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Website Design by Maura McDonnell. Maura McDonnell is a web designer with 11 years experience in the web design industry. Maura worked as a multimedia developer with the leading e-learning publishing company Intuition. Since 2002, Maura designs websites on a freelance basis, working with individuals, small businesses, education institutions, non profit organisations to design, build and update websites.  Maura’s strength is her skill and focus on design – the graphic design of the look and feel of your website and her technical skill in providing a high quality web design.

This website provides information on the web design services that are provided. Recent website design projects are showcased.

Top priority in designing web sites for a range of information content, is on effective layout and unique design that reflects your site goals and the organisation of content and easy to use navigation. Updating your website is important in order to keep your site content current. There are various solutions for updating a website.  For a static website, then you cannot beat Adobe Contribute, Increasingly I am building websites using the open source software of Wordpress, it also provides a blogging facility and is excellent for organising and presenting pages as well as posts and news sections that you may like to update regularily. Wordpress also means you can update all content via your web browser – any computer, any time, any place.

Stages in building a website

Planning and Design

• Prepare site goals – client or in consultation
• Research – client or together – look at existing websites for features that you would like in your own site
• Consultation – discussion in relation to your ideas and site goals for your website and design ideas.  
• Design – Design the main interface – sign off
• Build main xHTML and CSS template – test for web standards and accesibility

Build the pages of the website

There are two main options for building the pages of your website.  The pages can be created as static html files or you have the option of your pages being built via a content management system.  For a static website, you can then purchase the really easy to use Adobe Contribute software (approx 180 euro) to update your site.  For a content management site, the site will need to be developed into templates and you can then update the website via your web browser – any place, any time, any computer.  A content management site is useful if you wish to have the same content appearing in several places on your site, such as in sidebars, or in particular areas of a page, it is also useful if you wish to have a blog or news section on your site.  An open source software called Wordpress can be adapted to be used as a content management system, this software is increasingly being used by web designers today.  Wordpress is handy in that it also incorporates a blogging platform, which means your blog will be hosted on your own domain rather than using some of the hosted services such as blogger.com.

All options for building and updating your website will be discussed at the consultation phase.

• Build pages of the site in whichever platform is decided at the beginning of the project
• Preview site
• Make site live

Hosting and Domain

Hosting and Domain registration can be arranged for you, or your existing hosting arrangements can be used.

Updating your website

Updating can be arranged with me or you can avail of training on how to use Adobe Contribute to update your website or in the use of your CMS to update your website.  Ongoing support is available.  I have many clients who I have been working with for a number of years and where I have done major revisions and updates and in-house staff have completed their own updates.  For many of my clients I have also been involved in design upgrades – whereby a new site is designed with new goals and design ideas implemented.  Updating solutions then are flexible and dependent on what you need and how you would like to proceed with ongoing updates.

 Use the contact form or email me at info@mauramcdonnell.com to arrange consultation