Web Design
Web Design is like designing a new house or a new structure to it - the designer needs to carefully listen to their client, translate their wishes into technical specifications while following established conventions.
During web design we establish the colour scheme of your site, how things are laid out and what emphasis we should give them. This phase creates the look-and-feel of your new web presence. When web sites are relaunched oftentimes the design changes while the content remains the same.
Web Development
Web Development is like filling an empty house with life, putting the circuitry behind a switch or installing shopping trolleys and cashiers in a supermarket.
During web development the decisions of the design phase are put into action and the developer creates a 'standards-compliant' web site, meaning that the code they write must be valid to the specification, usable for people with disabilities (e.g. the blind) and separate content from its formatting.
Another, often large, part of web development is the development of entire web applications, i.e. programs that interact with databases and act like a normal computer program. These web applications frequently require the design and development of user interfaces, forms where the user inputs data or reports which output formatted data to the user.
Creating structural, semantic markup, as most standardistas recommend, still takes time, thought, and hand-coding.
—Casper Voogt, web designer
For the experts, here is what I can do for your site:
- create web sites that comply to World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) web standards and guidelines
- use tableless layout
- write usable, accessible, valid and structured code
- produce pages that are easily crawled by search engine spiders
- minimize page and image size to reduce page loading time
Web Learning
My dad learned about using the Internet when he was over 60 years old. Not because he had to but because he wanted to.
It's always good to keep that curiosity alive, and I like to help you learn about the Internet too. For starters, I can
- show you how to use browsers
- show you how to write, send and receive emails
- tell you about the dangers of scam and phishing emails
- introduce you to effective web searches
Should you want to create a web site yourself, I can help you to
- write lean and validating HTML code
- learn how CSS helps you to efficiently style your site
- create dynamic applications, like blogs, shopping carts
- know how to design databases
- find out the secrets of design and which books to read
If you're fed up with spending hours trying to figure it out yourself, don't despair any longer. Contact me and feel at ease while I help you.