SERVICES: Web Design

Smart web design fulfills your vision for your website and makes it possible to accomplish your business goals. It is a balance of brand extension, user interface, and information architecture. Perfect web design should not hit you over the head — it should whisper in your ear. It must simultaneously reinforce your brand and get out of the way to let the user experience convey your message.

To be effective, a compelling design must be coupled with valid, standards-based markup language. Advantages of the current standards include:

• Your website will open and load much faster due to reduced file size
• Your website will look good across all platforms (Mac, PC, etc.) and all browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, etc.)
• Your website will be easier to maintain (because predictable things happen when we modify code vs. unpredictable), resulting in reduced costs
• Your website can evolve as standards evolve; it won’t become obsolete due to the use of proprietary code
• Your website will incorporate accessibility so that the millions of people affected by disabilities will be able to view and use your content
• Your website will be viewable and usable by all the different user-agents of the Web (browsers, cell phones, PDAs, screen readers for the blind, and search bots like Google)
• Your website will communicate in a way that is understood by everyone, regardless of what they are using to access the Internet

Sadly, the majority of sites you see today are not standards-compliant. There are a number of reasons this occurs, but the primary reason is a lack of knowledge and skill. As a client of Bear Creek Web, you won’t have that problem.

> Continue on to information architecture and user interface

Standards-based markup language

This is a phrase that has many different interpretations. For some developers, Web standards-compliant simply refers to a "table-free site." For others, it may mean that the code has been "validated."

Our interpretation, which is a bit stricter than most, means:

• The Web site adheres to proper and currently accepted Web standards such as HTML, XHTML, XML, CSS, XSLT, DOM, etc.
• The Web site adheres to best practices for valid code, semantically correct code, user-friendly URLs, proper 404 error pages, etc.
• The Web site presentation, structure and content are properly separated. We accomplish this by placing the presentation in a Cascading Style Sheet (CSS), the structure in a template, and the content in the page itself or in a database.

Who decides what the standards are?

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is one of the most influential organizations for setting Web standards. They release technical specifications, recommendations and other documents guiding proper implementation. But in order for their standards to work, Web authors and browser companies must both read, understand and implement them.

We at Bear Creek Web read, understand and implement. You'll never have to worry about a site we've created becoming obsolesced by new standards.