Dan Peverill - Front-End Web Developer

Welcome!

I am a programmer, not a designer. XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, the 3-legged stool of front-end web development. These are the tools I bring to the table.

Hand Coded XHTML/CSS

I’ve been hand coding (X)HTML with Notepad for 10 years. I do not use any WYSIWYG editors or automated tools, and in fact I hate them. Often times these applications will produce bloated, non-semantic code. Each and every design is unique, and it needs to be handled with care. XHTML and CSS coding is an art, not a science, and there not a single application that is currently available can ever replace the quality of code I produce.

W3C Web Standards

It’s important to future proof your web pages. They need to be well structured, valid, and built to last. I currently follow XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS 2.1 standards, to ensure each design will not only work on all of the latest browsers, but also future browsers to come.

Tableless Layouts

Tables were used back in the 1990s to produce web designs that a browser would otherwise not be able to render. Table based designs are very bloated with inline styles cluttering the HTML, making them very hard to update and maintain. As a side effect, table based designs load slow due to the bloated HTML code, cost you more in terms of bandwidth and hosting due to the large file sizes, and are hard for search engines to parse, hurting your rankings.

Today, we separate presentation (CSS) from content (XHTML). CSS is nicely packed into its own file, which is cached by browsers when a potential customer visits your web site. This allows your web site to load faster, and saves you bandwidth. The HTML files themselves should be minimal markup that describes your content, allowing search engines to easily parse the data and increase your rankings.

Semantic XHTML

XHTML is used to describe the content of your web site, nothing more, nothing less. It is not there to add presentation (design) to your web site, that’s the job of CSS. It’s important to understand this, as it directly leads to minimal markup. For example, the menu on your web site is nothing more than a list of links. Thus, it should be marked up in XHTML as a list. If you have a paragraph of text, it should be, of course, marked up as a paragraph of text. Have a header? Look no further, XHTML provides markup for headers, and they should be used. The point I’m trying to make is that we’re giving meaning the content of your web site, and this allows search engines to easily gobble up and index your site. This, as you might have guessed, increases your search rankings.

Minimal Markup

It is still possible to have a tableless layout that is perfectly semantic, but bloated with wrapper DIVs. This is commonly referred to as DIVitis. The point of minimal markup is to describe your markup so perfectly semantic, that you couldn’t have possibly used any less XHTML. This allows your files to remain small in size, allowing pages to load lightning quick, save you bandwidth costs, and of course, help increase those very important search engine rankings.

Web Accessibility

Your web site needs to work.. for everyone. Every single person that visits your web site is a customer, so you need to make sure they aren’t turned away for any reason. If the user is on a slow network and needs to turn images off in their browser, your web site still needs to be usable. It’s possible a client is also browsing your web site on a cell phone or PDA device, which most likely is unable to render your advanced CSS layout, so your web site needs to be usable with CSS turned off. Let’s of course, not forget users with handicaps, such as low vision. Those users will have the text size in their browsers increased, making it important that your layout is flexible enough to handle various text sizes without breaking. Accessibility is a thick topic, and should not be made light of. It needs to be emphasized: Every single person that visits your web site is a customer, so you need to make sure they aren’t turned away for any reason.