Web Design Philosophy

GIDI values standards that make the websites we design for you more likely to reach the people you want to reach.

You cannot predict how your visitors will access your pages. By following the standards, we help ensure that your customers find your site more easily and that they enjoy their visits.

Most of what we are doing may be invisible to you, but you can be assured that we have done everything we can to meet current standards and display web pages properly in as many web browsers as possible.

• Strict Adherence to Web Standards
• Fluid Page Design
• Cross-Browser Compatibility
• Search Engine Optimization
• Universal Design Techniques

Strict Adherence to Web Standards

The World Wide Web is filled with sloppily coded websites. Browsers are very forgiving. They try to display pages no matter how badly coded they are, so you may not even know that most sites today do not meet the standards.

The icons we display demonstrate our commitment to Web content coding standards. We are proud to incorporate these standards into all the work we do for our customers.

Find out about some of the standards we follow. The first column displays standards icons and the second column provide a link to the page describing each icon.

	Validation & Testing
	Valid XHTML
	Valid Cascading Style Sheets
	Web Content Accessibility Compliance
	Section 508 Accessibility Compliance

If we code your Web content properly today, we won't have to retrofit your pages as technologies change tomorrow. We can also make Web pages accessible for a wider audience and take more of your users' needs into account.

Fluid Page Design

We do not force pages to be a particular size. We allow pages to grow and shrink depending on the space available to them.

This fluid or liquid page design allows your users to shrink or enlarge their browser windows, change font size, or even print— without losing information.

Your users can open a side-by-side search window or access pages on a wide range of alternative devices— and you can still get your message across.

Cross-Browser Compatibility

Everybody has a favorite browser, but many people do not realize that a page that looks great in one browser may look poor in another one. We test in a wide variety of browsers, including all versions of Internet Explorer since 6.0, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Google's Chrome.

We do our best to find solutions— often using cascading style sheets— to make a web site look as consistent as possible in all browsers, platforms, and environments.

A similar challenge is creating HTML emails that can display well across a wide variety of email packages, from Outlook 2007 and 2003 to web-based email programs such a GMail, Yahoo mail, and HotMail.

Search Engine Optimization

Luckily, the techniques we use to make web sites accessible for people with disabilities, and for hand-held devices, work extremely well for search engines such as Google and Yahoo.

For our small business clients, we also assist with the integration of keywords, and such tools as Google Analytics and Google AdSense. We help our clients improve their search engine rankings, as well as giving them advice about interlinking with related web sites and other techniques to get more notice for small businesses.

Universal Design Techniques

Did you know that most websites today use tables, which should be reserved for tabular information, to lay out pages and keep items in the right places? This is because earlier browsers did not provide Web designers with the tools they needed to control their page layouts.

With the advent of cascading style sheets, everyone should be using tables for displaying data, as they were originally intended, and avoid using them for page layout.

For complex designs, we use layout tables only where necessary. Most of the time, we can eliminate them completely.

This means that pages we design work well in a wide variety of browsers, as well as output mediums you may not have considered— such as hand-held devices or adaptive technologies for people with special needs.