Web Design
Web design is usually the first stage of a project, the first goal to achieve at this stage is to create a design with visual appeal. If your site doesn't look good, the chances are it is not reaching its sales potential. At Techlands, once we have created a design our job is only half done. A web site that is truly successful needs to meet all the following:
- Clearly shows what your company has to offer
- If the company offers a large number of products/services the most important should be prominently displayed
- The site's navigation(s) need to be intuitive (you'd be surprised at some of the navigations we've seen)
- Points of contact need to be clearly visible
- Points of sales need to be simplistic and intuitive
- Site should not be cluttered with useless or marginal information
- Text should be inviting to read
Web Development
Web development is broken down into two areas: front-end development and back-end development. Front-end developers are a mix of a designer and a back-end developer. They are responsible for turning designs into a web site, user interface and JavaScript widgets. Back-end developers generally have no artistic ability and have not seen the light of day since they first turned on a computer. They spend their spare time watching Star Trek and coding Nintendo DS emulators. Back-end developers are responsible for programming into existence all the functions of your web site that it's users will experience but never see - XML parsers, elaborate product databases, eCommerce integrations etc.
Front-end Development
The first stage of front-end development is to turn a design or set of designs into HTML and CSS. The majority of web developers will simply use a WYSIWYG editor like Dreamweaver to put your site into HTML. This is little more difficult than using Microsoft Word and results in an unprofessional end product. Web sites that have been constructed in a WYSIWYG editor will suffer from all of the following:
- Messy and bulky code, which is difficult to update and maintain
- Pages will not be geared for search engine optimisation
- Updates to the site will cause degradation to already low quality HTML
- HTML will be inflexible and suffer from accessibility issues, reducing your target audience
- Contain numerous coding errors, which can cause cross-browser incompatibility and confuse search engines, again reducing your target audience
- Only makes use of a fraction of HTML and CSS
At Techlands every single page is hand-coded using scaleable, semantic, keyword-rich HTML. This means:
- Our code is clean & minimal, resulting in pages that are easy to manage and update
- HTML is constructed in a way to best inform search engines what that page is about
- HTML is scaleable, meaning any content can be changed to fit any requirements and the size of the site can be increased infinitely without degradation (for accessibility & gee wizz purposes)
- HTML and CSS is provided free of errors and compatible with major web browsers
- Web site will be compatible with all screen resolution
Back-end Development
Once a project has been through front-end development it is handed over to a back-end developer. This is the stage where all the 'behind the scenes' work goes on - the front-end of the site is connected to programming functions and databases that will make the web site actually work.
We have knowledge of and can support development using the following:
Markup Languages
- HTML & XHTML
- SVG
- XML
- XUL
Stylesheet Languages
- CSS
- XLST
Programming Languages
- C
- C++
- Java
- JavaScript
- Pascal
- PHP 4 & PHP 5
- Perl
- Python
- Visual Basic
Query Languages
- MS Access
- MS Jet
- MySQL
- PostgreSQL
Miscellaneous
- ADO
- AJAX
- JSON
- mod_rewrite
Protocols
- DNS
- FTP
- IMAP
- MIME
- POP3
- SMTP
- SOAP
- SSH
- TELNET
- TLS & SSL