Page Design, Old and New

Building attractive, effective websites involves two distinct design stages. First, we create the basic look and feel of a page, deciding on the use of logo or other banner art, choice of colors and fonts, placement of graphics, and style and placement of site navigation. For the most part, this stage follows basic design principles known to graphic artists for years.

The second design stage takes place in the computer-coding of the site. This is where we tell web browsers how to render pages, and the experience of our site's visitors will vary widely depending on how clean and up-to-date we write the code. These design principles are so new and fast-evolving that any site design that's more than a couple years old is seriously behind the times.

MacWorks can create a site from scratch, or take a logo or other client-provided design element and build the site around it, or take a pre-existing site and bring it's code up to date, while leaving the page look and feel as is. All of our code is compliant with recent standards, and will work on all modern browsers.

Site Management

Once your site is up, there are long-term management issues, starting with the need to keep current with domain name and webhosting fees and to deal with any server problems. Most sites need regular content updates, from changing a word here or there to adding whole new pages. Active sites will also tend to add new features as they go along, and every few years a major design overhaul may be needed. MacWorks can handle all your site managment needs, and will usually post changes to a page within 48 hours of a request.

Web Hosts

Your web host is the computer where all the site files reside. Though any computer can serve as a web host, a good, full-fledged host offers all sorts of important services and features, all at a reasonable price. Most of our sites are hosted by Dreamhost, a great company that we highly recommend. You may also need to secure a domain name for your site. Dreamhost includes one free name registration as part of its hosting package. If you just want to find out what names are available, directNic has a well-designed service.