We see the benefits of complying to web standards guidelines and designing for the future and therefore all of our websites will provide valid XHTML and CSS along with testing our sites for areas of web accessibility that the W3C validation service cannot recognise such as usability, navigation, color clashes, readability etc. Working within the W3C recommendations allows us to provide web sites that really work for our clients, sites that are accessible by as many visitors as possible, sites that are future proof and sites that are visible to search engines, therefore maximising the potential of your site as a commerce, resource or promotional tool.

W3C Web Standards

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is a diverse collection of important figures within the internet world - technology developers, content providers, corporate users, research laboratories, standards bodies, and governments, all of whom endeavour to apply a set of guidelines to the way that websites are designed and maintained in order to ensure that web site content is available to the largest possible number of users, regardless of how they view they browse the web, what tools they use and whether they have any disability.

As a means to exact these guidelines upon web developers the W3C has developed a site validation service, which tests websites files for conformance to the W3C recommendations. This validation service is offered for XHTML (The file type we use to bring a site's content to your internet browser) and CSS (The file which integrates our design into the 'code' behind your website), all of our websites will comply with this validation and as such be some way towards providing a fully accessible website.

Accessibility

Why does my site need to be accessible? An accessible website has a huge number of advantages - Blind users may utilize a screen reader which uses speech synthesis to read out a web site's content, valid XHTML means that this will work the way that the software intends. Partially sighted visitors will need to increase the size of the text on your website and valid CSS will be needed to allow this to happen. Deaf visitors and those with no mouse access along with web users with Color Blindness and even Epilepsy are also considered.

It is not just Disabled users who benefit from accessibility, visitors with PDA's, mobile devices, WebTV and even slow connections will benefit from an accessible website - the most important benefit however is that of automatic search engine optimization, engines such as Google use a 'spider' technique in which their software crawls through pages looking for meaningful content. Search engine spiders do not see design and need accessible navigation to crawl through each page on your site, a valid website will allow this and instantly improve your sites position.