Our Philosophy

We're not your average Web Design company.
We think too much.

Professionalism - What is a "professional website"?
Usefulness & Useability - A viable idea must be both useful and useable.
Thoughts from our President - Why he founded this company and why it matters.

Professionalism

When you hear the word "professionalism" what is the first thing that comes to mind? Business? Meetings? An office? Suits and ties? Paperwork? Ick. That "professional" mindset is the Corporate Business mindset. Professionalism, as we see it when it comes to web design, is not so restricted.

The web is becoming so ubiquitous that almost anyone can have a webpage that says whatever they would like, no matter how qualified or correct they are to say it. Sometimes how serious an organization is taken heavily relies upon what shape their website is in. If it looks amateurish, people may dismiss its owner as an amateur. If it looks clean and well designed, visitors will give it more weight.

Gill with attention to detail.	Gill with that attention taken away.
Taking an honest look, which one is more "professional"?

Case and point, many scholarly, tenured researchers in academic fields have personal webpages with reliable information that are barely used. Why does this happen? They are either out of date, look atrocious, are difficult to navigate or no one knows that they exist. On the other hand many "Joe Laymen," who proport factually mistaken information, happen to be crafty with their web work and own websites that look like peer-reviewed journals, are updated daily and are driven by targeted advertising that brings in visitors from all over the web.

As a result, Professionalism in web design (to us) is:

A "look and feel" that convinces visitors that the owner has taken the time and effort to detail their business or organization in a manner that is informative and visually appealing.
Active work to ensure that a website is properly submitted to search engines such as Google or Yahoo! so that people can find it; and
Further work to keep the website as up-to-date as humanly possible.

These three points make great websites.

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Usefulness & Useability

Sometimes good ideas can be overwhelming. To prevent this, we over at The Nerd Tank tend to try and follow principles of Usefulness and Useability.

When a good idea comes to the forefront, how Useful it is must be tested. For example, a method to show your specials of the day on your website seems to be a genuinely Useful idea. Having a smiley face that follows your mouse cursor and makes weird noises when a customer clicks a link probably isn't.

Furthermore, Useful ideas are pretty much useless unless they are Useable. Furthering the daily specials example, if the daily specials only need to be entered once a month, automatically update themselves on a daily basis, and are displayed prominently on the home page of your website, you have a Useful and Useable feature. It acts as a boon to your business and reduces the amount of work required while giving wanted information directly to your customers with minimal effort to find it.

If you first need to manually update the specials every morning and if a customer needs to click 4 or 5 links before they can see them (after waiting 10 minutes for them to load), a Useful idea suddenly becomes useless. Customers will become frustrated with your web presence, and in the end it will hurt your organization.

The Nerd Tank strives to create both Useful and Useable websites, the kind of intuitive designs that are easy to use and bring more business to your business.

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Thoughts from our President

(This section is currently being finished.)

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