Web design, like many design disciplines, is generally accepted as a creative process. Yes, there are ergonomic considerations, technology requirements and lots of layout dilemmas for tabular data, but it is fundamentally seen as a creative thing.

...or is it?

When a web site is commissioned and subsequently designed, there is almost always a constraint of some kind governing layout, colour, content and style. Well that may be the case, but you can still be creative within the parameters and guidelines set out be the requirements for the web site, so it must technically be 'creative, surely'?

So how do designer maintain creativity and expression within a strict content guideline?

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It is all doom and gloom right now in the world of business, finance and economics. The most prudent amongst us would probably think that right now, with consumer confidence falling, we need to be spending less and looking at ways to save on expenditure.

Whilst it may be good business practice to streamline our operations right now, we should have probably been doing this anyway so it might actually be to late. Nobody is that certain of the impact the current economic climate will have on the business and private consumer's budgets, but we can assume it will be to shrink them dramatically.

So, how will this effect our businesses?

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For a while now, we have given our clients who use data driven web sites the facility to include our 'Meta Tag Builder'. Until now, this has been little more than a set of classes that we include in their code, that gives them the ability to derive SEO-centric content, targetted specifically at the content served by a dynamically generated web page.

If that isn't too clear, here is an example.

Say for example you have a website that sells widgets. You have 100 distinct widgets in a database that populates an on-line catalogue.

Each time a visitor selects a widget to view, you present a page, for example 'mywidgets.aspx' that picks a particular widget out of the database, and displays its particular details.

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One of the best feelings that we get at N - Web Design, is when we really amaze clients with great web site designs, intuitive web content or features that put the client's web site ahead of the game.

Unfortunately, great websites take planning, time and investment. The biggest enemy of the web developer is time. Or lack of it! Many projects, even those that are well planned and implemented, can still hit problems with development time, deadlines and lack of resources beyond provision.

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SEO, that is.

Search Engine Optimisation, even to the knowledgeable, can still be a very unpredictable animal.

I think most people in the web design, development and search engine marketing business have seen many sites that, despite no attention to any SEO process, have ranked well in search engines.

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Following a fairly comprehensive re-structure of a clients stock and pricing system, I recently changed the URL mechanism of their web site [amongst other things], to use an integer value (from an identity/primary key field) rather than a string to identify products in their on-line catalogue.

This worked out really well, made managing dynamic content for the site a little easier to manage and probably made the process more efficient (although I haven't tested this!).

The problem I then encountered was that Google, as well as other search engines, have indexed dynamic pages with the old query string variables, as well as having sitemaps and other resources available that now wouldn't work!

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I was speaking to an ex-colleague a few days ago, and we got on the subject of a particular web development project that I had done a significant amount of development on, that he was just finishing off.

Inevitably, we got onto the subject of clients contributing throughout the development process and how important it is to get them interested, involved and part of the overall project team.

I think most developers and project managers have met with some apathy or lack of communication during a project that has caused a few issues and a fair amount of back tracking at some point!

But we can do something about this...

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Wellingtons direct, the web site dedicated to wellingtons, has now been launched.

Developed in a short time, the site offers a product catalogue with database driven dynamic content, a shopping basket, on-line payments and a whole lot more!

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The web site for N - Web Design (http://www.n-webdesign.co.uk) has finally been uploaded.

It has been a little bit of a 'Cobblers Shoes' offering up until now, with other work and responsibilities getting in the way.

We have added this Blog (based on the most excellent Nucleus CMS http://nucleuscms.org/) to tell you about all the interesting and exciting things we are doing at N - Web Design, as a supplementary editorial to our 'Studies' section, which you may have noticed is a little lacking in content at the moment.

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This is the first post on your Nucleus CMS. Nucleus offers you the building blocks you need to create a web presence. Whether you want to create a personal blog, a family page, or an online business site, Nucleus CMS can help you achieve your goals.

We've loaded this first entry with links and information to get you started. Though you can delete this entry, it will eventually scroll off the main page as you add content to your site. Add your comments while you learn to work with Nucleus CMS, or bookmark this page so you can come back to it when you need to.

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