Process: Information and graphic design
Information design
You may not have heard the phrase "information design" before, but it's possibly the most important piece to this process. Essentially, information design involves organizing your content at both the macro level (your site as a whole) and at the micro level (paragraphs and sentences).
Since by now we've gathered some useful information about your company and possibly several pieces of content, we have a foundation upon which to lay the other parts of your web site, such as company information, testimonials, news, products, and services.
Categorizing this content on a high level is important mainly for defining your site's navigation. Highly important categories are listed in primary navigation, and sub-categories or less important information are displayed underneath. This gives your visitors a consistent site that is easy to understand, which means they'll get to what they're looking for quicker.
Categorizing content on a lower level is very important for readability on the web. It's simply not as easy to read long paragraphs and sections without some sort of break. This is where a technique known as "chunking" comes in: by breaking up related material and paragraphs into labeled sections, readers can skim to a specific piece, or begin detailed reading whenever they'd like.
You can see chunking in action on this page (and this entire web site). Useful headers such as "Information design" and "Graphic design" allow skimmers to quickly get to a section. Also, paragraphs are shorter than in print media—usually not more than two or three sentences without breaks. This helps readers to not get lost in a large section of text.
Graphic design
We believe that your web site's success is not determined by how it looks, but by the benefits that it provides. However, you will lose credibility if your web site looks amateur or otherwise unprofessional. Design communicates subconsciously—people assign value and worth to objects based on aesthetic feel without necessarily being aware of their decision. According to research published in the Behavioral and Information Technology journal, visitors judge your web site based on how it feels within 1/20th of a second.
With this in mind, we design web sites that show you are a professional, that look and feel right, and are easy to use.
Services in this stage of development
Next up » Our process, stage 3: Develop your content and structure