Web Strands
The Complete Solution
Web Strands has been supplying web site development expertise and web site hosting to Australian businesses since 1993. Working within such diverse arenas as;
- government research,
- small/medium business,
- online education,
- individual people - check our case studies for examples.
Put simply:
We provide web development techniques and technology to businesses and people within Australia.
We work alongside academics developing online education systems.
We provide fast and reliable web site hosting for domains and web materials.
We provide software for use in both developing web sites and components that may be used within web sites.
Previous Client Web sites
I have been doing this since 1993, there are quite a few. You might like to look at a selection of the sites I have prepared. I have picked examples which illustrate budget constraints (clubs), the typical (small and medium business) and larger projects (a publicly web site coupled with an internal only intranet site).
Web Development
Web Development is electronic publishing and involves just as much complexity as any other full colour, paper-based publication. If you need a single page, which introduces your product line, that can be used for internet marketing OR you need your whole catalogue placed online for a complete eCommerce experience - we do this.
We have a range of skills which cover the gamut of electronic publishing including extensive experience in project management. Try this for size, if you have 5 product categories and, say, 5 product-items in each category, you have a 125 page catalogue to go online (not counting index pages, forms, top page of site, etc).
The web development covers a wide gamut including:
- web page design (the visual design, look and feel, user interface design)
- interactivity, (elements which excite, teaching materials which engage)
- animations (moving illustrations to expand on the story told or laugh)
- movies (capture then present in a format which the Viewers can use)
- web site design (levels of detail Vs leading Reader through story)
- web site construction (the mechanics)
Over the years I have brushed up against some of the best people in their respective fields. I can pull together Project Team which will deliver just what you need within the budget that a good business decision requires.
Document Conversion
Over the years we have collected a mass of scripts and techniques for converting material into web ready form. We are also skilled in creating electronic expressions of your more interactive aspects - those which have no equivalent in printing.
Website Design
The design of a site takes place at different levels. The different aspects of the site to consider are:
- site wide design aspects (e.g. navigation across the major sections of the site)
- intra-section design aspects (e.g. navigation up/down a branch of the site)
- page construction (e.g. meaningful hierarchical heading structure, elements displayed where and when required)
- page elements (e.g. visual component consistency, are 'side bars' displayed consistently)
For many web sites the design requires providing multiple paths to information, we have worked with the exceptions though; such as online education, where providing instant access to explanatory materials (eg links from the instruction page to dictionary of terms) must be constrained such that the student is still lead through the whole teaching unit - they must have seen/read everything regardless of what side trips they take.
Online Education Systems
The 'reach' that online education provides is an advantage anyone can see. But the actual construction of online teaching systems is a skill-base all its own, and one that only those with experience in constructing teaching materials online can truly appreciate. While we have worked with a number of development systems (at TAFE and university level) our extensive experience is with the WebCT system. We have people, each with two decades of teaching under their belt and our technical folk have worked within Primary Schools and Tae- we have the expertise.
Web Site Hosting
We have industrial strength web servers available for hosting your domains. Our servers sit on huge and multiple telecommunications lines inside armed security protected, air conditioned facilities - all backed up regularly.
Search Engine Optimisation and Advertising
But hosting a site isn't the end of the job. A site is useless if no one visits it. We have the years of expertise in listing your domain on the various internet search engines, and can advise in how to integrate your web site into every day promotions and activities to increase its visibility. For example; we once listed a company on search engines then four years later they were bought and re-named so we listed them again - the new name appeared under the old name on the first page of a search-results at three of the major search engines.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the careful editing of your web site pages and the website as a whole to deliver a high ranking in the various search engine's results pages (often referred to as the 'organic' search results). This can be a bit of a 'black art' especially as the search engines often change their algorithms in their own attempts to be the best at what they do.
Search engine advertising (SEA) are the other links on the search engine's results page (often distinguished by a separate colour) which represent the commercially purchased place on the results page.
Web Software
Their are some parts of web sites which are more than just documents. Calendars, diaries and other web site components we have utilised are available for your own sites - obviously we would happy to help install them.
We also have a few utilities which are utilised in the back end, those that other web developers might utilise. For example we have a Java applet available which, once installed on a web site, will allow the web developer to designate portions of a web page to be editable and then, using the applet, allow the web site owners to edit their own site without knowing any HTML - this is one of those cases where seeing it in action is much easier than describing it - but it does allow a CEO to make changes just by typing a sentence (give them ownership of the site!). These are software we have used and consider the best at the time, so this collection will grow, and even change as we are able to make them publicly available.
Web Strands - We see a great deal further
About this site
This has been designed to be viewed by browsers from version 4 onwards, at any window size and uses cascading style sheet version 1 and version 2 definitions (CSS1 & CSS2). Throughout this site, the same HTML template is used at all times but you will see a difference in page renderings depending on the browser and version you use, as the various CSS aspects are either rendered or ignored.
This shows that it is possible to produce pages which use the very latest coding techniques yet are still useful to all Visitors no matter what software or hardware they happen to have.
And do it with minimal effort - minimal cost
The easier a site is to use - the more thought that went into its construction
Call us for a free chat
- Ross Campbell 0417 049 715
