At Design Services we pride ourselves on the fact that we are unique in all areas, be it design, development or the way we communicate with our customers. To keep this uniqueness flowing throughout our company we ensure that our visions are at the forefront of everything we do.

Our Mission - to offer an inspirational experience for customers through the deliverance of innovative, dynamic and balanced e-solutions of the highest quality that always get results.

Our Vision - to excel as a service provider within the digital field to the extent that we can say to all our customers simply - we are the best.

Information Architecture & Initial Design:

Our initial design process looks heavily at how your site information and content are arranged and labeled. This process is essential in creating a web site that is user-friendly and best achieves the goals you may have. It is also the area in which we begin to think about SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). By looking at the language and organisation of information we can cater for search engines.

Web Standards Production:

At Design Services our aim is to make our websites as accessible as possible to the widest range of visitors, customers and search engines.

At the centre of everything we do is the act of communication, so communicating as effectively as possible is paramount for us. This means considering the specific needs of those with visual or physical impairments, learning difficulties and other forms of disability.

In addition it means having an understanding of different browser technologies. We produce our sites to meet current best practices and guidelines. This approach goes hand-in-hand with SEO and search engine spiders (these are the programs that trawl the internet indexing and ranking sites).

How Does Design Services Do This?

In the past many web browsers were released that did not follow a common standard for interpreting web pages. They focused on their own propriety code. The result was that we had to sometimes make several different versions of one site for all the various browsers and there would often be inconsistencies across these sites.

In recent years the makers of web browsers have adopted and brought in support for an open set of standards. These standards are laid down by the W3C, a not for profit organisation, that oversees the development of the web.

There is now a move towards this standard based approach method of building websites within our industry and Design Services is proud to be working in this way.

The Benefits of This Approach:

• Sites are available to as wide an audience as possible and across a variety of technologies. They will also be accessible to future devices.
• Sites meet guidelines for those users who may have impairments and difficulties using the web.
• Sites load quicker and use less bandwidth. This creates savings in hosting costs that we pass on to our customers.

Specific Search Engine Benefits:

Our web standards based method of website production ensures our sites offer the best form of code for search engines. Standard sites completely separate the design of a website from its content. In the past this was not the case. Web pages contain a huge amount of code pertaining to their design, colours, images, tables etc. In many cases this caused search engines to incorrectly index sites and in certain cases ignore them all together.

In the past and in many cases still today, important keywords and navigation were presented as images which in turn meant nothing to a search engines.

Our approach allows us to include these important keyword elements in a page and then format them using CSS to display rich graphics, there by allowing us to create strong user experiences, sites that are easy to use, well designed and loved by search engines!