As people use the internet more and more and we become used to the slick interfaces of sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Amazon and the BBC, people are demanding more from their websites. Brochural websites still have their place, but in the last six months we’ve seen an increase in our clients asking for database driven applications and functionality that allows their viewers to interact with, store information and generate content by using their websites.
With tighter margins and a really tough economic climate, companies are looking for ways to differentiate themselves from their competitors and their website is becoming increasingly important as a means to attract the business there still exists out there and show that they are forward thinking, willing to share useful features with their clients and open to innovation.
As web designers this means mastery of HTML and CSS (and of course Photoshop) is no longer enough. Today’s websites need javascript interaction (often Ajax), flash animation, PHP functionality (or .NET) and quite often a little bit of Java or XML on the side. More on these jargonistic terms in the coming months, but for now, just to say that we have put effort into expanding our team of programmers in the past few months so that we can usefully employ all of the above and its exciting to see this new functionality popping up in our current crop of (as yet very hush hush) websites in development.
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