Good design begins with good code. Good code comes from experience. We started doing web development in 1995, before Netscape, before Internet Explorer, before some web designers graduated from grade school.
We hand code and test all sites. We strictly follow standards and best practices. This has multiple benefits, such as increasing accessibility, maximizing search results, enhancing usability and decreasing maintenance time.
All web pages created here will be validated to the latest standards and tested in the latest versions of four major browsers (Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari for Mac, Microsoft Internet Explorer for Windows and Opera). We use XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and avoid using images and tables for layout and navigation. Why?
Adherence to standards improves readability for anyone using a screen reader to describe the content of your web site. We properly label all binary and form data. We do not rely solely on colors or images to describe text or provide feedback. Many governments are now requiring government web pages to be accessible to all, shouldn't your site be?
Search engines rely exclusively on a site's underlying code to categorize a page. WYSIWYG programs, Flash, Frames and excessive use of images tend to hinder search ranking. Here at the bitcastle, we think like machines when it comes your content.
When sites are written to standards using CSS, its easy to apply a site-wide change with a simple style sheet edit (choose a new theme to see what we mean). By avoiding images, Java, or Flash for navigation, it's trivial to add a link or category to your site with no need to hunt down a Photoshop file to make text edits.
If you need PHP or JavaScript development, an e-commerce or custom web application, look no further. We develop open-source applications using PHP, JavaScript and the MySQL or SQLite databases. The advantages are clear:
Our philosophy is simple; don't reinvent the wheel. We write clean, secure, reusable and well documented code so changes can be made quickly. We work closely with the customer in the planning stages to clearly define requirements so everyone can stay on schedule and budget. We follow a well-defined process and keep you in the loop during each phase of development.
Contact us today for your free quote.
We developed this informative site for a rafting company. It features XHTML 1.1, JavaScript slide show and navigation, Flash and Quicktime video, PHP scritping and SQLite backend.
One of our older sites that uses a custom e-commerce shopping cart written in PHP with a MySQL database.
