Website Design and Development

Designing your site to meet your customers’ needs while also reflecting your image may seem obvious, but a quick survey of the majority of sites on the Internet demonstrates that it is not easy. At Eight Trails, our combination of strategic marketing experience, user-focused research and testing, compelling website content, and exceptional visual interface design makes us uniquely qualified to deliver the optimal website. At Eight Trails, we don’t just build websites. We build brands.

We are strong advocates for user-centered design and web standards-based design and development, which provides a number of benefits for site users as well as site owners. Among the benefits of a web standards approach, which includes the use of valid and semantic site markup (HTML or XHTML) for content, CSS for styling, and Javascript for interactivity, are the following:

  • Sites are easier to use, easier to understand, and easier to navigate
  • Sites are flexible, so the text and even the page can expand or contract to suit the visitor’s preferences
  • Sites are easy to update
  • Visitors with visual or physical disabilities can use the site
  • Search engines will “like” your site because it’s easier to index – you’ll get higher search ranking faster

Our Website Design Process Gets Results

We’ve perfected our website design and development process over the course of designing more than 50 websites for businesses of every type and size. Whatever the size of your project, we’ll approach it with the same comprehensive and thoughtful steps to ensure a successful result:

  • Client Input Meeting – We’ll meet with you in person or over a conference call to identify key website audiences, their needs, and your goals for the site.
  • Site Planning – We’ll put together your website “blueprints,” which may include a strategy brief, content outline, sitemap, wireframes, user personas, and functional specifications.
  • Design – We’ll create a professional and unique look for your site, based on your input and any visual elements you provide us.
  • Development – We use modern, standards-compliant coding languages to develop your site, so it will be functional in all modern, standards-compliant browsers.
  • Search Engine Friendly – Because we use clean, standards-compliant code to develop your site, it will be easily findable and indexable by search engines.
  • Testing – We check all the sites we build in Internet Explorer 7, Firefox, and Safari to ensure that they work well on the most common browsers on PCs and Macs.