Know-How Exchange : Website Critique

Michel -
At the risk of self promotion, my company XPRT Creative may be able to help you with this. Our programmer is, simply put, a genius. He has the unique talent of understanding not only usability design, but also general graphic design, and knows everything from Visual Basic to PHP, PERL, cgi, and other programming languages I don't even know the names of. He is currently the webmaster at Eastern New Mexico University and a partner in my firm. As a student, he wrote the voting program that the school still uses to have the students vote online for the student body officers, and the homecoming king and queen. He singlehandedly wrote the content management system for the ENMU Intranet from scratch, and we are currently working on some websites with administration interfaces for content management and customer information collection. And, as if that wasn't enough, he is currently building a web-based file management application our company will be using to track and maintain client records, files, deadlines, etc. FilemakerPro, eat your heart out! We have Adam.

Please check out our very plain (soon to be restructured) website to get a feel of our company personality and read our profiles. Although our pricing for a job such as yours would vary, just depending on the complexity, attributes, structure, etc., I do think it would be worth your time to check us out, and I can almost guarantee you won't find pricing like ours in more established companies. Please view my profile which contains more information about XPRT Creative, and also a link to our website which contains our contact information. I would also be more than happy to provide references of our clients if you are interested.

At any rate, I wish you the best, and hope you can find what you seek, if not with my company, at least with someone who can get it done or you!

Best Regards,
Jennifer
XPRT Creative

Thanks for the tips so far.

I just wanted to further clarify my need.

What I need to create is the design for a Web Application. A transactional application with menus, forms, tables and charts that will be used by the average user to support his daily work.

This makes the design component very different from the traditional website (that is typically used for visibility, branding, awareness, selling...).

This is the difficulty I've been having: I just find cool designers that do these great looking corporate websites but none that has experience is designing web applications...

An example of such application can be found at www.strongspace.com (by the way, I'm not associated with StrongSpace in any way).

Thanks again
Michel

Hi,
The space is not one with which I am familiar, but I am familiar with the design process in general. I find if someone is not measuring up to my vision of something I have in my head, it is usually because I have a very strong, but hidden, idea of what it is I really want. In this case, I sit down with paper and pencil and start drawing or sketching ideas. That starts a process that can really clarify your own knowledge of how things ought to be. When I started this for a project of my own, I ended up with sketches of fifty pages of the project. It helped that I researched other designers like you are with www.strong space.

This can serve as a great starting point for discussions with engineers. We all like concrete tangible starting points. And thanks for opening up a new area of consideration for me. Best of luck, Carmella Weintraub

Dear Michel,

I have been Internet Project Manager for more than 7 years already. I created many Technical requirements for the websites, with very carefully, user-friendly, and logically arranged content.

In addition to that I am a professional PR Manager, Journalist and have strong artistic skills.

I am about to start my own Internet Marketing and Design company and now in progress of completing my portfolio and the website for this project.

If you need an appealing design supported with strong usability and great content arrangement optimised for better SE indexing, you may contact me personally.

I can create a Technical requirements for the most challenging projects, create an appealing design, and help you to arrange the content in order of better SE work and the best navigation.

You may contact me (Natalia Chernyavskaya) by e-mail [email address deleted by staff].

Good Luck!

Natalia.

I'd like to thank all of you who helped on this quest.

Unfortunately the list of potential experts is still long, but you have managed to point me to some very interesting sites where I might find who I'm looking for.

Web applications are very different from web sites, thus the design and usability skills a designer must have are quite different and hard to find.

Thank again for your help

Michel