Web Design

Web Design covers everything that the visitor sees when they view your site in a web browser. Whether it's an informative infographic or vast tables of data, a web designer will have the know-how to get your message across in the most attractive and efficient manner possible. There is a great amount of difference between good and bad, and varying degrees of grey area in between, but in the end you want your most important information accessible.

CSS

All current browsers support CSS3 elements. CSS gives a scalable, seamless property to text and block elements in your web page. We can now leverage custom fonts, shadows, gradients and animation all within a standard style sheet. The days of Times New Roman and tables with borders are over! We can now recreate Photoshop-style effects right within the browser, without requiring extensive graphic images to support the effect. All text and block elements on this site have been rendered in CSS, including the glows, font choices and gradients.

While images and graphics are great to show pixel-perfect elements, they have their drawbacks. A photo will scale poorly to different screen sizes, as it will always be the same initial resolution. If you resize an image at the browser level, it will either reduce down poorly with an aliasing (blocky) effect, or will stretch up without any smoothing, seeming incomplete. 

In addition to these benefits is the decreased load time for your pages. CSS renders on the client side, so your server has to serve less data to show the page, and there is a lower chance of missing/corrupted images.

UX / UI

These terms refer to User Experience and User Interface. Sometimes it is the simple difference between a radio button and a select menu, or checkboxes vs. multi-select boxes. Other times it is a custom-written interface which makes choices in your page more visual and intuitive.

UX is the overall impression a visitor gets when interacting with your site. The flow of the menus, the way the site directs your mouse as you navigate your way through it. At Elyptic, we focus on driving the visitor's mouse to high priority items first, while allowing them the perceived choice of what they want to explore. This can be as basic as reducing the number of clickable items on your home page to channel people into the most prominent areas of the site, and leaving other items to be found under menu items.

Also included in UX is the way the site reacts to user input. When filling forms, feedback is critical to help users discover parts of your form that have been omitted, or entered incorrectly. There is nothing more frustrating for a new visitor than to try to guess what was wrong with their form input. With instant validation of your forms, visitors can easily see what the need to correct, or have the site suggest alternatives that make sense to the user. If they feel the site cares about their input, they get the feeling that their information is more valuable to you.

Good UI is the science of reducing clicks for visitors while allowing them to drill down into what they want to view. Nested menu items are the best way to allow vast-reaching site access while keeping the footprint low on screen real estate. UI is also critical when it comes to form input. Giving your visitors a choice to click with the mouse is better for both of us. It reduces human error on the visitor side by using checkboxes instead of text input, and also streamlines the process for mobile users.

Imagery

When CSS doesn't cut it for the effect you're looking for, enter the advanced graphic designer. With all the latest tools at our disposal (see Expertise), we have the right tool for the job. From Instagram-style photo treatment to advanced 3D rendering, we can create some serious graphic elements. If you are prototyping a product for retail, we can create a mockup of your product to display it proudly on your site to generate interest before you go through the expense of your first alpha version. We can recreate architectural impressions and interior scenes. We can create logos, business cards, and letterhead for your brand (see Showcase).

WYSIWYG

Most of our clients wish to have control of their content. With our CMS, you get to have complete control of the content of your pages. We include an advanced WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor for all major text areas of your site. This allows you to update all of your content, without breaking the layout and impact of your site. You'll see your updates show up in real time on your site, styled and formatted to match the style we've created for you. You can add images, tables, colors, and whatever else you like, without worrying about breaking the site's functionality. We can even clean up extra markup added by word processors like MS Word.