principles
Our Principles
Accessibility
- We believe in making all our sites accessible to as many people as possible
- This means we make a conscious effort to make our works compatible with screen readers and other accessibility based formats
Structure
- We enforce structured coding in all our work, this is to enable easy parsing by search engines, and to enable readable pages when the CSS formatting is removed
Standards
- We adhere to the latest W3C xHTML and CSS standards
- We also support the AAA model
Quality
- All of our principles ensure that the project we complete for you achieves the results that our best for your visitor, and consequentially your business
consultancy
Particle-productions believe in agile coding methodologies and advocate the use of on site client contacts.
We believe this presents the greatest opportunity for the client to communicate their views and therefore achieve the desired result in a reduced timeframe. There is no advantage to either party to be reliant on input from a client that cannot be contacted.
design
Particle-productions fully support w3c web standards, and the AAA accessibility model. This means we endeavour to create our designs in a way that is both attractive yet simple. The structured nature of our designs means that they are search engine friendly and easily maintainable. Any site we produce will be accessible without the CSS styling to produce a text only version; this is suitable for screen readers and search engine parsing.
Such standards ensure our designs are cross browser and cross resolution compatible. We do not believe there is not value in making a site which looks spectacular on one particular screen but fails to display correctly on anything else. We produce designs which are specifically coded and tested for maximum accessibility; many of our designs can offer custom style-sheet selection for visitors that are hard of sight.
Unlike many designers, we do not spend weeks making custom animations and flash screens which may wow the visitor first time round but ultimately end up slowing future visits and annoying your potential customers. We instead focus on clear accessible design that can be implemented quickly to target your desired market.
coding
True to our design methodolody coding is produced to adhere to both xHTML 1.1 and CSS 2.0. This means our code is 100% valid for use with future versions of these standards.
We attempt to minimise the use of images as this can often increase a sites size, and therefore the amount of time it takes to load. Instead, we use pure CSS menus and background areas which resize dynamically to the visitors screen size. This means our designs do not look tiny on high resolutions or large on lower resolutions. View this current site with various resolutions to see what we mean.
hosting
All sites we produce have the option of managed hosting. This service involves us purchasing your chosen domain name and linking this up to one of our servers where your site is stored. This is an optional service which certain clients may wish to ignore, especially if an alternative hosting solution has already been arranged.
The advantage of our managed hosting is that we will take care of the hosting and maintenance of your site. Maintenance will include services such as keeping the code up to current standards, and altering content where desired. This does not extend to site re-design work or increases in scope.
More competent clients may wish to edit content and manage other aspects of the site hosting. This is offered via the 'cPanel 8.0' interface. This offers full access to all site functions including visitor tracking and email address management.