Web Site Design Techniques

HTML

This is the fundamental coding used for creating web sites, and has been since the World Wide Web as we know it first came into being.
We create the html code by hand to ensure that it is as lean as possible. There are two benefits from having as little code as possible in your we page:

• The web page will load faster if there is less code to be down loaded and displayed by your browser
• Search engines may see your pages as being more valuable if the real information on them is not diluted by lots of necessary code.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

We use CSS to control the appearance of certain items, particularly text and where appropriate, to control the layout of the page.
The use of CSS helps to reduce the amount of code on a page which can cause the problems outlined above.
Using CSS to control layout also enables us to place important content of your page before that of the menu which appears on the left hand side, in the coding. The result is that the content is loaded on the page first, and gets read by Search Engines first.
It is not helpful to search engines if the text you want people to read is at the end of all the coding, as would normally be the case if using straight HTML to control the layout.

PHP

This is a scripting language which runs on the web server where your web page is hosted and enables us to make the web page more functional.
Our main use of PHP is in connecting to a database and then creating the correct HTML to produce a web page using information retrieved from the database.

Java Script

This is a scripting language which runs in the visitors browser, not the web server, and we use this in small amounts where it is useful.

FLASH

Flash can be used to create moving images and text, or more sophisticated interactive web pages.
The more sophisticated FLASH web pages can be slow to load and the information in them (text) is not accessible to search engines.
We use small amounts of FLASH where appropriate to bring life to a web page. We avoid using FLASH for the main content of the page or the navigation (menu).