Web Design
Tuesday, 4 September 2007
I’ve been interested in web page design since the late 1990s, with my first commercial site going live in March of 2001. Interoperability across a variety of user agents has been important to me from the start. Even that first site had a drop-down javascript image-map navigation menu that degraded gracefully.
All my sites are coded by hand using valid XHTML and CSS, and all of my services are performed with the degree of skill and care demanded by professional web development best practices. I am a staunch supporter of simple, clean, and standards-compliant site design, interoperability, and usability. Standards-compliant web sites are forward and backwards compatible, load faster, and are accessible by a greater variety of devices and user agents. Where practical, I prefer to use the lossless PNG image format and to avoid javascript in favor of server-side programming.
Each site is tested on no less than five different machine configurations: a fully updated Windows XP machine in Firefox and IE 7, a Windows 2000 Professional machine in IE 6, and an eMac with the latest version of OS X in Firefox and Safari. IE for Mac is primed to completely disappear, so I don’t see much sense in trying to accommodate its idiosyncrasies.
Search Engine Optimization is well-hyped these days, and there are a few things that can be easily done to improve a site’s organic Google rankings. Among these are the use of valid code and the generation and submission of an xml sitemap to the Google Sitemaps beta project. Google itself provides a number of useful tools for identifying elements of site design that will improve a site’s search engine ranking. While one can’t guarantee specific rankings, most of the projects that I’m involved with do quite well with Google for their most likely search terms.
If you are interested in a handmade web site built on solid and forward-looking code but don’t know where to start, drop me a line via the contact form on this page. If you already have a web site but are not satisfied with its performance and would like it audited for SEO best practices, updated and refined, or torn down and completely rebuilt, I would be happy to take a look at it and give you a quote.