purple oar software

"Ensuring Your Web Presence Contributes"

web standards

Web standards

We think adhering to standards is a good idea. Standards exist in many aspects of life, usually to ensure safety and minimum quality.

The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) provides online validators where any site's markup may be checked. Rolls-Royce is a brand name that oozes quality, they produce luxury cars and ultra-reliable jet engines.

This was the W3C's verdict on the Rolls-Royce web site on 13 May 2006.

Rolls-Royce W3C validation

Now one error is actually very good, and in this case it is a trivial problem. Many well known sites produce hundreds of errors.

Does it matter, they seem to work OK and appear in search engines? Relating cause and effect regardng things on the internet is notoriously difficult, but we believe if all other factors are equal, then standards compliant sites rank better than non-compliant ones.

This is our validation on 24 December 2007. Yay!

Purple Oar Software W3C no error validation image

Books

We find these books incredibly useful.

  • Persuasive Online Copywriting - How to Take Your Words to the bank, Bryan Eisenberg, Jeffrey Eisenberg, Lisa Davis.
  • Don't Make Me Think - Steve Krug
  • Web Standards Solutions - The Markup and Style Handbook, Dan Cederholm
  • Pro Drupal Development, John K VanDyk and Matt Westgate
  • Pro Javascript Techniques, John Resig
  • PHP 5 Objects, Patterns and Practice, Matt Zandstra
  • The principles of beautiful web design, Jason Beard
  • The Long Tail, Chris Anderson
  • The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell

Your web site

Regardless of where you are in the world, we are keen to design (or redesign) and create your website. We are software and web developers operating in sunny Nelson, New Zealand. We understand how to make your website reinforce traditional sales and marketing principles to make your organisation successful.

For us, there is only one good outcome from your visiting our site - that is you contact us. You might glean something from these pages and admire the lovely photo at the top (Rocks road, Nelson), but that's no use to us at all. We want to talk with you! Hopefully you will have confidence in what we are saying and get in touch. That is why we have sprinkled many contact us links around!

There is a lot of information about website development in these pages. We assume you have arrived here because you are establishing or improving your web presence. If there is anything we can clarify or expand on, please contact us.

We design web sites so that:

Visitors find your site -

  • easily on the major search engines for relevant key words.
  • fast to load even on "dial up".
  • easy to navigate.
  • appears consistent, attractive and enhances your "brand", regardless of the browser being used or screen size (resolution settings).
  • shows attention to detail and a sense of responsibility to users' privacy by having a "privacy policy" and "terms of use" statement.

Owners/administrators of your site -

  • have a site that sells!
  • find it easy to amend and add content and photos.

Technically, all sites use current best practices, i.e. -

  • use of html 4.0, xhtml 1.0 or xhtml 1.1.
  • separation of content and presentation by using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets).
  • all pages should validate with zero errors using the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) validator.
  • no email addresses shown that could be harvested by spammers. Visitors can email you by filling out a form.
  • no use of deprecated tags (e.g. <font>)
  • security issues are addressed.
  • accessibility issues are addressed.
  • all pages optimized for search engine optimization (SEO)

Contact us now for a free no obligation chat about your web presence.

Our product, a website developer tool

We also sell our own shareware Javascript editor with built in syntax error checking called "ScrypTik". You can visit its own site www.purpleoar.co.nz/scryptik for more information and free download.

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