Web Development

I am an expert freelance web design and usability specialist dedicated to clear, usable, customer focused design. My primary concern is that your site visitors find visiting your site agreeable and are willing to come back.

I have put in the effort to become proficient at building well made, durable sites that are user agnostic. I currently make use of CSS and adhere to W3C standards to ensure my sites provide a responsive user experience and minimize bandwidth consumption. All completed work gets validated for standards compliance. (Why you should care)

I have skills in digital asset management and e-commerce as well as knowledge of several associated scripting languages. I also have extensive finance and data base experience. Combined with an advanced degree in business, I am well prepared to understand your business needs.

I can minimize schedule delays by creating all graphics and photography in-house.

And last, I can structure your site for optimal placement with search engines. If you are re-designing a site or building one from scratch, it's a good idea to work with someone who understands the complications of optimizing your site for this purpose.

Sound good? Then get in touch.

Why Good Code Matters

There is a long legacy of designing for specific browsers and using "hacks" like tables and spacer gif's to control layout. Most of the markup on the web draws upon these creative abuses. This yields bloated code that is expensive and slow to write and equally slow to modify for each new browser that arrives on the scene. This bloated code requires more bandwidth for servers to download to site visitors, a likely less responsive site, and possibly a larger hit to your pocketbook from your web site host. The alternative is using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to control design and avoiding deprecated markup and the hacks of the past. Considering that the old ways of coding web sites seem to work, using CSS seems like a lot of bother to some. CSS has many advantage though. For you the bottom line is that coding this way saves time in the long run, makes sites that are more responsive to visitors, and can save you money.

Using CSS ensures future browser compatibility, legibility across platforms, and is much easier to edit when design changes are desired. Furthermore, the content can then be more easily used in non-web applications (e.g PDA's and cell phones).

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)

This is a mechanism that adds style (colors, fonts, positions, etc.) to the content of a web page without using hacks like transparent .gif's or tables and without creating yet more HTML tags. The standards for CSS and HTML are developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). More info can be found at that link. Not all browsers follow the standards completely, nor necessarily in the same way. This often creates great difficulty in developing pages that behave properly for everyone.

Validation:

The World Wide Web Consortium, among others, provides on-line tools to check pages for valid HTML and CSS code. This is a good start in checking pages, but as hinted at before, just because a page validates does not necessarily mean that it will work well in every browser version.

Deprecated Tags:

These include proprietary tags introduced by Microsoft and Netscape that were never part of the W3C specifications and tags once part of the HTML specifications that have now been kicked out of the club in favor of more efficient CSS methods.