Code can be elegant, too
All of our sites are carefully coded by hand using valid (X)HTML and CSS, using the degree of skill and care demanded by professional web development best practices. We are staunch supporters of simple, clean, and standards-compliant site design, interoperability, and usability. Besides being ‘the right thing to do’, standards-compliant web sites are forward and backwards compatible, load faster, and are accessible by a greater variety of devices and user agents.
We’re absolutely humorless about good coding, and are dismayed at the laziness exhibited by most development firms. Thankfully, you as the client have an easy way of measuring the amount of care that went into a web page. Simply copy and paste the address of a web page into the W3C validator, and it will tell you whether the page actually follows the rules for the (X)HTML language it uses. As the W3C people put it, “Validity is one of the quality criteria for a Web page, but there are many others. In other words, a valid Web page is not necessarily a good web page, but an invalid Web page has little chance of being a good web page.”
Collateral benefits of good coding
A happy benefit of creating simple, usable sites is that the same things that make them good for people (standards compliance and validating code) also make them good for search engines. We pair a solid understanding of on- and off-page Search Engine Optimization factors with sound coding fundamentals to produce decent organic rankings naturally baked into each of our sites. We will also help your site along by generating an xml sitemap and submitting it to Google Sitemaps. While no one can guarantee specific rankings, we’ve done pretty well so far.
Thorough QA testing
Before we pronounce a project complete, it is thoroughly tested on no less than seven different systems convering the vast majority of OS/browser configurations: a futuristic Windows 7 (or Vista) machine running IE8; a fully updated Windows XP machine running Firefox, IE 7 and Google Chrome; a Windows 2000 Professional machine running IE 6; and a Mac with the latest version of OS X running Firefox and Safari.
If you are interested in a handmade web site built on solid and forward-looking code but don’t know where to start, feel free to contact us to start a discussion. If you already have a web site but would like it audited for SEO best practices, updated and refined, or torn down and completely rebuilt, include the URL and we will be happy to take a look at it and give you a quote.
