Website Maintenance Specialists

Are you frustrated that you or your staff simply don't have the skills or time to be effective on the web? Website management involves many areas of knowledge to produce an effective campaign for your business.

We have hundreds of website maintenance customers who once struggled with these challenges. After months or years of doing it themselves, Parker Web became their website team. Now with a quick email or phone call to Parker Web, questions are answered and tasks are accomplished knowledgeably and quickly.

Note from Darryl: We are including the article below on our front page because it speaks directly to our philosophy on how we believe servicing a website is a critical part of building better web credibility and the importance of modifications versus wholesale rebuilds (except when absolutely needed).

Fresh vs. Familiar

How agressively should you redesign?
From Jakob Nielsen at useit.com

You often hear design team members (or their management) say, "We need a fresh design." This usually gets redesign projects off on a wrong footing, with the wrong goals and strategy.

Typically, a fresh design will be a worse design simply because it's new and thus breaks user expectations. A better strategy is to play up familiarity and build on users' existing knowledge of how a system works.

Why Insiders Want Fresh Design
You stare at the thing all day, years on end. Of course you think the UI looks tired. Count the number of "exposure hours" you've had to your own design. If you've worked on the same design team for a few years, those hours likely reach into the thousands.

In contrast, your typical user has probably spent only a few hours looking at your design over the last few years. Remember Jakob's Law of the Internet user experience: users spend most of their time on other sites.

People usually spend no more than 2-3 minutes on a website, so even if they visit your site daily, they'd run up only 30 exposure hours over 2 years. More commonly, even loyal customers will spend less than 5 hours on your site each year. With so little time spent looking at the design, customers won't tire of it anytime soon.

Why Users Want Familiar Design
The most important reason? Users don't care about design for its own sake; they just want to get things done and get out. Normal people don't love sitting at their computers. They'd rather watch football, walk the dog - just about anything else. Using a computer probably rates above taking out the trash, though.

When people are visiting websites or using applications, they don't spend their time analyzing or admiring the design. They focus their attention on the task, the content, and their own data or documents.

Thus, people love a design when they know the features and can immediately locate the ones they need. That is, they love a familiar design.

In fact, anytime you release a redesign, prepare for a flood of angry email from customers. It's a law of nature that users hate change, and they'll complain every time you move anything around or otherwise reduce their ability to just do what they've always done.

(Having users complain about a redesign doesn't necessarily mean that it's bad; if the new design actually has better usability, people will eventually grow to like it. Customer complaints are thus not a reason to avoid all redesigns; they're simply a reason to avoid changing the design purely to "stay fresh.")

Read entire article...

Testimonial from Matthew Wizeman - SDS Global Logistics
"I have been working with Parker Web since 2004, when I had the responsibility of rebranding my business. I had a ton of projects at once and I needed not only a subject expert but also a true leader. Typically I have found that the design firms I have worked with were excellent in their subject but had a great deal of trouble handling instruction and providing project leadership. I spent only a few hours with Darryl and almost instantly he understood my vision for our web portion of our branding effort. He was then able to adeptly convey that vision to his competent team and then had the wherewithal to see the project to completion. His team has been maintaining our site ever since. I have recommended Darryl on numerous occasions and each time I have looked like a hero to those I recommended him to. I recommend him again now."