Website Development
Real-World Websites Shouldn't Look Like They Were Done by Your Nephew
The web is the most important business development in the last 50 years. Don't leave your website to amateurs!
These days everyone knows how to do a website -- at least, they think they do. Webpage creation programs like Dreamweaver have convinced people they can do websites, and they can... just not comercial, industrial-grade websites. What's the difference? The number of pages for one thing. Comercial websites may start out small but in today's e-world, they can quickly turn into hundreds of pages. And building and maintaining a website of hundreds of pages is a completely different beast than a family or personal site of a dozen or two.
Lots of pages requires specialized web tools to manage
Things as simple as menus get harder and harder to manage as the number of pages goes up. Comercial sites have systems that automatically update the menus throughout the entire site as changes are made. There is nothing worse than making a change or adding a page and having to make changes to every other page in the site to reflect that addition. Comercial sites are frequently run under a content management system that makes it easy to add pages and new content. That, in turn, opens up the site to many people in the company who can manage the content in their particular areas of that site.
Websites have moved far beyond the simple HTML pages of ten years ago
Another difference between consumer websites and comercial sites is in the web technologies employed on the site. Ten years ago pages were authored totally in HTML. Then Javascript appeared, mostly to make the menus and buttons fancier with dropdowns and rollovers. CSS and CSS2 finally took hold and for awhile it looked like Javascript would be forgotten and disappear. But today, sites are written in PHP (like this one) and Ruby on Rails... they use AJAX for dazzling effects (which in turn uses Javascript -- ha! Just when you thought you could drop JS)... they have motion cartoons and video brought to us through Flash... the list goes on.
Mastering these web technologies is not trivial. It requires full-time people. Does your company have those full-time people? If not, just use Mindpik's. We're crazy enough to think the web is still fun
A word of acknowledgement and thanks here
The look and feel of this site, and virtually all of the illustrations were done by our graphics guru and master of design, Art Romero, the Imaginist. We have wored with Art for over 35 years and to this day he remains a key part of the whole Mindpik vision. Contact us and we'll make him part of your vision as well.
