Web Site Design

Web sites and their design are a key technology for the exercise of scientific curiosity and sharing of knowledge. They also offer the potential for developing a significant income.  Building a successful site requires a blend of technology, art and communications skills.  Since websites are a relatively new development, best practices are poorly understood and curiosity plus a willingness to experiment are critical.

In our web site design work we have been feeling increased pressure to build more ambitious sites with attractive designs and major enhancements to back end capability.  There is no way one or two people can possibly learn everything they need to do this themselves. They will either have to hire help or find tools which speed the process.

If you think about it, the web is a giant teaching tool raising expectations of all the users about what to expect from a modern website.  Viewers are learning to fill out online forms correctly and expect sites to remember their user names and preferences.  If you are building sites by hand you can't possibly work fast enough. 

We are not interested in hiring employees and the idea of outsourcing work to India or some other country seems difficult to do well.  Sites we build are typically not planned in advance so there are no detailed design specs for what we want to do.  We tend to figure things out on the fly.  So far our search has lead to the following: