Web Design Basics
Welcome to the internet home of shapesandpages, located in Boca Raton, Florida.
Boca Raton is in Palm Beach County, between the City of West Palm Beach and Ft. Lauderdale. In 2005 Hurricane Wilma unleased it's terror in Boca, with the Eye of the Storm coming right over the city. We lost power (along with 3,241,000 others) in our office for 13 days. The Effects of Wilma are still around.
A web page is a collection of shapes and pages,which is where our name comes from. Text, photos and graphics ... are just shapes and they are arranged on pages. What is so complicated about it? If you look around the internet you'll find that web pages cover the range of basic black text on a white page to very fancy colorful sites filled with graphics and video. Some sites have music. Each component must be carefully evaluated. If your target audience is people in their office, would they want music to play? Probably not. Our experience, our technical abilities combined with your vision can create a web site that effectively represents you to the world.
We take web design serious
Extraordinarily Effective Web Design.
What does that mean? It means that our goal is to create a web site that conveys your message, attracts visitors, shows up in search engines, and fits the personality of your business. A site that customers and prospective customers can find, and one they can navigate easily when the find you. The site must have a friendly and inviting start page, must be in colors that are easy on the eyes and have graphics mixed with text to keep it from getting boring.
It's not about glamour and glitz, which is good because we're not a glamour and glitz firm. A web presence is necessary today. It adds a level of viability to a business, it makes it real. It's no longer an option.
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Domain Name The internet is really made up of numbers or addresses but do you care? The idea of domain names came about so that users didn't have to remember the numbers. Behind the scenes www.shapesandpages.com is just another number that gets translated. The www.something.com is a domain name. It must be registered so that no one else uses is and that all systems on the internet can look up the registration to get it's number or address when someone asks to go there. There is an annual charge for the registration of a name. |
HostingA web site must be put somewhere. A hosting company charges to put the web site files and information onto a server connected to the internet. That server has the address associated with the domain name which enables visitors to find it. The hosting firm charges for using their servers, and for using their connection to the internet. Along with these basic services, it is important for the servers to be up all the time or most of the time. All the time is almost impossible. The internet connection to the servers must also be up most of the time. These four elements are key to hosting success. |
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Web Site The web site is up and running but now what? Everything that lists your phone number should also have your web site address. It is a big deal, let people know. Let your customers know. Maybe you should consider a feature on your page recognizing a special customer or customer of the month. Let your suppliers know. They might want a chance to give you advertising material or funding. Over time even the simplest web site will grow to be more sophisticated. Don't be intimidated by those that have been around for years. |
ExposureOnce it's done, you really want more than just your customers and suppliers coming to visit ... right? That's where search engines come in. A search engine is a collection of servers that spend all their time scouring the internet, recording information about everywhere they've been and letting users search it to find what they are looking for. There are ways to include information in your web site so that when a search engine gets to your site we can have some influence over what it learns, collects and record. And we want all the search engines to keep coming back so that every change gets recorded for the millions and millions of searches that occur every day. |
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