No one involved in any form of commercial activity can afford to ignore the Internet. This is true even if there are no circumstances in which you would actually want to sell goods or services over the Net.

Every day, more and more people make the Net their first stop when seeking information—and frequently it is their only stop. If you don’t have an Internet presence, you might as well be invisible to them.

But having decided to put up a web site, how do you go about it?

There are software packages which claim to enable you to construct an entire web site quickly with no problems. There are books which claim to teach HTML in a day. Do you really need to pay us to build you a web site?

• If you want your site to reach as many people as possible, the answer is yes.
• If you want your site to work in a wide range of browsers, the answer is yes.
• If you want your site to leave a good impression of your company with whoever visits it, the answer is yes.

Despite what some books and packages might lead you to believe, there are many ptifalls for the unwary in designing web pages:

1. Navigation. A site’s navigation is crucial to the users’ experience of it, yet many sites fail to make navigation clear and comprehensible. A 1998 report revealed that 39% of would-be Net shoppers failed while trying to buy goods over the Internet because of difficulty in navigating web sites. The situation has not improved in fact, since the advent of Shockwave and Flash many sites have become more difficult to navigate.
   
2. Cross-browser problems. Not every user visiting a web site is doing so with the latest version of Internet Explorer running on Windows. Substantial numbers of people use other setups—and certain target groups may well be more likely than average to be users of other browser/OS combinations. A page which looks superb in one browser can look terrible in another. Here’s an example to show you what we mean.
   
3. New technologies. Recent years have seen the arrival of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), which combined with JavaScript gives unprecedented ability to control and manipulate the appearance of a page. Unfortunately, the variable support for CSS by browsers can give unpredictable results, sometimes even the catastrophic failure of the page.
   
4. New standards. The current W3C recommended standard has moved from HTML to XHTML. As the move to more stringent standards continues, sloppy coding will lead to failure of pages—and all of the packages which supposedly make web page construction easy produce at least some of the time code which is sloppy.

At WindSword we are experienced in preparing web pages and dealing with the problems which can arise—so you don’t need to worry about them. We routinely test pages using various browsers under MacOS, Windows and Linux.

WindSword has the experience and the ability to provide you with a Web site which will look good on a wide range of platforms: if you want a professional job, get the professionals to do it!
 

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