Web Site Development

Small Planet undertakes typical web site development projects on a turn-key basis. This means, for a customer we are a one-stop-shop. All allied services like Domain Name Registration, Web Site Hosting, Email Hosting, Maintenance and Support, etc. are part of Small Planet's offerings.

There are several models to manage a web site development project. A project title 'web site development' sounds pretty familiar to all of us, however, the understanding of 'what is in scope' of my web site development project is still a somewhat new area for a typical customer. Example, 'choose a layout from our library of layouts and send us write up by email' can be a Scope of one web site project, while some other project may have clearly defined tasks like 'make three elegant layouts Specially Designed for our type of industry, run through approval cycle from our three departmental managers, etc.'

Note, the efforts and hence the costing of a web site project varies even many-folds as per the project life cycle we choose as above.

The visible aspects of Quality measurement for a web site project primarily covers parameters like Presentation of matter, Layout, Copy-writing, Attractive graphics and Animation, etc. These parameters are fairly known to most of us.

Apart from the above, there are several more Quality aspects that are initially invisible to a customer. However, when a customer compares his site with somebody else's site, he could discover several more good or bad factors of comparison. These aspects mainly include the following:

  • Optimization of images - the size of an image (in kilo bytes) can vary to even 300 % or 400 % depending upon how much the web designer optimizes it with appropriate color pallettes and compression techniques.
    Just look at the images on right - both have Same Visual Feel, still they differ by 350 % in byte-size!
14 kb - Bad
4kb - Good
14 kb - Careless compresstion
4 kb - Excellent optimization
  • Browser compatibility - certain HTML syntax looks considerably different in different browsers (like Internet Explorer, Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape, Safari, Google Chrome, etc.). A good web designer always chooses the most stable syntax.
  • Screen-resolution compatibility - commonly used monitors vary across several different resolution, viz.800x600 to 1280x1024. A nicely designed web site should look good on ALL resolutions At Least in this range. Note, a web site that says something like 'best viewed in IE 6, 1024x768' is actually a Badly Designed web site. It is like saying 'this car runs only on concrete highways with only 3 persons sitting in'! BTW did you notice the note in the footer of this page? ... Best Viewed in All commonly used browsers, in All commonly used resolutions. That's what the Small Planet Confidence is.

Just look at the adjoining print-screens. One layout looks good in both the resolutions - its contents get uniformly re-distributed all over the screen. The other layout looks quite odd in the resolutions other than the one which it is designed in (1024x768).

 
800x600
1152x864
Bad
Layout designed only for 1024x768 !!
Good
Good - Evenly redistributes parts of the page
Good - Evenly redistributes parts of the page
 
Uniformly redistributed contents
 
Good
Bad
Text on background image is Printable
Text on Image is unreadable on a Printout!
  • Printability - while we make our choice of font-colors, background-colors and background-images, a good web designer also checks for its impact on printability of the web page. In order to economize costly printing ink, most browsers do not print background colors and background images.

    This can result in badly readable printout, or at times, even totally unreadable headings, captions, etc..
  • HTML size optimization and usage of render friendly HTML - the HTML editors like Dreamweaver, FrontPage that are oftenly used for making web pages have limited WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) capability. Due to this, at times, a web designer may not realize that he has messed up tables, 'div' tags, 'p' tags, etc. This unnecessarily increases size of the page file. Apart from that it also makes it difficult for the browser, to render (i.e. to show) the page on the screen. As a result, sometimes the browser is not able to show the page content till it downlaods entire page. Alternatively, the browser may have to redraw the page several times while it is getting downloaded. In such cases the visitor finds that the page text suddenly jumps over to another place while he just started reading it!

Please visit our web site and look at some random picks from out web site layouts, specially designed for some of our customers earlier.
 

 
 


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Pirojshanagar, Vikhroli (E), Mumbai - 79. INDIA. Email - info@smallplanetindia.com