CafePress Shops®!

Our newest service is building and managing CafePress shops for our web design clients.

We can build the entire shop including the product images and designs, or we can simply set up the shop, and upload your finished designs. more info...

Here are two shops we recently built:

Marja McGraw Author Shop
Electric BibiLand

Words and Pictures provides a full range of site design, development and management services.

	design and layout
	custom image creation
	usability testing
	site development
	programming
	ongoing site management
	content enhancement

Our staff is trained and experienced in design, usability and site development. For larger sites, requiring extensive non-HTML coding and database capability, we partner with IndustryStandard.com, whose engineers have many years experience developing and programming web sites from major corporations to startups.

Visit our site portfolio to see some of the sites we have designed or built.

Site Review

Do you have an existing web site that you'd like redesigned?

Or perhaps you'd like to improve your site's usability...

Or you may be ready to expand your site with more pages or more capabilities, like a blog, forms, or a shopping cart...

Contact us and we can discuss your needs and work out an approach that will meet your goals. Email for more information.

Our Tools

We use Macromedia Dreamweaver MX Studio®, but we also have Photoshop®, Front Page® and Adobe GoLive® available, when needed for the best result.

Some Terms Explained

Design

When we talk about web site design, we aren't just talking about the way a site looks or what colors are used. Website design does have that "artistic" aspect to it, but site design also inlcudes the way the site is structured and how the user moves from page to page. The interaction of these factors determines how visitor-friendly the site is.

Redesign

What works and is acceptable on a small site may cease to be acceptable as the site grows. What seemed like a good site design when the site was built may have proved to be not so good. A very large corporate site may have gone through tremendous expansion without ever revisiting its original design. Or it may be as simple as you don't like the way the site looks anymore. These are all reasons for revisiting the original plan and doing a redesign.

Usability

Usabiliy could be called the frustration factor of a web site. Poor usability makes you hunt for things that should be obvious - like navigation elements or contact information. Poor usability also adds unnecessary mouse clicks to your visit, like clicking on a product name, going to a new page where you have to click on an image of the product to get the details.

Poor usability is when navigation in counterintuitive, i.e., not where you'd expect it to be/not easily located. The opposite, good usability, is intuitive and, therefore, transparent to the user. Everything is where it should be, moving from one place to another is logical rather than a guessing game. Good usability means a happy visitor, a visitor who will leave the site with good feelings about their visit and may recommend it to their friends.

Do you want your business or organizational site to become a destination for your visitors? If so, you need to provide added content value. For example, a social or professional organization might want to regularly feature interviews with members, or with celebrities on subjects of interest to members. If appropriate you might want to consider adding a recurring column of recipes or book/movie reviews. If you have families or children using your site, a games page could attract a wider visitor base.

You may already know what content enhancements you'd like for your site, but if you are unsure, we can review your site and make suggestions.