Web Poynor

We have been developing software for business, government, and education for 40 years. Since 1999, we have concentrated on data-based Web solutions and mobile devices.

Introduction Design Projects Tools Skills Contact

What we do

We create custom Web site projects, providing a full range of e-Commerce, database, content development, and graphic services. Our sites attract attention, add value, and set our customer's messages apart from their competition.

Who we are

Hugh Poynor taught e-Commerce at the University of Texas at Austin for five years and has over 40 years in software development and management experience. Lee Poynor provides communication, content development, information flow, and graphic design for our projects.

How we do it

We have the skills, the technical solutions and experience to create an effective site that meets your unique needs. Unlike many developers, we work from your requirements forward, rather than trying to retrofit a general-purpose system to meet your needs. Please contact us to discuss your project and learn what we can do for you.

Design

Web design encompasses many different disciplines. They are interface layout design, user experience design (especially information architecture and navigation), content editing for web-style writing, graphics, software tool selection, search engine optimization and promotion planning.

It is impossible to begin web design without the content already written and firm agreement about what the website will do (its objectives). Let's begin web design with project objectives.

In addition to the information here, we have written four design chapters for our online college course in web development in which you may be interested:

Design Objectives

  • Provide an online sales revenue channel
  • Heighten awareness of company and mission
  • Shape the company/product image
  • Influence opinion and distribute news
  • Enhance company/product loyalty
  • Describe services and how to obtain them
  • Increase brand, model, features, and size awareness
  • Provide information and referral among partners
  • Alert supply and manufacturing partners of your orders
  • Inform prospective customers of accurate manufacturing schedules
  • Direct customers to nearby outlets for in-store shopping
  • Reach an audience for market research surveys
  • Create a platform for launching new products
  • Reduce expense of customer service
  • Increase services without increasing costs
  • Provide a clearinghouse for sharing common information
  • Gather information through online questionnaires
  • Administer tests
  • Entertain with music and videos

Design Tasks

  • Specify concrete objectives for the Web site
  • Describe what the site does, and write an 'About us' page
  • Identify what visitors (a) want and (b) expect from the site
  • Organize and refine page content around (a) & (b) above
  • Refresh content to give visitors a reason to return
  • Structure pages that support a clearly organized site
  • Help readers find information quickly and easily
  • Make sure nothing important is more than 2-clicks away
  • Work on appearance after finalizing and structuring content
  • Appearance will please visitors, but they stay for your content
  • Strive for coherence and consistency
  • Build search engine hot spots: title, headings, and link tags

Web Writing

  • Speak the intended visitor's language
  • Be direct—use the second person, active voice (the "you" voice)
  • Expect visitors to scan, not read
  • Get organized, write clearly, be brief
  • Use an inverted pyramid structure: put conclusions first
  • Don't dilute information by saying too much
  • Use half the words you would on paper
  • Omit needless words
  • Closely follow accepted rules of writing
  • Use meaningful headings frequently
  • Write, rewrite, and spell check

Projects

Several projects are shown below that you can visit by clicking or tapping on the screen capture. Currently, only a few of the projects display properly on mobile devices. When the site owners decide to rework their sites for these devices we will propose the AngularJS and BootstrapJS libraries that were used for the page you are viewing now. To see the effect of what this means look at our site on different size devices: computer workstation, iPad/tablet, and smartphone.

PrimeTimeEntertainment.net

OppositeStrengths.com

Books by Morgan Law

jiffyDates.com (archived offline)

WebSysAnytime.com

ClassAnytime.com/mis333k

Pocket Guide (in iPhone App Store)

Community Web Site

James Carter Studio (archived)Z

Political Campaign (archived)


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Tools

We work in our home office on a large iMac and variety of MacBooks, iPhones, and iPads. In addition to equipment it takes a few specialized tools, libraries and Apps to work on a level that users now expect from websites. User interfaces are easier to use on a variety of new devices, and so they are harder to program. Here is a list of tools we use.

Our host is PAIR.COM because of speed, reliability, security, success and support. PAIR hosts over 190,000 Web sites and have run a profitable hosting enterprise for over 18 years. We have a developer hosting account and support all our sites on pair.com.

iTunes Connect (for registered Apple developers) is an Apple web app we use frequently to set up new iPhone/iPad apps, enroll beta testers and build descriptive infrastructure for the App Store.

jQuery is a fast, small, extremely popular and feature-rich JavaScript library.

jQuery Mobile is a user interface system designed to make responsive web sites and apps that are accessible on all smartphone, tablet and desktop devices.

PhoneGap Build enables programmers to build applications for mobile devices using JavaScript, HTML5, and CSS3, instead of relying on platform-specific APIs like those in iOS, Windows Phone, or Android.

GitHub is a repository and versioning service that is used on our client devices and online.

The Angular structural framework for javaScript supports the backend of our apps. Used with Bootstrap and jQuery.

Bootstrap is the world’s most popular front-end open source toolkit for building responsive, mobile sites. Sites we have developed in the past 5 years rely on Bootstrap, including the site you are reading now.

BBEdit is the programmers editor that we use for writing html, javaScript, php and SQL.

Pixelmator is a graphics editor and photo processor. Its strength is in repetitive tasks, ease of use and price.

MySQL is the world's most popular database. It is is used in the world's largest and smallest companies.

Sequel Pro. The language of databases is SQL. It is essential to have a graphic user interface to perform SQL queries.

SQLyog Enterprize is one of the most popular MySQL font-ends available on Windows.

The server-scripting language we use is PHP. It has the reputation of being the most popular scripting language on the Web.

Forklift is a popular and powerful FTP client for the Mac to transfer Web pages, images, and other files to and from Web servers.


Skills

Hugh Poynor's language skills are PHP 7, HTML 5, MySQL, JQuery, Bootstrap. His customers have been state- and federal-level agencies, businesses, associations, statisticians, politicians, universities, psychologists and talent agents.

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