Website Design

Your Website is Your Shop Window

shop_front_fianl.jpgThese days, your website is your window to the world. How it looks and how it functions will be crucial in defining how visitors think about you or your organisation. Balancing these two things - visual impact and clear functionality - are among our top priorities.

Clear navigation, ease of use, beautiful design and attention to detail are integral parts of all Thinking Arts websites.

Thinking Arts has a proven method of collaborative website development. This includes allowing our clients to see and comment on their sites as they take shape.The development cycle is as follows:

  • Requirements and specification
    • We will meet with you to learn more about you or your organisation, your requirements and your vision
    • We will draw up a detailed specification outlining all the functionality of the proposed website, including the site structure and any special coding requirements
  • Proposal
    • We will submit a detailed proposal including a timescale and pricing
  • Design and Protoytpe
    • We will prepare an initial design template and continue to refine it, or present alternatives until you feel happy with it
    • You will be able to follow the design process through an online test site to which you will have 24/7 access

  • Design Review
    • Signing off of Design Stage

  • Development and Content Creation
    • We will work on the design and implementation of the remainder of the website pages
    • We will provide simultaneous support and training to you and/or a member of your staff in preparing and uploading the content.
    • If you would like us take care of the content for you, we can do this by arrangement - we do however recommend that you use this stage to acquaint yourselves with the admin and contact management system
    • Once the content has been inserted, there is a period (usually a week or two) for testing and final adjustments

  • Site goes Live
 
What is a CMS?
A Content Management System (CMS) is designed to allow you, the user and owner of the website, to manage your own content.
CMS Image

There are a huge number of CMS's to choose from - some, like Wordpress, are hugely popular and free but limited in their scope - others like Drupal, are extremely sophisticated but demand professional computer programming skills. A third category are custom built CMS's, such as the one which underpins all Thinking Arts sites. The advantage of a customised CMS is that it can be tailored specifically to meet each client's requirements, something which is difficult and sometimes impossible with 'off the shelf' systems. The dis-advantage is that if we fall under the proverbial bus, it can be a problem... The reality however, is that the speed with which online technology is changing is much more likely to be the factor that triggers a re-design of a website. The Thinking Arts CMS's in their various iterations have suuccessfully run our client's websites since 1999.

Whichever kind of CMS you end up using, they should allow you to have (almost) complete control over the content of your website, so that you don't have to run back to the website designers everytime you want to add, delete or change something on one of the pages.

The JanYii CMS which powers all Thinking Arts websites is extremely sophisticated - it has an easy to use Administration System, giving you access to the database which underpins the whole system and a WORD like editor for managing display pages, which are primarily text and images.