Our experienced web design team put together the look and feel for the site with simplicity being the most important factor. With so many variations possible for each cage being possible it was decided that a step by step “wizard” approach would be used to provide the user with guidance and an indication of progress through to checkout.

We also put together a Blog to allow ACA to connect with their customers on a more personal level. The constant flow of new content will help the search engines take note and bring in new customers.

If you’re interested in our e-commerce web design services or would like to learn more about our powerful e-commerce CMS, contact Ben for more information.

WSI Yorkshire are a Huddersfield based Digital Market Agency offering everything from website design and development to training and internet marketing.

Limelight Occasions is a unique and luxurious wedding dress shop just outside of Huddersfield. We worked with their existing design agency White Ash Creative to build a beautiful brochure website, highlighting many of their fantastic products using simple navigation and various attractive image gallery techniques. The Bridal Buyer awards judge thousands of retailers every year across 16 categories.

Huddersfield based WSI have worked with many creative and design agencies in the Yorkshire and Manchester areas to help them bring their visions to life.  Take a look at our Outsourced Web Development page to learn more.

In this post I’m going to discuss some of the popular techniques used to allow more flexibility with online fonts as well as newer solutions that could be on the horizon

Web-safe fonts

For reasons both technical and legal, web browsers have really only been able to make use of fonts already installed on a visitor’s computer. That means that for the most part we’re left with the following list of fonts which are common to both Windows and Mac machines (or at least have a close Mac equivalent):

• Arial
• Courier New
• Georgia
• Impact
• Lucida Sans Unicode (or Lucida Grande on the Mac)
• Tahoma (or Geneva on the Mac)
• Times New Roman (or Times on the Mac)
• Trebuchet MS (or Helvetica on the Mac)
• Verdana

Font Stacks

When CSS became the standard for styling your website it brought with it greatly improved tools for defining and transforming text. One of these tools was Font Stacks, a prioritised list of fonts to be used by a particular part of your site. To list multiple fonts in this way you use the “font-family” property, for example:

p
{
font-family:”Times New Roman”,Times,Serif;
}

This would instruct all of the text in your paragraph tags to use Times New Roman, if that font isn’t available on a user’s machine it would check for Times (the Mac equivalent) and if it can’t find either it would fall back to whatever generic “serif” font was available. This also means that designers can be a little more adventurous, for example adding a relatively rare font at the front of the queue, there’s always a fall back option that everyone else could use. The downside to this being that the majority of your visitors will be seeing a different version of the site, something that a lot of clients may not be happy with.

Font Replacement Techniques

If you’re familiar with the web-safe fonts listed above you may be thinking they all look a little tame. They’ve generally been selected because they are easy to read on screen and so work well as the font for your main body text, but what if you’d like to try something a little more adventurous for your headings? Headings are usually going to be just a few words and rendered in a larger font size which means readability becomes less of an issue, they can be the perfect place to inject a bit of creative flare and give some personality to your design. Over the last few years several options have been developed:

sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement)

sIFR uses Javascript and Flash to convert your plain text into any font you would like. It was first developed in 2005 and has been open sourced so anybody can use it free of charge. You can find out more about it here – http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/sifr/

Because the switch is made by the Javascript after the page has loaded, you don’t have to make any sacrifices in terms of search engine optimisation or accessibility. The downsides to sIFR are that it requires that both Javascript and Flash being installed, the text may not show up if the visitor is using ad-blocking software and some browsers can have problems with selecting/deselecting sIFR text.

Cufón

Cufón is an alternative to sIFR which doesn’t involve Flash. It uses a specially created font generator which converts standard fonts into the necessary format, then Javascript to render the finished font on the page. You can find out more here – http://cufon.shoqolate.com/generate/

It has the same benefits as sIFR but doesn’t need Flash which means more people will see the results and the page should load slightly quicker. On the other hand there can be more work involved in getting it set up and it doesn’t have complete browser support, there are still problems stopping it from working in some versions of Firefox and Chrome. It also has show-stopping problems in some screen readers which would make your site almost useless to visually impaired visitors.

Typekit

So while there are options out there for swapping more adventurous fonts into your websites, they all come with their own drawbacks which is why they’ve not achieved mainstream success. Typekit is a new service which was announced earlier this year and promised to change the way type is handled on the web. It uses a previously available but underutilised CSS property called @font-face which is starting to be implemented by more browsers.

The Typekit founders have made deals with various typographic foundries to offer hundreds of custom fonts specifically for use on the web. The service launched this week allowing website owners to sign up for one of various payment plans. I’ve been testing the service myself with mixed results, you can take a look here although depending on your browser you may or may not see the results – http://www.wsiyorkshire.co.uk/typekit/

A comparison of my Typekit test between two modern browsers.

The Typekit founders claim the service works in Internet Explorer and recent versions of Firefox and Safari although I’ve not been able to get it to work under IE. There is no support for Chrome or Opera until those browser manufacturers include support for the @font-face property, however for now these browsers will simply fall back to the next font in the stack.

The service itself is easy to use and the collection of fonts available is impressive. I’d have to recommend against using it on client sites until the browser support improves but it’s definitely a technology to keep your eye on.

There’s definitely a bright future for typography on the web, there are many other companies working on similar products and the amount of buzz around Typekit shows just how much demand is out there for better fonts! Once the bugs are worked out and the browsers catch, up I’d be very surprised if custom typefaces don’t become commonplace on the web.

Occasionally, you may win over visitors with a website because the content is actually pretty good. However, more often than not, surfers just won’t invest the time it may take to look past an overly busy, flashy, or simply unfathomable website home page. So what makes a great home page?<!–more–>

Employing Home Page Essentials
Your website’s home page is your invitation to stay and see some more. As such, it has a number of roles to fulfil: tell your visitors who you are, what you offer, how you can help them, and where to find additional information. Each role is important and should be prioritised in accordance with your website goals. Following, in no particular order, are 4 tips to help fine-tune your home page.

1. Clearly Identify Who You Are
A well-devised logo will enable you to immediately introduce your brand – and maybe even convey your USP. Your website colours and style will also have an immediate impact on that all-important first impression.

Your company name should be prominently displayed, taking away any guesswork in identifying who the website represents.

2. Set Out Your Stall
This is your ‘elevator speech’ – what do you do? Make it short, punchy, and to the point. The fewer words the better. If your introductory paragraph (or two) successfully does its job, then you will have more opportunities to wax lyrical about your products once the surfer extends his or her visit.

Keep in mind that your website should be an extension of your normal business demeanour. A cleverly written home page introduction can also convey the tone of your website.

3. Include Clear Calls to Action
Don’t be shy. Make it clear where you want your website visitor to go next. Your navigation menu provides access to all the areas of your site, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t direct visitors yourself.

A strategically positioned image can work wonders as a “call to action,” instantly indicating the benefits of following your suggested path rather than following any other link from the home page.

4. Don’t Get Busy
Be selective with your home page content. In most cases, less is more. Establish your main website objectives, then organise your home page content accordingly. Here are some tips:

• Use white space liberally to differentiate between your content; this will make it easy to quickly hone in on the most relevant messages.
• Be selective with your images. The right pictures can instantly get your message across. Too many and your home page may lose some focus.
• Consider using video. A well edited video message can be a fun and effective way of sharing your elevator speech.
• Keep your most important messages “above the fold”. Your visitors shouldn’t need to scroll down to learn what you are all about.

Remember, too much content crammed into your home page can be confusing at best – and downright annoying at worst.

Your home page is perhaps the most important page of your site. It can make or break that all important first impression. If you would like help improving your website home page, call us on 01484 690430.