Website Design
Simple and User-Friendly
I am very good at creating user-friendly websites. This is what I love to do.
My websites are fast. I don't use fancy graphics, so my websites load fast on even the slowest modem.
I design simple websites that work on different browsers and screens. The simplicity also makes them search-engine friendly.
If you want a more elegantly-designed website, your or I can find a designer, and I can work with whatever front page the designer creates. But... Bob Sez: Do not put a moving image on a page if you want people to read text on that page. Moving images draw attention. And Google sez: "Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images."
Statistics
I have a great program for reporting visitors to your website. It does a better job than most programs of filtering out robots and handling visitors that change apparent id. It shows what your visitors actually did.
This is critical information for making decisions about a website. You can see what visitors are doing when they visit your website, and how many visitors you are getting.
Examples
Programming Skills
In addition to HTML, the lanuage of webpages, I know Javascript and Perl.
Javascript is the programming language for a webpage. For an example of Javascript, see http://libridge.com/clubs/local.htm. The blue boxes in the map are bridge clubs. Clicking on a bridge club immediately produces a box showing the information about the bridge club. Similarly, http://franklinbridge.com/results.htm is bridge results by month. If you click on previous month, you immediately see the previous month.
Perl is the programming language for the computer that sends out the web page and receives information from forms. You can't see examples of that so easily on the Web. I use Perl so that web pages can interact with email. I also use Perl to create webpages. For example, one of my programs collects information from about 30 different pages on one website, reorganizes that information, and creates about 40 webpages on my site.
On my teaching math website, students can write a computer program in a simple language I call e. My Perl program then translates that program into Javascript. It then sends a webpage of Javascript, and the Javascript then creates the webpage. So I have a Perl programming writing Javascript to write HTML.
User-Friendly
This includes my "dual-entry" front pages, need-oriented contact pages, and good direction pages. Dual-entry pages accommodate the fact that most organizations have two very different types of users coming to their pages: first-time visitors who want to learn about the organization, and members of the organization who have been to the website many times and are looking for latest news and information.
This website is a good example of a dual entry front page. The text on the left is a welcom for new visitors; the text on the right is latest news and information. This webpage is a good example of a need-oriented contact page. And I am still thinking about how to have a good directions page, but here is an example of one. One feature is to make them print-friendly, so that people print the page and go. Then they have the directions and the address and phone number.
Bob Sez
The web site is a very complicated medium. The more I think about it, the more complicated I realize it is. Newspapaper and magazine do not begin to compare on complexity. Even most graphic design people do not know how to have a good website.
Take the issue of menu choices. Ideally, you should have just one menu, with about 7 choices on it. The art of information architecture is looking at a mass of information and deciding how to organize it to make a friendly web site. But that organization and presentation of information also needs to take into account the needs of the organization sponsoring the website. Writing style for the web -- in most cases -- is ideally fast and friendly, like a magazine article.
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