Web Design Best Practice

At Cleardrop we believe that all our customers no matter how large or small deserve websites that observe 'best practice' for design, coding and accessibility. The intention of this page is to explain some of the complexities and jargon of web design, while identifying some of the advantages of commissioning a site from Cleardrop as opposed to some other companies.

Standards

All web sites should be designed to meet web standards as defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Meeting web standards is important because it helps ensure pages look and function similar on different browsers, systems and devices both present and future. It can help make content accessible to those with disabilities who may be accessing the web with specialist equipment and also makes future updates and changes easier, less time consuming and thus cheaper. As if all that wasn't enough, it can also make your site perform better in search engines.

Cleardrop tests all its sites on the major browsers and platforms, and actually checks that pages meet the standards they declare they meet!

Content

Extensible HyperText Markup Language (XHTML) provides the base structure of web pages. Adhering to this standard ensures a clean semantic structure that leaves the content as the most dominant and important part of the page. It also helps ensure pages have present and future compatibility.

Cleardrop have made a concerted effort to move away from older HTML standards and now structure all pages to XHTML 1.0 Strict and validate them with the W3C online service.

Style

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) provide the style of web pages. The use of separate style sheets prevents pages becoming cluttered with code only needed to present the information clearly to humans. Web pages without style are pretty dull to humans, but pages that have style embedded in amongst all the content on a page can make pages unfriendly to search engines, harder to update and more difficult to extract data from.

Cleardrop always keep the styles of a site separate from its content and markup and validate them with the W3C online service.

Behaviour

JavaScript can be used to provide additional functionality to web pages. Using JavaScript it's possible to add dynamic and interactive behaviours, such as checking data entered into a web form before it gets submitted. There are techniques that can ensure that all JavaScript is kept in separate files and doesn't impose on or clutter the structure of a page. This is often referred to as unobtrusive JavaScript.

Cleardrop uses unobtrusive JavaScript to add functionality to web pages without disrupting or compromising content that doesn't need it.

Enhancement

Although Cleardrop is an advocate of standards based web design we still believe Flash has a major part to play in complementing and adding value to a standard site if used properly. Cleardrop frequently integrates Flash into websites to enhance the user experience because it is unrivalled in certain aspects, but we are always mindful of the accessibility issues.

Cleardrop tests all its sites on the major browsers and platforms, and actually checks that pages meet the standards they declare they meet!