Visuals
Capturing the essence of what your online business wants to say to its customers requires the designer to both understand your needs but also to have the creative flair to encapsulate that visually. In some circumstances we will involve ourselves in this. More often than not, we will use our digital design expertise to adapt an existing company style or another designer's look and feel for the functionality we need to deliver.
User Interface Design
The art of creating a website that is both compelling and useable is often harder than it would at first seem. The challenge is always to balance the competing pressures of form and function. It is now common to find examples of visually rich websites with themes that are absolutely “on message” for the businesses they serve. However, when you are building a web application or new online venture, you will soon find a plethora of links, user options and information that must be displayed on a page. The sheer volume of this denies the visual designer the creative screen space to also capture the imagination of the user. It is a visual and technical challenge to provide imaginative visual cues in a limited screen area. Intuitive ways are needed to present options and information using specialised visual devices, often exploiting technologies such as AJAX and CSS.
Application Architecture Design
Designing an application architecture requires knowledge and understanding of how many system components work. A successful architecture should exploit component characteristics, making informed trade-offs between the fundamentals of performance, maintainability and scaleability. In addition, consideration must be given to issues of licensing, supplier roadmaps and the knowledge base of your developers. Although this sounds very complicated, the good news is that current software and hardware make developing highly scaleable web applications possible, without needing to invest vast sums of money in infrastructure. We would advise anybody to spend a little time thinking through the application design before investing in infrastructure to solve problems that may not actually be there.