Fundamentals of web design play an important role in the the success of your website. Solid design is essential for fast loading websites which display properly cross-browser and cross-platform. It is also important in search engine optimization.
The standards we follow are set by the World Wide Web Consortium. These include the standards set for CSS, Semantic Markup, and HTML as well as following the standards of the Web Accessibility Initiative. Following these standards along with taking a few extra steps also assures compliancy of our sites with US Section 508 Guidlines and the British Disability Discrimination Act.
We will explore these topics a little further. CSS, also known as a Cascading Style Sheet, is the "modern" way to design websites. Table based layouts are a thing of the past. CSS is much more functional in it's capabilities, it's ability to be easily modified, and it's ability to reduce page size. We only use tables for tabular data, which is what they are intended for, and use CSS to form the structure of our websites.
CSS is meant to define page properties including colors, background images, and positioning of items. We employ the use of external style sheets in most of our sites to give the added benefit of caching, allowing our sites to load faster and conserve bandwidth. Another advantage of CSS, when combined with scripting, is the ability this gives an end user to affect the look of a site. This becomes very important in making a site more accessible for those with disabilities.
In addition, we use semantic markup. Semantic markup is basically writing descriptive code that makes sense to the rendering engine (the browser) in the same manner as it would to a human. For example, the headlines on a page would be marked with h1, h2, h3, etc. This has several benefits, the most obvious being reduction of coding, which in turn speeds up pages and gives search engines less coding and more content to read. It also defines the coding for a browser or search engine so it knows what the important parts of a page are in the same way that a human reader would. This goes hand in hand with writing HTML and CSS to compliancy, as the combination of the three is essential to a well-formed website.
The final point is that on accessibility. This is a pretty broad subject which we discuss more thoroughly in our section on web accessibility, but in short, it's building a site that is easily used by various individuals with varying physical capabilities. This means building pages which are easy to read and navigate by most people with visual, physical, or psychological disabilities. We do this by providing alternate style sheets and writing the coding in an order which allows those who use items such as screen readers to understand the information presented in a logical manner, though it may be presented in a different order than those who use visually based browsers may recieve it.