Services
Our website design and development skills allow us to provide you a large range of services. Whether it be simple maintenance to your current site, developing web-based technologies or working with you to design and develop a whole website, we can help you. We have experience with XHTML, CSS, W3C Standards Compliance, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), PHP, ASP, graphic design, javascript, Macromedia Flash, SQL databases and many other web-related technologies. If you would like more information please don't hesitate to contact us.
Following is some information about some of the web technologies we make use of and some of the principles we adopt when making your website.
Technologies used when making your site
XHTML
XHTML or eXtensible HyperText Markup Language is the future of the web and is starting to replace HTML as the standard in web design. Simply, it is HTML transformed so it complies with the rules that define the powerful language XML. The XHTML coding on your site will comply with the W3C coding standards. W3C or World Wide Web Consortium is the group that defines the standards of all the web languages.
CSS
CSS or Cascading Style Sheets are a brilliant web technology that allow you to code a HTML page with no layout specific information (text sizes, colours, widths, heights, margins etc.) and instead implement the layout with an external CSS file. This means that the code of all your web pages remains uncluttered by layout code and just contains the structure and content of the page. This is good for search engine crawling and will improve search engine rankings. A single CSS file can be used over the whole site and thus a change in layout can be accomplished by changing one file rather than ten or more files (i.e. each HTML file). CSS is very powerful as a layout tool and certain layout effects can be achieved through it that aren't possible with just HTML / XHTML. Any CSS coding on your site will comply to W3C standards.
Javascript / DHTML
Javascript is a client-side web programming language and Dynamic HTML (or DHTML) is where Javascript is used to modify the document object model (DOM) of a page allowing dynamic changes to CSS or the different layers on the page. It allows many interesting and useful things to be accomplished including such things as our units converter (see projects section of this site), dynamic page loading and on-the-fly page changes without the need to reload.
PHP / MySQL
PHP is a web server-side programming language and MySQL is an SQL database application. PHP can be used to create any number of things such as web forms that send emails, shopping carts, templates and dynamic page loading. When combined with a database, php becomes yet more powerful allowing such things as content management systems, editable shopping carts, news sections and content management systems.
ASP
ASP or Active Server Page represents the use of the server-side programming language VBScript which can be used in a similar manner to PHP.
Templates
Server Side technologies may be used on your site so that a template layout can be "included" in each separate page over the whole site. Thus a change in the layout of the whole site can be accomplished by changing only one file rather than ten or more. The benefit of this is that maintenance on your site is thus cheaper since changes are much quicker and easier.
Principles adopted when making your site
SEO
SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is a term that is commonly used now in web design. Basically it means optimising the site with respect to the current search engine algorithms so that your site will achieve better search engine rankings. Techniques that will be used on your site include well structured coding, appropriate use of headers, paragraphs and titles, and use of meta tags.
Looks
Obviously looks are important in a website!! A nice clean and simple design is the mark of a good website. Other than the layout itself, cross-browser implementation and cross-resolution implementation need to be employed to ensure the site looks good no-matter who is looking at it. This means that the site needs to be coded in such a way as no matter what internet browser someone is using (i.e. Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Mozilla etc.) or what screen resolution they have (800x600, 1024x768, 1600x1200 etc.) the site will still maintain its structural integrity.
Functionality
While looks are important, functionality is arguably more important, if the site takes too long to load or it is too hard to navigate then the user will exit the site out of frustration no matter how cool it looks!! The site needs to be designed so that it is user friendly to be effective.
Maintainability
The maintainability of a site is an important factor that should be considered. Things that will be done on your site to improve maintainability are template driven designs and the use of external files for stylesheets and scripts.
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