Our Approach

Web design simplicity

Our philosophy can be summarised in a single word: simplicity.

Rather than swamp your webspace with needless, excessive code, we make use of the latest Stylesheet technologies, combined with graphical simplicity in order to create an easily navigated, fast-loading website.

We don't use downloaded templates. We believe that every website should be individually tailored to suit your needs. This also means that we are able to offer a more flexible pricing range, ensuring that you get the best website for your money.

Tables versus Stylesheets

Until recently, tables were the web designer's best friend. Initally, of course, tables were intended simply to display tabular data. Then it was discovered that it was possible to use tables to create a layout grid for website design. Suddenly, designers could place objects on their sites exactly as they wanted to, allowing the possibility of full graphical interfaces. There is one problem with this innovation.

Tables are slow.

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Web Standards

Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network.

--Tim Berners-Lee, Technology Review, 1996

Web standards grew out of one of the most aggressive web-related marketing campaigns ever seen. Probably very few will be surprised to find we're talking about Microsoft, whose ruthless marketing-tactics (found illegal in a case brought by the United States Department of Justice) have meant that over 90% of internet users surf with Internet Explorer. This is in comparison to previous years when browsers like Netscape Navigator dominated the market.

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The Rule of 7 & 2

This rule is one of the most important in the creation of web pages. It is also one of the most commonly misapplied.

The rule states that your brain cannot handle more than 7 items of information (give or take 2) at a time. If you apply this rule to visual design, the maximum number of menu items would, of course, be 9. However, the psychologist who formulated this rule was not interested in the amount of visual information people can perceive at a time, but the ability of the mind to retain information in the short term memory.

This has meant that many web-designers favour narrow, deep menu structures, thinking that this will present the information to the browser in a way they can interpret quickly. However, in creating a deep menu structure, the designer has unwittingly created too many levels for the short-term memory to easily recall. This is why it's so easy to get lost in many - if not most - menu structures.

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