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- Fast, Effective, Handcrafted Websites -

Website design by John Potter

Hi! I'm a freelance web designer based in Auckland, New Zealand.
My current passion is developing and maintaining customised WordPress weblogs, which allow a client to publish updated information and articles on the web themselves, with only a tiny amount of training needed.

This page has information on how to evaluate the work of someone you are considering hiring to a design a website for you. Naturally, I'm making it available because I believe my work measures up well against current industry standards.

Of course, in addition to the technical factors there is the question of what sort of relationship you want with someone who is promoting your business or service. If you are in Auckland, I'm happy to come and meet you. You'll discover that I communicate well, and that I'm easy to get on with. I'm good at giving people what they want or explaining how their ideas can be enhanced. I tend to develop long-term partnerships - many of my customers re-employ me to do more work for them.

Importance of valid, accessible, cross-platform code

How will you benefit from hiring a professional code writer like me? Building a web page is not particularly hard; my daughter Judith has been making them since she was eight. If you are considering a personal site to share your hobbies or to display holiday photos for your family, I suggest you register for a free site at WordPress.com and learn how to do it yourself. My sister Annie got globalbeadproject.com up and running in a few days, without knowing anything about web design when she started. Alternatively, look for a web design student who has to build a site for free as part of their course.

However, if you need to project a professional image with a site which works properly for everyone, including people with disabilities using a wide range of browsers and platforms you should keep reading.

A website I design has the following features:

Fast download speed

From the perspective of the site user (your potential customer or client), the most important factor is the time it takes to find the information they are looking for. In New Zealand, many people will still be using 56K dial-up modems, so they are not going to appreciate technologically sophisticated Flash animations, or stunning graphics-intensive works of art. Others will be using mobile devices and paying extortionate data charges, so images and scripts will likely be disabled.

I keep my web pages simple and re-use graphics whenever possible so that your message arrives within seconds rather than minutes. I don't use unnecessary features just because I know how (although I must admit to the odd fancy tricks on this site) or because I want to hike the cost as far as possible.

Useable on a wide range of devices

Back in the 20th Century, you could be pretty confident that most website visitors were using a personal computer with either Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator browsers. However, in the coming years they will be using PDAs, cell phones, televisions, and who knows what other household appliances. They may have one of a dozen browsers. Sites which are future-orientated should ideally conform to accepted web standards.

Handheld friendly websites!

All my sites work properly in Internet Explorer for Pocket PC - does yours?

Ipaq displaying www.motuweb.com home page

Click to see what this page looks like

You can easily see if a site has been built properly with a quick look at the source code (View > Source in Internet Explorer). Somewhere in the first couple of lines of every page you should see the words <! DOCTYPE html PUBLIC>. If it's missing, the page is not coded in accordance with web standards. You can easily check the code of any page on the web for validity by entering the site address here: W3 MarkUp Validation Service.

Accessible to users with disabilities

Around 10% of web surfers have JavaScript disabled for security reasons - if the site navigation relies on it they are not going to get very far. Likewise, users may be blind and using screen reader software or may have turned off images, so sites which depend on a fancy graphical interface for navigation will also fail in these circumstances. My sites are designed to work effectively under as wide a variety of conditions as possible.

Although not every site visitor has 20-20 vision, many designers disable text resizing because they think small fonts look "cool" (or sometimes they just don't know what they are doing!). On all my sites users can resize text without problems - in Internet Explorer: View > Text size.

Handcrafted to eliminate redundant code

Because WYSIWYG editors tend to produce "Tag Soup" (look in the source code for hundreds of <FONT> tags), I do all my coding by hand so that I have complete control over the end result. In line with current best practice, I keep site presentation information separate from content in style sheets which are reused for all pages. I also avoid the use of tables (look for hundreds of <TD or TR> tags) for layout - another sure indicator that a designer's skills are out-of-date.

If Search Engine ranking is important you will want the first section of the page to have your content with a high density of relevant keywords; pages that start with vast amounts of JavaScript, presentation details, and site navigation information are not going to compete as well.

Many sites require separate print pages, which unnecessarily add to construction and maintainance costs. All my web pages will print directly, removing navigation and other web-specific content automatically.

Next: check out some examples of my work.

decorationwww.motuweb.comdecoration