Web Design
Design can be found in the balance of a page, the choice of a font, in colour and contrast. But design flows from understanding. How should a brand be portrayed? Where should we cast the line between impact and purpose? Who will use the site, and how will they use it? BGZ learns from its clients, from its clients' users. We learn about your objectives and design Websites to achieve them.
Brand
Moving a brand onto the Internet is a delicate business. Too many companies throw artwork designed for print at web editing software and hope for the best. We work with clients to develop corporate identities on the Web, charting a path between the dangers and opportunities the Internet can present.
Usability
It doesn't matter how good your site looks if your users can't find the information they need, or if they are lost after a couple of clicks from the home page. We design sites with clear and consistent navigation. We balance use of graphics with speed of download. We use visual cues to make a site's structure, and the user's place within it, transparent.
The Design Process
The design process begins with a period of consultation. We work with you to identify the objectives of the site, your intended users, and the nature of your brand. The outcome of this process is reflected in the design treatments we then produce for you.We use feedback from the initial design presentation to produce a further, more focussed, treatment. This fine-tuning process continues until a design is signed off.
At this stage the design exists as a number of image files, representing the home page, and one or more content pages. You may choose to take these away and implement them yourself. Alternatively we can build the entire site for you, or produce HTML templates with which your own Web developers can work.
XHTMLPlanning with the Client all involved are clear about expectations, and milestones are laid out, and consistently delivered against.
James Moore, Managing Director, CitiPages
BGZ Courses We teach open source and open standard technologies. We aim to cover the detail of any topic we tackle, but also to reach beyond that to the principles that underlie the subject.
Linux Magazine Article January's edition of Linux Magazine includes an article by BGZ's Matt Zandstra covering a new feature of PHP. The feature, a Reflection API, improves the Web scripting language's support for object-oriented programming.