A successful web site begins with careful planning of a wide range of aspects, from how to attract surfers with potential interest, to satisfying their information desire with a rewarding user experience.

There is no question that a professional web site is a critical tool in today’s Business World. Offering a clear message via an attractive, intuitive interface with a logical and easy to use navigation layout will make the difference between a happy visitor (and potential client) and a frustrated web surfer. But these are not the only important design issues either. Our professionals are trained to address many fundamental considerations for creating an effective web presence:

• How do we create a web presence that will be found via search engines?
  
  This is one of the most important issues related to planning of a site. If no one can find a site then there is simply little point in creating it. Users must be able to find our client’s web presences via a few, well chosen keywords at the biggest search engines - anything less is unacceptable. Our trained professionals realize that intelligent planning will affect where our clients' sites will rank in each search engine.
  
  Weighed criteria are embedded to determine how each site can be found. As we do not consider ourselves experts on the content of each client’s message, we make sure to work closely with their staff towards identifying the key words / phrases of interest, to be derived.
  
  Other design criteria we incorporate to help in the search engine ranking effort are as follows:
   
  • creating links in text, not graphic format
  • ensuring that the keywords accurately reflect the content
  • ensuring that the keywords are mentioned as often as possible within the page content, page header, page title and the first few paragraphs of text.
     
• How do we propose to update each client’s site?
  
  As technology experts we inform and demonstrate to our clients the fact that the web is a fast moving medium and any effective site needs to be updated frequently with new and revised content. An appropriate analogy to this issue would be another form of publication such as a magazine. If a magazine displays the same articles each month, it will quickly loose it’s standing as a destination of interest.
   
  In our proposals for design, we customarily include outlines to the efforts that our firm will extend for updating pages on our clients’ behalf. In conjunction, we furnish templates that facilitate client self-maintenance of content; as part of our delivery hand-off, we demonstrate and train these clients on the effective use of the templates provided. In all cases we work closely with our clients to entrench a web marketing mindset, and make them aware of the importance to stay up to date.
   
• How do we deliver the most appropriate navigational interface for a specific site?
  
  From a surfer’s point of view, once he/she has landed on a site, the navigational interface needs to be incredibly easy to use, so that he/she never thinks "how do I find what I am looking for?" but rather "what am I interested in?". Centaurin professionals realize there is no way to guarantee exactly where a user will enter a site, and therefore we make sure to create the intuitive roadmap that ties down the complete sphere of thought regardless of the point of entry.
  
  A design strategy we commonly use is to design interfaces to be subtle, consistent, and transparent. Our experience suggests that this is simply the best way to make users comfortable navigating around content. If the navigation look, style, feel or placement changes, users rapidly become lost and leave.
   
• To use frames or not to use frames.
  
  We realize that there are several severe usability problems involved in using frames. Frames, for instance, have a major adverse affect on how high in search engine listings web pages can rank. Many search engines are not able to index an entire site, if it is designed in frames. They will perceive the company as only having one page per topic.
  
  We therefore shy away from incorporating frames into our designs.
   
• How do we arrange for hosting services?
  
  Each completed web site needs to be hosted on the Internet, for public user access. Centaurin professionals make sure to educate and inform clients of the many related issues of setting up web hosting services. This is a critical decision that will govern the speed at which pages are delivered to people and also the reliability - i.e. "uptime".
  
  Never the less, we are prepared. Through our many hosting partners we are able to refer our clients to highly capable yet cost conscious web hosting providers, who will be glad to address this important requirement.
   
• What will be the site's criteria for success?
  
  Early on, we help clients determine how they will judge the deployed site for success. Examples of criteria for success may include a certain number of visitors every week, or a certain percentage of printing and distribution costs saved by distributing literature over the internet, or a certain amount of new orders being placed directly from the site and so on. There could also be less formal criteria outlined, in the form of enhanced public perception of the company or better public relations.
  
  Our staff are well informed in not only the technical aspects of web design, but also the business areas. We have successfully provided aggressive ROIs to existing clients, and are very much prepared through our experiences to do the same on behalf of new prospects.

Successful outsource partnerships require teams that work seamlessly towards a common goal. From top management involvement to cultural synchronization, our people go that extra mile to ensure successful results.

To find out more about what Centaurin can do for your business, contact us and we'll work out the details!

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