Templates & Designs
Can't think of what you want? We provide templates of past sites and personal designs to help expedite your decision process. These templates are for structure, not color; color schemes can always be customized.
Please feel free to browse the past templates used on other projects via the left bar, or check out some of our personally designed templates. Variations to templates can be made as well; none of these are set in stone.
Still can't find what you like? You can always request a custom design as well! Remember, the more you know about what you want the quicker and more effective your site can be.
Types of Website Designs
When it comes to designs, we break it down into a few simple categories to help your decision process and our application. The catagories are:
- Professional
- Business
- Personal
- Graphical
- Flash-based
- Custom
Professional
Professional designs kind of speak for themselves; they are professional in nature. This usually refers to simple color schemes, often working with contrasts rather than differing colors, solid color backgrounds, and lengthy content. Due to this, styles are often block and simple, making it reader friendly. Most professional sites are invisioned to be read with more academic intent, thus the style reflects that by making reading larger passages and longer paragraphs easier on the eyes and simpler to do.
By using simpler color schemes, the content of the site is brought out, drawing the user's attention to it. Furthermore, contrasts and lack of differing colors makes it easier on the eyes for long reading. Most professional sites will link to numerous documents that are meant to be available to the public so intelligent design is necessary to avoid link farms.
The most common customers of professional designs are professors looking for sites to host their research or class information on.
Business
Business designs are similar to professional in their simple nature, but color is used to help create a warmer atmosphere and add life to a site. These designs tend to use a four piece color scheme, which involves 2 main colors, different shades of them, and then black and white. Often, the choice is to utilize one color and numerous shades of it alongside the white and black to give depth and visibility to the site.
Business sites tend to sell something, thus useful forms and captivating applications are necessary to grab attention and keep it there. It is a fine blend between a professional looking design, and one that captivates a user in an advertisement fashion. Forms and scripts are often a large piece of this design, as are custom designed banners, logos, or sections within the site.
The most common customers of business designs are, simply, businesses looking for a new feel to their site.
Personal
Personal website designs often utilize sparkling graphics, vibrant color schemes, and custom applications. In terms of design, these sites are colorful, often utilizing custom banners and graphics throughout the site, rotating images and colors, different levels of shade to add depth and life, animated graphics, and more. Content wise, these sites are a mixture of content that the user wants to have on them, often driving the general design style.
These types of designs are rarer projects, but we will take them on. Most of the time, these sites are for the academic professional who already has his academic oriented site and is looking for something on the lighter side. Otherwise, it is when a professional or business type website can't handle all the requirements of a user, thus we build a personal one for them. In general, these sites require a webmaster to work with the team in order to keep the site up to date, as multiple applications must be handled by someone with coding experience and knowledge. Nevertheless, a content management system can be setup for minor updates and modifications.
Graphical
Graphical website designs are as the name suggests, graphic and image based. This would include custom banners, logos, etc. that one would see in a personal site, but a focus is made to display images as the main "content" of the site. Photo albums, display properties, etc. are the main content used and accessed. Due to this, the interface necessary for updating the content without webmaster assistance requires a custom solution for uploading images and arranging them correctly, often relying on some creative javascript and scriptaculous products.
Due to the graphical setup, a strong bandwidth is suggested along with a server that supports a programming environment. The reason for this is, to create a useful and effective interface, a program is developed to provide the necessary views and functionality. Furthermore, the timeline for a graphic based site is longer due to the need for a more detailed interface.
The most common users of a solution like this would be graphic designers or professors who need to post design ideas or images frequently. This can often be used in cooperation with a normal site, specifically if the site does not support a large bandwidth, server space, or programming environment. In this situation, we often recommend an external hosting package to accompany their current site.
Flash-based
Flash is an adobe supported environment that utilizes graphics and animation to create applications and designs that are unique to the name (hence the definition "flash-based"). As the name implies, a flash based website would utilize flash as the main background for development, including creating applications, graphical interfaces, photo albums, banners, etc. from flash, which gives a polished, and entertaining look. However, due to the high-quality of flash, this is not recommended for most sites as it can deter from content; thus, a flash-based site is often combined with a normal site, or is used for a specific project or apparatus.
Flash based sites have issues with compatibility and support for long-term, so a lot of time goes into making both a flash-based site and a non-flash based one as to increase customers ability to access the site (as per accessibility guidelines).
Timelines for creating these types of sites tend to be lengthy as well considering the additional code that goes into development, along with a longer review process (flash based development tends to be very picky as to how everything comes together). Most commonly, these types of sites are used in combination with main sites as specific components for a piece of a project, but they can work as stand-alones.
Custom
If none of the general design interfaces seem to fit what you are looking for, we do offer a custom based solution in which we develop the site from scratch based on your requirements. In truth, all sites are custom, but having an idea of what "type" of site design you are looking for can speed up the process, make it more streamline, and save us time and effort in the long run. Due to this, fitting a general style saves you money.