Optimising shopping carts have become an important part of website design if you want to have your website positioned high in the search results. Ensuring that your products website pages URL strings are correctly named compliments the website optimisation process. The search engine spiders will be able to understand what products you offer and favor your website in the natural listings as opposed to your competition.

One of the main factors in assisting your website to getting to the first pages of Google is website development. To develop your website regularly by adding new relevant content that is unique about new products or services is great for the search engine spiders as it keeps them coming back to index your website and keep up to date with your products and services. Website development is the process that continues once your website design has been completed and uploaded. When you access new web pages to your website there are techniques and website structure techniques that can be used to ensure your site is strongly equipped with the tools to compete in the top listings on the major search engines.

• HTML web design
• ASP web design
• PHP Web design Database website design
• Dynamic web design
• E-commerce website designs

Factors that have to take into consideration when trying to setup trading online are:

• Which platform are we going to use; PHP, ASP, HTML, Java or Flash?”
• Which website design company should I use for the web hosting?”
• Most important of all, “How can I get the correct website design?”
• After all the website design is the core to the success of your online marketing and web design also plays a key part in your online identity.

Many a times, a website redesign is just as important as designing a website itself. This is mainly because of the fact that once you design your website, over the passage of time, the concept and look of the website looks old when compared to other websites. So instead of considering starting a new website, you can create the same response and visitors to your website with a simple website redesign.

You can tell if your site requires a website redesign if you first look at it as a visitor and not as its owner. This way, you find out some disadvantages and improvements that have to be done to the website. Sometimes, you have to update your website’s information so that it can compete with other websites. Thus, a website redesign proves to be an important factor.

Your website redesign should make your website more attractive

When you upgrade your website, make sure it becomes more eyes catching to visitors with a compelling layout design. You have to use interesting and relevant graphics, images, fonts and colors in the website to make it as compelling to the eyes of the visitor as possible. This will ensure that you give some competition to the other websites on the internet.

Your website redesign should include all the factors that you wanted to include in the original web design, but could not do so. Make sure your homepage has all the necessary information that will entice the visitor to browse the other pages of your website. Take a look at your original web design to spot out the flaws and difficulties a surfer went through to access the other pages of the website. This will give you ideas to incorporate in your website redesign.

Make your webpage more navigable with a website redesign

Make sure you have manageable links placed in the website redesign by having a navigational menu that is easily visible to the visitor. Difficult to find links make visitors irritated while surfing your website as they will not be able to access the information they were looking for in your website. Thus, redesign your website to organize its information in an appropriate manner so that all these problems are taken care of and so that visitors find it easy to navigate the different pages of the website.

Of course, you get the best inspiration for your website redesign by looking at the different websites of your competitors. Aim to be ahead of your competitors with the latest in graphics and fonts used in the website. Remember that websites more than 1.5 to 2 years were created using old technology. It is only with a website redesign that you will be able to compete with your rivals.

Hence, it can be seen that a website redesign is very important to improve the profitability of your business by increasing traffic to your site. More visitors mean more sales. Moreover, a website redesign adds professionalism to your website that will be viewed by millions of visitors worldwide.

Modern websites are a far cry from the static text and graphics showcases of a decade ago, Today almost all popular and successful websites today, be it online shopping portals, lead management systems, surveys, event registration, reservation, and ticketing systems, social networks, entertainment sites, ecommerce websites implement web based applications.

Web applications are computer programs. These programs allow website visitors to submit and retrieve data to/from a database over the Internet using a preferred web browser. The data is then presented to the user within the browser as information is generated dynamically by the web application through a web server.

Web application development is not necessarily an easy task. A properly developed web application must undergo a series of actions to ensure success.

The 5 Step Software Development Cycle

The software development life cycle normally comes with some standard processes which can be managed by a well-trained development team. Like software, web site applications are also developed with a certain methodologies. Let us look at the steps involved in most any web site development projects.

1. Analysis:

As the web site is going to be a part of a system, it needs a complete analysis as, how the web based application is going to help the present system and how the site is going to help the business. Moreover the analysis should cover all the aspects especially what are the performance expectations of the finished product. Another key aspect of the analysis is identifying and understanding the targeted audience and their respective demographic.

2. Identify Specifications:

After the analysis, preliminary specifications are drawn up by covering up each and every element of the requirement. This specification document is then used by the design and development team as a master plan ensuring the ongoing understanding of the project requirements.

3. Design:

The Design step includes the creation and design of all the pages implementing the application features as design elements to be programmed later by the coding team. In most of the cases customer may be interested in viewing two or three design versions. Revisions are displayed via the web project board for the customer to view. In optimum project management processes, customer comments, feedback and approvals are submitted to a project management board for easy review and retrieval by all relevant parties. Throughout the design phase the team should develop test plans and procedures for quality assurance. It is necessary to obtain client approval on design and project plans. Once approved the approved coded designs are provided to the Programming team for development.

4. Development:

In parallel the Database team will develop the database with all the data structures. Unlike traditional design the coder must be familiar with the interface as the code should not change or alter the look and feel of the site or application. It is important the programming team and the designer interact and communicate well in order for the programmer to thoroughly understand the design. The coders should always produce necessary testing plans as well as technical documentation. The end-user documentation can also be prepared by the coding team, which can be used by a technical writer.

5. Testing:

Unlike software, web based applications need intensive testing, as the applications will always function as a multi-user system with bandwidth limitations. Some of the testing which should be done are, Integration testing, Stress testing, Scalability testing, load testing, resolution testing and cross-browser compatibility testing. Both automated testing and manual testing should be done without fail. For example its needed to test fast loading graphics and to calculate their loading time, as they are very important for any web site.

There are ideal testing tools which assists quality assurance testers. After the testing is completed a live Beta testing is necessary for web sites and web based applications. After uploading the site a final testing is conducted.

Successful businesses have made intelligent use of web application development to enhance their business prospects. However web application development should be handled only by firms who have the experience and technological understanding to undertake challenging application development.

Once your company requires an online application look for a web development with a strong portfolio of clients that have an industry reputation. A strong website development company can make any website effective.

Web development is broken down into two areas: front-end development and back-end development. Front-end developers are a blend of a designer and a back-end developer. They are accountable for turning designs into a web site, user interface and JavaScript widgets. Back-end developers normally have no artistic aptitude. Back-end developers are responsible for programming into about all the functions of a web site that it’s users will experience but never see - XML parsers, elaborate product databases, eCommerce integrations etc.

Front-end Development

The initial stage of front-end development is to turn a design or set of designs into HTML and CSS. The majority of web developers will simply use a WYSIWYG editor like Dreamweaver to put your site into HTML. This is little more difficult than using Microsoft Word and results in an unprofessional end product. Web sites that have been constructed in a WYSIWYG editor will suffer from all of the following:

1. Messy and bulky code, which is difficult to update and maintain
2. Pages will not be geared for search engine optimisation
3. Updates to the site will cause degradation to already low quality HTML
4. HTML will be inflexible and suffer from accessibility issues, reducing your target audience
5. Contain numerous coding errors, which can cause cross-browser incompatibility and confuse search engines, again reducing your target audience
6. Only makes use of a fraction of HTML and CSS

At Arkis Data Ltd every single page is hand-coded using scalable, semantic, keyword-rich HTML. This means:

1. Our code is clean & minimal, resulting in pages that are easy to manage and update
2. HTML is constructed in a way to best inform search engines what that page is about
3. HTML is scaleable, meaning any content can be changed to fit any requirements and the size of the site can be increased infinitely without HTML and CSS is provided free of errors and compatible with major web browsers
4. Web site will be compatible with all screen resolutions

Back-end Development

Once a project has been through front-end development it is handed over to a back-end developer. This is the stage where all the ‘behind the scenes’ work goes on - the front-end of the site is connected to programming functions and databases that will make the web site actually work. We have knowledge of and can support development using the following:

Markup Languages

• HTML & XHTML
• XML
• XUL

Stylesheet Languages

• CSS

Programming Languages

• C
• C++
• Java
• JavaScript
• PHP 4 & PHP 5
• Perl
• Visual Basic

Query Languages

• MS Access
• MS Jet
• MySQL
• PostgreSQL

Miscellaneous

• ADO
• AJAX
• JSON
• mod_rewrite

Protocols

• DNS
• FTP
• IMAP
• MIME
• POP3
• SMTP

If it is not possible for us to meet your requirements with one of the above languages we will definitely be able to using a combination of them.

Our approach to programming is modular and object-orientated. All of our programming is created with extensibility in mind. Most of our programming is built on frameworks, which allows us to do more, to a higher standard in less time. We have our own content management framework, which allows us to build any form on content management on strong foundations. We do not create anything that uses systems or pre-built packages; quite simply because they are inflexible, difficult to maintain and we would not insult our client’s confidence in us by giving them something we have just downloaded for free.