The purpose of a web site is to support and enhance the goals of your business or organization - it is not an end in itself. A web site should be much more than just an on-line brochure, and a well designed web site integrates the following key concepts.

What makes the Web such a powerful medium is that it is interactive, and it provides instant access to an incredible depth of information. Good web site design should take full advantage of these capabilities, providing your visitors with easy access to the information, products or service you provide, while making their whole experience stimulating and satisfying.

We will also evaluate the need for your own domain name and your web site hosting options. Based on this we will provide you with a scope document that summarizes the objectives of your web site and outlines the content and navigational structure, free of charge.

In order to make your web site dynamic we will also consider time sensitive information that you want to publicize: announcements, schedules, events, meetings, sales, and special activities or campaigns. You may also want to schedule periodic content updating for certain portions of your web site.

Included in the creation of all our web sites at Merit Web Design is the appropriate use of HTML Meta tags and effectively presented text, which will help your web site get high listings in the search engines. This is critical to getting traffic to your web site, and can make the difference between success or failure. Many of our clients have achieved #1 positions in the major search engines through these and other techniques.

At this point you can review your web site and request any changes you would like us to make. We want you to be happy with our work.

Design Challenges

An image that looks fantastic with 64,000 colors on a new monitor can look terrible through an older monitor that displays only 256 colors, because the older monitor "dithers" the colors it cannot display. If you have ever seen Images on a web site covered with dots or bands of colors, this is the cause. Six common factors contribute to dithering and image degradation:

• The image's color palette was not sufficiently reduced
• The image was not correctly compressed into the "GIF" or "JPG" format
• Lack of memory in the viewer's computer
• Use of certain browsers, especially AOL's older versions
• The viewer has set their monitor resolution incorrectly (i.e. someone with a 17" monitor set at 640 x 480 resolution--they should set it for 1024 x 768)
• The viewer has set their monitor colors incorrectly (i.e. someone with a new monitor set at 256 colors which should be set at 16 million colors)

People use monitors with different screen resolutions. The most commonly used is 800 x 600 pixels. However, many newer PC's and Mac's come with monitors that display 1024 x 768 pixels or more, and many people with older PC's have monitors set at 640 x 480. Browsers will actually move the Images around and the lines of text will stretch or shrink, all depending on the monitor's resolution.

Shown below is the exact same web page viewed on a Netscape browser, but at different monitor resolutions, from lowest to highest resolution. Notice how the browser moves around the graphics and text, and how the higher screen resolutions appear to shrink the graphics.