Website Options

When it comes to building a website, the sky is the limit when it comes to the number of options you have as far as styles and functionality is concerned.  If you have a bigger enough budget, within reason, you can pretty much have what you want.  This section of our website goes through the various options available to our customers who contract us to build a Joomla Website.

The expectations for most folk who are looking at having a website built for a small to medium size business or for a club or organisation, do not have large budgets, nor do they need overly complicated websites.  The attributes they need in their website include;

• Website Designed for your Intended Market – The website overall theme should fit into the type of market or person you wish to attract to your site. You must decide on your target market and ideally, understand how the people in that market think!  If your site is aimed at the farming community, a rural theme is needed whereas, if you sell coffee, then you need a Café styled theme.
  Have an Attractive Layout Style – The design of your website must look attractive and be easy on the eyes of your intended visitor. Colour and graphic combinations should be modern in terms of your intended market. A website selling clothing to teenagers would look completely different to say, a website selling hearing aids to the elderly.
• Contain Useful Information – A visitor to your website is usually looking for particular information and will often decide in just a few seconds whether they are in a site they want to visit or not. Having the right and useful information that can be seen instantly for your intended market, will make the visitor stay long enough to hopefully find yet more information.  This is the single most important factor for having a good website. The information must be in a form that your audience will understand.  This useful information also has another important function and that is to feed ‘search engines’ used by the likes of Google and Yahoo, which troll through websites looking for useful material to use in their search engines.  Relevant information, will directly dictate how well you will be ranked in the search engines.
• Easy to Navigate & Find Information - If your website visitors can't find information on your site, then the website is useless.
• Loading Time – If your website is slow to load, users often opt out and find an alternative website to view.  In general terms, your website should load at an acceptable speed for your targeted market.  While loading time is important, it is important to ‘weigh-up’ the options. “Do I sacrifice functionality and presentation, so that the 12 percent of my total website viewers in New Zealand, who are still on dial-up, have acceptable performance”?  If your target market was a rural folk then this is a consideration.  Broadband numbers are rising in heart-land New Zealand, with one in two rural homes now having a broadband connection, compared with just one in five in 2006. This percentage will continue to improve for Broadband.