Websites are primarily visual, they get looked at by most visitors - and for those who need screen readers to help them out, the way pages are put together and handled for visually impaired visitors is just as important.
One of the things I notice personally when looking at any website is the general layout and aesthetics of a page and areas within - making sure images are lined up with others, that they are (when appropriate) the same size and dimensions as other images.
Whitespace and gaps around areas and sections of the website page draw my eye when they are not 'right' - where the spacing to the left of one image is different to one next to it, for example.
Say there are three images in a row, with a sentence of text beneath each describing a website owners services - if one sentence spans 4 lines, but the others only span 2, it can look strange...easily corrected here by perhaps putting the 4-line sentence in the middle, but also a little focus on that sentence to bring it down to 2 lines can be the better way - where possible, less is more and also more quickly read and understood by the visitor (read 'potential customer'!).
The layout of a page could be covered in great detail when it comes to paying full attention to how it all looks and works, a website with layout problems is often more obvious than one with good layout and structure.
Alongside the work we put in to the visual design of our websites, there is as much work, sometimes more, that goes in to the parts you don't see:
- Creating customer focused home pages, which draw the visitors attention quickly to the key areas
- Making sure navigation is clear through both the menu structure and on-page call-to-action features such as buttons and links
- Image naming (web-design-carlisle.jpg is more useful to search engines and others than AH77789.jpg for example)
- Image quality settings to ensure fast page loading times
- Creating SEO focused URL menu structures and meta data for all pages and areas of sites
- Keeping ourselves up to date with growing trends in web design, incorporating best practice into our own work
- Monitoring hosting features that we can implement to improve security, page load speeds and more
And that's just a few of them - web design is not a static field, and where possible we try to be ahead of the game and make sure we can provide our clients with things often before they even know they want them (we were the first in the area to move all of our websites to SSL hosting for example, making this a free and inclusive feature of all websites hosted on our own server platform).
Overall, the prices we advertise and charge are for much more than 'just a website' - we charge for the years of expertise grown over almost 20 years of web design, alongside ongoing support in keeping your website software up to date, managing automated backups and ensuring our own knowledge is up to date so we can best support you now and in the future. Our attention to detail is a key part of what we offer, to both new and existing clients :)