Web design services
I offer a complete web design service for business in
the Abergavenny and South Wales area (and further afield!), producing easy to use, fast
loading, good looking web sites with harmonious color schemes.
I will help you plan your web site carefully so that the whole site
is simple to follow. Many sites are difficult to navigate, and
the result is that potential customers leave.
Look at some of the features below that can be incorporated in your site design:
- Static design or dynamic, using a Content Management System (CMS) - click here for an example
- Multimedia content such as video, audio etc. Click here for an example.
- Ecommerce, from a small number of items for sale to a fully featured store. See my other site, Sylvatica Art & Photographic Prints for an example.
- Customised Google ™ Maps - click here for an example in a site I manage
Our web sites conform to the XHTML 1.0 standard defined by the
World Wide Web Consortium
and make extensive use of style sheets to define the appearance
of a web page. The result is pages that are small files that load
fast, display correctly on a wide range of browsers and can be
updated quickly. The headers, text, menus etc. on this site are
all defined using an external style sheet.
Cross-browser and platform compatability
We thoroughly test your website on different browsers and platforms.
Some web sites look fine on Internet Explorer, but fall apart
when viewed on other browsers and platforms. All our web sites
are tested using IE6, 7 and 8, Mozilla Firefox, Safari for Mac and Google Chrome.
Although PCs are the dominant type of personal computer, Apple
Macintosh ™ computers are used by millions of people. Macs
have different font sets to PCs. We get around this problem by
defining font families for the display of text, so if the user's
computer does not have the first choice of font, a suitable alternative
is substituted. For example, this text is in the Trebuchet MS font, common to PCs and Macs. We check web sites on both PCs and Macs to ensure that your web
site works on both platforms.
Accessible web sites
Far too many web sites are difficult for people with disabilities
to read and navigate. People with visual impairment may choose to enlarge the text on a web page (press CTRL and + to do this). The text flows around the graphics and doesn't fall off the end of the boxes - they enlarge to fit the text. Each article on the page has a descriptive header so those using screen reading sotware can immediately find out what the text is about. To reduce text size, press CRTL and - or to go back to the original size, press control and 0 (zero).
Web sites and spam
Where do spammers get e-mail addresses? One way is through your web site. Spammers have programs which spider through web pages, looking for email addresses, e.g. email addresses contained in mailto: HTML tags [those you can click on and get a mail window opened]
To prevent this happening, all e-mail addresses on sites I design are encrypted. To the user, the 'mail me' link looks normal, but in the underlying HTML, the address is in a form that is hard for spam-bots to interpret.
Feedback forms can often be a source of spam where spam-bots attempt to fill in the form with links to web sites (often with pornographic content) and send the form to you. To make sure that a real human being is trying to contact you via your feedback form, all feedback forms I produce incorporate CAPTCHA, where the user is asked to type in a string of characters as seen in a randomly generated picture.
I can't guarantee that any anti - spam measure is 100% effective, but security measures such as the ones above certainly reduce the chance of becoming a target for spammers.
