It is difficult to compete sometimes – that’s natural. But the Web Industry suffers from a huge number of amateurs who are pretending to be professionals. And sometimes you meet a client who wants to compare your (truly) professional services with those of these charlatans masquerading as a “worthy” adversary.

The web is a content delivery medium; the more effectively we can deliver the content to our target audience, the more effective our website will be for our business. So, if the web is a content delivery medium, shouldn’t content be the most important element of our design and development process and not the design?

The User Interface, or UI, is the communication between the computer and a human being, or in the case of the web the mechanism of communication between the website and the visitor. A “good” user interface can mean that the design fulfills a visitor’s expectations. A “bad” user interface only gives you few clues about where you are or what you’re supposed to do, leaving you with the sensation that you’re drowning and don’t know which way is up!

In this 8 part series, we explore how we architect great websites. Here we outline the seven building blocks of a website and provide links to each article describing them in more detail.

“The internet now plays a critical role in most consumers’ decisions to purchase or hire a service,” said Rodger Armstrong, from Easily.co.uk. “It’s great to see that small businesses and tradesmen are increasingly realising that having a professional website is vital to their business.