Welcome
Welcome to Dornbush Web Design. We design and develop web sites. That sounds simple, doesn't it? We have spent years learning how to best develop sites. Our focus is on providing a site that is as easy and inexpensive as possible to develop and maintain, while providing robust capability.
What kinds of sites do we support?
Web sites today need to be interactive, to support online stores and communities and social networking, to provide rich content to site visitors, to keep visitors coming back, to rank high on search engines like Google, to be fun.
How do we do this?
We start with your business or organization. We help clarify your organization mission, goals, brand. We help you define what you want in a web site: your audience, your goals.
You can't really do a web site just because you think you need or want a web site. You need to understand what you want to accomplish with your web site.
Once we have a handle on that, we can proceed to define the contents and functions you want in your web site. Every site is different, just like every business or organization is different, but there are some common things that most sites have.
A good starting place is
to define your basic site map. What are the top-level and second-level pages on your site? What functions do you need?
- A comment form for site visitors to send a message to you?
- News about your organization, such as announcements, future events, highlights about what has happened recently?
- A way for visitors to sign up for your newsletter, contribute to your cause, purchase your products, or sign up for your events?
- A way for you to send that newsletter to them via email, and for them to share it with others, or unsubscribe?
- A place for your members or customers ("constituents") to share thoughts, photos, files?
- A place for you to share with your constituents: your commentary, or blog? Your videos, audios, photos?
- A way to write a blog, providing ways for your site visitors to send messages to you or comment on your blog?
We use a Content Management System, or CMS. A CMS provides the structure you need for your web site, like security and flexibility. A CMS often provides the functions you need ready to go, so no custom development is needed.
There are many good CMS systems out there. We tend to use Drupal in our work as we have found it to be robust and generally very flexible for supporting the requirements of a dynamic site. We also use CiviCRM for "constituent management."
What's constituent management? Let's say you are a nonprofit organization and have contributors, or a for-profit operation and have current and potential customers. These are constituencies you want to manage. You want to stay in touch with them, contact them individually or in groups by phone or email, and invite them to events. A constituent management system makes this easier and more consistent.
You might also want to have an online store presence. We use Ubercart for this need.
I got started in this web business by developing and maintaining several sites for charitable organizations. At first, the sites were static, as that was all we could manage in the early days of the World Wide Web. As the web technology developed, people began to want to involve more that those who were talented (or not so talented) web programmers. In recent years, this has been called "Web 2.0" to reflect a major change in the Web. CMS systems allow us to simplify the language for the more non-technical users. You can use a plain text editor or a "WYSIWIG" editor. (WYSIWIG is short for "What You See Is What You Get.")
I have over 30 years of experience in the Information Technology field. I have been both a technical contributor and a business manager, so I understand the needs of both sides of the typical business operation. I can help you make sure that the technology supports the business, and can help you find and develop the technology that will make your business more competitive.
