Thought i’d post something about some of the other projects were currently working on. The microsite which we’re due to drop in a couple of days is for Glasscene Australia. Glasscene produces double glazed windows and doors for Australian builders and home owners. The project features a simple minimalistic design which reflected both the beauty of their products but also tried to reflect on their service they provide, clear and simple.

See the thing is web-design isn’t always about having the most flashy website or having the most bells and whistles. Its a lot more complicated than that, first we need to identify the potential visitor, are they are web developer like us? or a blue collar worker? What age are they going to be? All of the questions will ultimately affect the design, not to mention designing the site so that it may be indexed and crawled well by the google-bots and other search engine crawlers.

This project had a couple of challenges associated with it; firstly with any minimalistic design their is the problem of having the website stand out, from a web design perspective we want people who visit the site to result in a conversion that’s why we incorporated a contact form on all the pages (in the footer) so that if someone was interested they could send an enquiry (potentially leading to a sale). We also want their product to stand out, which is where the minimalistic design comes in, when a website is to flashy it detracts away from the product and customers ultimately leave unimpressed or get distracted and forget the purpose of the site. But this is the challenge, we need to make sure that the product is good enough to sell itself this is usually achieved by using very colourful and bold images which capture the visitors attention.

Glasscene was built upon a wordpress architecture to make sure that business owner was ultimately able to edit the content and keep their blog up-to-date which would result in better page rankings in google and other search engines.

You Can Check Out The Site Here : www.glasscene.com.au

Just like with many question in life internet hosting also has many solutions and ultimately it depends on what your site is doing. Are you hosting a simple shopping cart / ecommerce site with a few hundred visitors a day? Are you hosting a simple blog or company microsite with less than 100 visitors a day? Are you hosting a website which holds very secure information? Or are you hosting a website with thousands of vistors a day where uptime is a priority.

We don’t markup our hosting costs so ultimately we want our clients to make the right decision and not have to worry about having to change infrastructure months after launch. So here’s a rough guide to what kind of hosting solution you should look at:

For websites with less than a few hundred visitors a day:

Look at hosting your website on shared VPS server either in Australia or America, you will find cheap hosting solutions and most of these VPS servers have more than enough grunt to ensure that your website remains operational, as well as plenty of storage for the odd photo or video.

If your looking to step things up a notch, you can look at hosting your website on a dedicated server.

This means that you will have your own computer (similar to the one at home) which will be hosting your website, and only your website, in a secure facility with a big pipe to the internet, these servers can generally handle thousands of users throughout a typical day and are usually more than capable of handling our customer’s needs. These servers are available in both Australia and America, ultimately latency (how long the website will take to respond to clicks) will decide the location where you want to host your server, generally Australian hosting solutions are slightly more expensive.

Finally if your looking at hosting a large web application with potentially thousands of users and require access to large datastores you’ll be wanting to look at hosting your site on the cloud.

There are a couple of options and we’ve built several applications on Amazon’s Cloud which is considered the industry leader in cloud technology, these applications required massive computing power and required a level of redundancy beyond your standard website application. You can take a look at a couple here www.ticketbooth.com.au & www.fusionbooks.com.au 

If your new to the IT business or just getting started at university or even high school it can be a little daunting but take it from someone who is an active member we love to see young people or inexperienced asking questions its one of the reasons we become web programmers in the first place (to help people). So next time your stuck take a look at stack overflow and your bound to find the solution to your problem, or at least someone that is willing to give you a hand.

For The Record:
If your using wordpress and the page your making is static you should generally be setting it as a page which will allow you to use a theme page template or create one yourself. This allows you to manage the page alot better than a blog page, although generally it is a bit more difficult and tedious, on the other hand if your posting a blog (like this one), you better off setting it as a post and filing it under a category for better organisation.

Anyway that wraps our first blog page, stay tuned for more updates from the sleek design team

In addition to these great benefits it also allows our development team to build the applications far quicker than building the application from the very base level. Which in turn results in a saving for us which we happily pass on to our customers.

Web Applications are our specialty and where Sleek Design started you can check out our very first project which has been almost 6 months in the making of Ticketbooth Australia. This application integrated with multiple API and had to handle hundreds to thousands of ticket sales every day.