About this site

This page is included for those who may be curious about what is "under the hood" of a website, and how Web Design Partners builds sites that are cost effective, easy to maintain, and search engine friendly.

This site may look unremarkable, but the internals are very different from most web sites out there now. First, at the bottom of each page, notice the "W3C" logos. The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) sets the rules for how web site should be coded, and how browsers should "render" the web site code. Why is this important?

First, the trend now is toward "compliant" browsers, such as Firefox, which render the a web page according to the W3C rules. As future browser releases - yes, including Internet Explorer - become more compliant, it will be more and more important to code web sites so that they are compliant as well. Failure to change to compliant coding (also called markup) will mean costly site revisions in the future. The old "wild west" is coming to an end, and there's a new Sheriff in town - the W3C.

Secondly, specifying what coding standard is being used, (in this case, XHTML 1.0 Strict) you have some confidence that your page will render properly across different compliant browsers. Unfortunately, MS IE is not among those browsers now.

Third, web designers can now take advantage of new tools that were not available a few years ago. One such tool is CSS - Cascading Style Sheets. CSS allows the designer to separate the content of the site from the presentation of the site. This allows the presentation code - division, margin, border, color, font and other definitions to reside in one file for the entire site. I can totally change the appearance this site simply by changing the single CSS file. Try that with your average site.

Here's an example. In the "traditional" website, if I want to change the font throughout the site from Arial to Times, I would have to find every bit of text in the entire site and change "arial" to "times". This would take hours - or maybe days in a large site. In this site, I can edit three or four lines in the CSS file, and I'm done! Total time, maybe five minutes.

Try this. In your browser, go to the View menu and click source. This shows you the markup used to create this page. Note that you can read this markup almost as easily as you read this web page! Now, pull up almost any other web site and do the same. What do you see? Can you find the content? What you see is an indecipherable mess, right?

You might be thinking - why is this important to me as long as my web page displays properly? Good question. First, a site such as this one is much easier to create and maintain. Once the basic layout is determined and the CSS is created, adding content is pretty simple. Secondly, it is very search engine friendly. Search engines like to see content near the top of the page.

If the search engine has to wallow through a labyrinth of nested tables, font tags, not to mention Javascript and Flash to get to content, it likely won't rank the site as highly as a simple clean design like this one. Finally, a simple, compact site loads much faster.

Update 12/12/2007   Web Design Partners is a huge fan of CSS - Cascading Style Sheets. Just one area where it is a boon to the web designer is in creating the site navigation. Several of our sites now use nav buttons with a "rollover" effect, such as the C4.Coop site. Previously, to achieve this effect (background changes with rollover) we would have had to use a lot of intricate Javascript which is difficult to maintain and not terribly search engine friendly. Some designers use (and we have too) a software tool to generate the Javascript navigation. These tools are simple to use, but the problems are that (1) the resulting code is not search engine friendly in many cases, and (2) if a future designer takes over the site and does not have the software tool, they cannot update the navigation, unless they recreate it.

CSS avoids these problems, because navigation code is plain HTML, is easily visible in the page and anyone with even a passing knowledge of HTML can add navigation buttons or remove them. The navigation function and appearance are controlled buy the CSS. While CSS navigation is more complex than plain HTML, it is relatively easy to understand, and is much simpler than the equivalent Javascript code would be.