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Features of Websites Built by IWD
Visible Standard Features
A website that I design or upgrade will always have a professionally-built look and feel. The web pages showing the website content will normally also include:
- A website banner (a graphic including the name of the site) that appears at the top of each page.
- A primary navigation bar (a set of graphic links used to navigate from page to page within the website) that appears with the same location and orientation (vertical or horizontal) on each page.
- A secondary horizontal text-based navigation bar that appears at the bottom of each page.
Occasionally a website that I build departs in some way from this standard structure in a way that works for the website.
Hidden Standard Feature
All of the websites that I build are database-driven, i.e., most of the content of the website is obtained from and stored in a database. This has important direct and indirect advantages for the owners of the websites. They benefit directly by being able to update most of the content of their websites themselves from inside their websites via edit pages that I provide, including adding, deleting, or replacing photos and making them smaller if necessary. This requires no software other than a browser. Only I and the website owner can see the links to the edit pages, and then only after clicking on a hidden link and provided the correct password. For some website owners the flexibility of changing their own information quickly and easily can be very important, e.g., for adding or deleting an item for sale or changing its price. In a few cases I have given the website owner the ability to add and delete pages and change the order of the pages in the website.
Website owners also benefit indirectly from how much easier it can be for me to construct and update their website. Of course I can use the edit pages described above myself. In addition, looping through placing repeated similar items from a database into a page according to some programmed rules is both easier and more consistent, over the long run anyway, than manually creating or updating the corresponding content. And storing the menu names and corresponding file names for pages in a database makes it much easier to construct and modify the navigation bar, including changing the names and order of the pages and adding or deleting pages.
These days I generally have website owners make the initial inputs of the content that they will be able to update later, with my help as needed. This is more work for them, but it gives them knowledge and confidence for making updates later. It also makes it clear that it is ultimately the website owner's responsibility to come up with the content of their website, though I am available for advice. It is important that website owners be careful about spelling and grammar, and have someone, which could be me, check what they input if they think it might contain errors.
Optional Features
Some of the other features that may be included in a website, and examples in websites that I have built, are listed below. The examples are all from this site and the sites listed on the Web Design - Examples page. When the example is on a particular page of the website the link below is to that page when feasible; that is not feasible for the Flash websites.
The links to other pages in this website given below open the page in a new window, unlike the other such links on this website, to be consistent with the links below to other websites.
Optional features include:
- Second-level navigation bars or other means for more complex navigation schemes. This website includes a second-level navigation bar (the lower one). The Glass Shop page of International Glass Company contains a second-level navigation bar for the various sub-pages of that page. Pediatric Heart Center has second-level navigation bars; move your cursor over Services... or Contact Us... and then click on one of the resulting subchoices to see how this works in that website.
- Animation. This can be a lot of work to create. It should be used with discretion, as it can be distracting, even annoying. I use it in the banner on the Home page of this site to show some of what I can do, and to "tell the story" of the e after the g in Imageine. Other examples of animation that I created are the banners for Central Oregon Employee Benefits and Barbara Tyler and the gateway page and Portfolio website introductions of Stott Shots Photography and High Angle Photo.
- Input forms. For example the Contact IWD page of this website, the Contact page of Affordable Deschutes Shuttle, and the Contact Us page of the Portfolio site of Stott Shots Photography, among others, include forms for emailing the site owner.
- E-commerce. International Glass Company and Downtown Doggie have website visitors add desired items to their shopping cart and then purchase the items in the shopping cart using a credit card or a PayPal account; e-commerce is the purpose of the websites. I custom-built shopping carts for these websites that include more complex shipping charge inputs and calculations than are possible using PayPal's shopping cart. Habitat for Humanity of Oregon lets website visitors make a donation using a credit card or a PayPal account.
- Slide shows. The Photos/Videos page of Windward Performance and the Porfolios page of the Portfolios site of Stott Shots Photography, among others, contain slide shows. In both of these cases website visitors can choose from among several slide shows. The slide shows initially start playing in automated mode, but website visitors can stop the slide show and then play it in manual mode or resume automated mode. In Windward Performance, website visitors can go directly to a specific slide by clicking on its correspnding thumbnail image, and can see a larger version of the slide tailored to the size of the monitor in which they are viewing the site by clicking on the slide itself. In Stott Shots Photography the size of the Portfolio website is already tailored to the size of the website visitor's monitor, so the slides are already relatively large.
- Audio. I built a full-featured music player in a Flash website for The Drop, a rock band based in Los Angeles. The band, and as a result the website, no longer exist, so I can't provide a link. That website featured the usual music player controls, such as pause-play and volume, but also scrollable song lyrics, and the ability to simultaneously change the song that was being played and the song for which the lyrics were shown by clicking on controls in either place. Habitat for Humanity of Oregon has a sound effect for the primary navigation bar that only works in Internet Explorer.
- Video. The Photos/Videos page of Windward Performance includes videos; these videos include audio.
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©2005-2010 Imageine Web Design
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