistic aspects of websites are as important to usable web design as the information architecture and visual design. Words are one of the primary ways in which we communicate.

UX web design practise will almost always be concerned with breaking down required content into user centred taxonomical categories to form the superstructure of information architecture. Research and user testing will often be used to inform the labelling of these elements for use as navigation labels and other on-page elements, especially pages titles.

Too often though content planning and content creation becomes an isolated work stream. Ideally UX web design should involve key content persons throughout the design process. That means from the initial planning stages onwards to delivery. There are synergies to be had by involving content people even in exercises, such as wire-framing, that are often viewed as the sole domain of the information architect (or whoever it is who does the layout). After all, ultimately those wire-frames will turn into pages into which we drop words.

UX web design should also be able to guide the content people to use the words they employ in alternative description text for images and metadata effectively. Users will interact with these words every time they visit a search engine, and too often these words are neglected because they fall between been the domain of the web designer and the wordsmith.

Web content and copywriting services

Accessibility rules for web content writers | Web Content & Copywriting