How we build quality websites
Websites can be built using a number of different methods and the web site can appear very different to search engines, disabled users or people using different browsers.
Accessible websites
It is a UK legal requirement that websites can be used by disabled users which effectivly means the website will need to work with screen readers so blind people can still access the site. This usually means that the website conforms to the priority 1 list of the 'Web Content Accessibility Guidelines' as defined by
W3C the organisation which define the standards of the Internet. All of our sites are created to confirm to these standards. Accessibility also means that the websites should be available to everyone so we always check that our websites work in the 4 most popular browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Opera).
Quality (X)HTML code
All the code that creates the website can be validated and checked that it is error free. This functionality is built into the web management system so that the HTML and Style Sheets code can easily be checked at any time. We use the latest version of HTML that can be validated which at the moment is XHTML 1.0 but we will soon be using XHTML 2.0 once it can be properly validated.
CSS design - Search engine friendly and fast pages
All of our websites are search engine friendly which means they are built so the search engines such as Google can easily read and index the pages of the website. We use CSS design which means the web pages are split into 2 files a HTML page with the page content and a CSS style sheet describing the layout of the page. This approach makes it easier to maintain the web site in the future and also produces pages which load very fast.
Printer specific style sheets
Our websites will be styled differently when you try and print any of the pages. If you click on print preview you will see a different version of the page with menus and any other unnecessary content removed.
XML site map
A XML site map is a file which tells search engines such as Google which pages of the exist, how important they are and when they were last updated.
