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WEB SERVICES OFFERED
- Web site design/development
interface design, programming & scripting.
- Web site maintenance content updating, system migration, hand coding and tool based.
- Server-side application installation and administration
Server-side Web-app installation, forums & bulletin boards, Web-photo galleries and shopping carts.
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CMS - Joomla!, osCommerce, Gallery2, vBulletin
- Graphic design & Flash animation
custom Web site headers and Web banners.
- Web site hosting and consulting
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
make sure your Web pages comply with search-engine requirements.
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Private tutoring/training in XHTML, CSS and Web-dev principles
PARTIAL CLIENT LIST
- Laurel Springs School, Ojai, CA
- The Learning Springs, Ojai, CA
- Patagonia, Inc., Ventura, CA
- Victoria Torf, Fine Art & Graphic Design, Ventura, CA
- House of Props, Inc., Hollywood, CA
- Palm Avenue Associates, Carpinteria, CA
- Becket Films, LLC, Ojai, CA
- California Literary Arts Society, Ventura, CA
- Mirror Image Translations & Services, Oxnard, CA
- Heffernan, Inc., Santa Barbara, CA
- Krohn Construction, Inc., Santa Barbara, CA
- Livable Streets Coalition, Santa Barbara, CA
- Coach-Connection, Oxnard, CA
- Lynn Houston Studio, Goleta, CA
- Santa Clarita Speed Skating Club, Valencia, CA
- Baxter BioScience, Westlake Village, CA
- Griffin Laboratories, Temecula, CA
- KneeridersSM, Roseville, CA
- Catalina Imaging, Inc., Loomis, CA
- Mallen Designs, Marna, AZ
- Virtual Armor, Denver, CO
- Team Balli, Honolulu, HI
- T&I Grafix, Toronto, ON, Canada
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Client testimonials...
Web site projects...
Résumé...
WEB DESIGN PHILOSOPHY
Design with Web Standards
What are Web Standards?
Designing with Web standards means complying with a set of conventions set forth by the
World-Wide Web Consortium (W3C), whose purpose is to
review and make recommendations for Web site designers, programmers and browser makers on how to best serve the World-Wide Web community.
Why use Web Standards?
Web sites designed in compliance with Web standards display and behave with far more consistency across the myriad of display modes in use today
than sites that don't comply. Web standards virtually eliminates the time-consuming headaches of struggling with page designs that display
great in one browser but lousy or not at all in another.
- Structure
- Presentation
- Behavior
What is a Web page?
The fundamental ingredients of all Web pages are structure,
presentation and behavior.
Working together the three assemble content and render it to the end user's display
mode, or user agent (Web browser, Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), Web-enabled mobile phone, etc).
To assure that a Web page renders properly across these (and other) display modes,
Web page designers must use structure, presentation and behavior
technologies appropriately. One common mistake by some designers is to employ structure technology (XHTML)
to format text. This is the job of presentation technology (CSS).
Structure (XHTML)
The underlying framework that describes the content of a Web page is its structure.
For example, what's the difference between a paragraph of text and its headline?
We humans know that a headline is big and bold versus a paragraph's smaller text.
We also understand the relationship between the two: the headline is a one-punch overview of the content described in detail by the paragraph.
But how do you explain this diff to a Web browser? Through document structure; the headline gets a different
markup than the paragraph. Web browsers (and other user agents) depend on markup languages
like HTML, XHTML and XML to differentiate a Web page's various content parts.
WARNING: The content structure of a Web page is not the same as its visual formatting.
HTML should NOT BE USED AS A TEXT FORMATTING OR PAGE-LAYOUT TOOL.
Visual formatting is the reserved function of presentation technology.
Presentation (CSS)
Determining how content looks to an end user depends on how she wants to see
the content -- big screen, small screen, big text, small text. But what if the end user can't
see? Do I assume such a visitor will never come to my Web site because sight is a requirement for using the Web?
No way! Technologies exist to compensate for visual disabilities. With the appropriate user agent, Web surfers
can access a site's content through audio or Braille "displays."
So why should I, the designer, hinder or even completely obstruct this user's Web-surfing experience with code that
only my sighted visitors need? The answer is, I don't. How the content looks to my sighted visitors
is handled by a Cascading Style Sheet (CSS)
meant only for them and their preferred display mode (Web browser, PDA, cell phone or whatever).
By keeping my Web page's
visual presentation code seperate from its structure, I'm freeing the content for unhindered delivery to my non-sighted
visitor's preferred display -- most likely some kind of content reader, that cares two-hoots about how the page looks.
Behavior (DOM)
You visit a Web site, click on a hyperlink and get an alert with some message for you.
This is an example Web-page behavior. A proprietary scripting language called JavaScript used to be the main
technology for creating behavior, but more recently the
(W3C) sanctioned
Document Object Model (DOM) as the
technology of choice. DOM is non-proprietary and (theoretically) compatible
with W3C-compliant browsers, which includes the later versions of
Internet Explorer,
Safari,
Mozilla,
Opera and even
Netscape.
SO WHAT DOES THIS MEAN TO YOU?
Pick your answer: time, money or making sure no visitors leave your site because they couldn't
access your content. If you're an online commerce store, imagine customers shopping two clicks away just because they
couldn't "see" your content. Adhering to Web standards
greatly reduces the chances of this happening.
Following a Web-standards approach to building Web pages means that the code will be
cleaner, leaner and more maintainable than otherwise, resulting in reduced -- substantially in some cases -- maintenance
costs. Clean, lean, efficient code means smaller file sizes, faster page-loads and less bandwidth use.
Improving bandwidth use alone can mean significant savings for a Web site with heavy traffic.
Let's say you reduce your home page's file size by 30 percent, that's 30 percent less bandwidth usage per home-page view,
and if you have 2 thousand page-views per day.... Well, you do the math.
Time IS money and visa versa. Don't mess around with sloppy and non-W3C-compliant coding practices.
Live for today AND tomorrow, and most importantly, let the end user decide how she wants to access your site.
Do it right, code it properly and spend your evenings with your family.
Frank Nilsen
February, 2005
***
Read more on this subject in Jeffrey Zeldman's book,
Designing With Web Standards, New Riders Press.
