Strawberrysoup Blog

Chichester is a historic market town in West Sussex, located on the scenic South coast of England. It is best renowned for its cathedral and its stunning Gothic architecture, which is a common style throughout the city. Chichester is also an extremely industrial area full of thriving businesses and shops – many of which have their own website.

Marks and Spencer, Dorothy Perkins, Tesco and W.H.Smith are all other examples of businesses and shops in Chichester which have taken advantage of the internet to rocket charge their profits and public awareness. Chichester’s art community contains an array of expert web designers, in which Strawberrysoup is a ‘major player’ – located on the cities North wall and our office is a mere five minutes from the cities cultural centre.

Today it is an extremely good idea to advertise your business or shop online, in the form of a website – and because Chichester is such a popular city, and is home to such a diverse range of people, cultures and arts it is a great place to have a beautiful website designed and built. We not only design stunning websites, but build them in the latest standards compliant code – they can even add e-commerce and content management system modules to your website!

If you have read the statistics you will realise what a tantalisingly lucrative market Internet users are – in 2006 over half of UK households, at 57%, had access to the internet. Of these, 6 in every 10 of internet users logged in everyday. 7 in 10 businesses in the UK already have a web presence of one kind or another – if your business is one of the 30% which hasn’t joined the Internet revolution yet then contact us and arrange a meeting today. They are less than a five minute walk from the centre of Chichester.

Statistics from National Statistics online - www.statistics.gov.uk

As time moves forward, ideas and technologies progress – the internet is no stranger to progression and it demonstrates as well as any other modern technology what great things happen with time. Once a rudimentary network of computers, sharing information on only a handful of topics, the internet has evolved monumentally in the past ten years. This evolution has given fruit to such technological miracles as instant messaging, email, internet television and radio, dynamic internet applications and VOIP (voice over IP – phone calls through the internet).

Twenty years ago, if you told someone that in the not too distant future they would be able to do their weekly shop, chat to friends, bid on auctions and send virtual post from their desk, they would collapse in a fit of laughter (or accuse you of being a witch and burn you at the stake). Yet today these very things are everyday life for the majority of people.

As the internet changed, so did the options available to web designers. The mass uptake of the broadband internet connection was a major way mark for modern web design – the speeds available for the downloading of content was such as to allow the streaming of video, audio and other multimedia. Web pages no longer were required to consist of plain text and basic formatting – web layouts could be forged completely from images and could contain animation and audio.

But, to quote Spiderman, with great power comes great responsibility. Websites started appearing that had no discernible design or purpose – there just because they could be. Random animations were strewn haphazardly across the page and an annoying audio track looped on entry with no option to stop. I may be painting a portrait of a cliché of a bad website, but such novelties as animation and sound really turned many designers (please excuse another movie influence) to the dark side. Thankfully most website design businesses were not ‘wowed’ by the array of new techniques available enough to abandon good taste, and instead of pasting them in a montage of annoyance, used them to create rich user interfaces like nothing ever before experienced.

Today designers have the tools available to achieve everything that was ever possible in print and more, on screen. With applets like Adobe/Macromedia Flash and Java and programming languages like PHP, ASP and CGI, interactivity like never thought possible is accessible to the average consumer. Nowadays, designs need to cater for an immense range of potential content – from plain text and images, maps and message boards to browser based massively multiplayer online games and interactive tours. It is generally no longer acceptable to have a page of information presented in default formatting, and call it a website.

Instead of plain, boring statistics and data displayed in type, websites can today visually represent this data in graphs and charts. Users can toggle how that data is displayed, adding another level of interactivity and therefore involving the user even more with the content. Comments and suggestions for the site owners can be left, visitors can upload pictures…share them, rate them, even sell them. Message boards, chat rooms, games, libraries, shops and vast online worlds to explore. It’s all possible, and the marvellous thing about it is that it can all be disabled with a flick of a switch (or automatically if you’re feeling a bit flash-Harry) if the user is on hardware or software which doesn’t support it.

With the release of a couple of brand new web technologies for the programming of websites, designers today are able to invent designs which harmoniously blend graphic beauty, accessibility, aesthetics and accessibility. If web standards, and designers respect for them, continue to grow as rapidly as they have in the past five years, one day every website will be accessible universally. This is because every web designer will create their sites in the strictest and latest standards compliant code. But until that time arrives, we already do and will complete the job for you!

Soon after the very invention of the Internet, the true purpose of the world wide web had been lost in the midst of a swamp of tables and images. Many web designers were concentrating on design above content and websites started displaying differently in different browsers and resolutions. Tables broke, and content was strewn meaninglessly across pages of clashing colors and tacky images taking minutes to load on our beloved 56k modems.

CSS is a relatively modern web design technology, but even in its infancy it is clear that it is the key to creating an  Internet that is better for everyone. CSS holds many advantages for both the web developer and the end user that older, and much more primitive methods could either not support or, if they did, only extremely erratically. CSS is used to style a websites layout, fonts and coloring, and tells the browser how to render the elements in a page on screen.

Standing for ‘cascading style sheets’ and invented by Norwegian software developer Hakon Wium-Lie in the  October of 1994, CSS slashes loading times and can be accurately interpreted cross platform. Hakon Wium-Lie invented CSS for one main reason - that being to separate content from design. All CSS rules should be kept in an individual file, and these rules are called to each X/HTML page so that changes made in one file have affects across a whole website - thus making modification of designs an extremely simple task.

Working cross platform means that your website which looks great in Internet Explorer 6 on Windows will look just as good on Safari on OSX or Firefox on that obscure distribution of Linux that that potential client of yours uses. CSS isn’t only brilliant cross platform, but ‘cross resolution’, too. It can be used to make layouts automatically resize to fit on a viewers screen, regardless of the resolution they use - in fact, it can even be used to make images resize to fit on a viewers screen. That’s 100% Javascript free - just one line of code, under twenty characters. No messy code, and no broken website if a viewer has Javascript turned off or are on a browser which doesn’t support Javascript.

Cutting out all of that useless table, frame and Javascript markup from your site not only boosts loading times  monumentally, but reduces the load on your web host, saving bandwidth and, therefore, precious money.

You can already see why using CSS instead of tables, frames and Javascript is the best thing you can do to make your website load quickly (yup, even more so than that new web hosting package you were looking at the other day). But what about those of us who know a website should look great as well as function great (we are web designers, after all) - well, CSS doesn’t cease to impress when it comes to this matter. The fact is that CSS actually gives designers more control over a page than ever before - from the font family, to line spacing, the style of bullet points in a list to how the page should look when it is printed; CSS does it all.

CSS gives designers a level of control that has never been possible before, it loads faster than ever before and uses less server resources. If your website uses tables, frames or excessive JavaScript for tasks that have much smaller and faster solutions then your website just isn’t cut out for the Internet of the 21st Century.

If you are looking for a web design company that will design and build your new or existing website using CSS, why not contact Strawberrysoup - a dedicated website design business focused on standards compliance and accessible websites?

The World Wide Web is the fastest evolving media platform in modern society. The data found on it is updated at a tremendous pace and it takes mere seconds for an internet publisher to document real world affairs as they unravel. The range and diversity of information available on the web is monumental, and practically any topic desired can be researched – whether that is in an online encyclopedia, specialist website, discussion forum or a personal website or blog.

Unfortunately web designers and publisher often neglect the needs of internet users with disabilities, or those browsing with older or less widely used software. As a result many websites are not accessible to a large percentage of internet users, and hence their experience is hindered. This is discrimination, and even though the “Disability Discrimination Act (1999)” contains several references to accessible websites, the law is nearly impossible to enforce. Only a handful of very large companies have been pursued with legal action over their websites – this is under 0.00001% of the internet – an insignificantly small fraction.

When a designer builds a site to adhere to accessibility guidelines, he or she writes the most basic markup which will achieve the design already devised. The less markup used, the more likely the final website is to function correctly cross platform. The other advantage to using as little markup as possible is that as a result loading times will be decreased. Only essential images are used, and when they are used ‘text replacement’ is utilized so that text is inserted in place of an image if the image cannot be rendered for any reason. This means if a user has images disabled or cannot view an image, they can still read any text which was in the image.

A number of other, highly specialist methods are also employed to ensure that no matter what operating system, browser or disabilities a user may use/have their experience is not compromised and they have access to all of the data available on the website. These methods range from options to enlarge or decrease the pages font size, options for high contrast versions of the page and a version of a page especially designed to be easily interpreted by a screen reader (a screen reader is a piece of software which reads the text on a page and can output that text for a variety of different uses, such as a specialized keyboard which has a series of small holes through which the below surface is raised to form Braille).

Websites should be accessible by all people, regardless of any disabilities they may have or software they may use. This results in a consistent user experience cross platform and the elimination of discrimination. Therefore increasing the quality of your website, improving the experience of the end user, bettering you/your organizations reputation and, in the case of a company, diversifying the percentage of the public which can view your product/service online.

We recognize the utmost importance of accessible web design and takes pride in building all of their client’s websites to only the strictest accessibility guidelines, as set forth by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The W3C are the definitive body in web design standards and their guidelines are those which a website is compared to if a publisher is ever taken to court over website accessibility (www.w3c.org).

We also acknowledge that accessible design needn’t mean boring design. Their expert web designers can create a bespoke solution tailored to your individual needs that is exciting, eye catching, bold and accessible.

When we started Strawberrysoup, we focused our business around 2 towns - Bournemouth and Chichester - and we focused on getting great online results for our clients in both of these towns.

Now that we are coming up to 2 years old, we feel that we can extend our web design, search engine optimisation and e-commerce services to a much wider audience, and have taken the decision to focus on the whole of the South of England - so if you know anyone in the following towns that want a website, get in touch!

We are initially going to focus on promoting our web design in the following towns on the South coast of England :-

• Christchurch
• Poole
• Weymouth
• Southampton
• Fareham
• Portsmouth
• Worthing
• Brighton

We already have clients in a lot of these towns, so we feel that we should be actively promoting the fact that we offer our service in these towns, not just Bournemouth and Chichester!

This is good timing for Neil! - Our latest website has just gone live and sells a wide range of wedding accessories, wedding gifts and wedding presents, and is called Accessories of Distinction.

Accessories of Distinction approached us to create their new e-commerce website as they had found us on Google, and liked the work that we had done on previous e-commerce projects such as Chic Beauty in Bournemouth and Blush Photography in Chichester.

We have now created a professional and functional website, allowing Accessories of Distinction to sell their wedding accessories and manage invoicing online. The order process from an end user perspective is totally automated, allowing Accessories of Distinction to worry less about the technology, and more about their business. For more information on this project, why not visit our web design portfolio?

Wow - what a month! We are chuffed to have launched our latest website - for US sweet manufacturer Just Born.

We were chosen to create the new UK website for MIKE AND IKE® sweets due to the fact that they liked our pitch, but also as they saw the work we had done previously and because we fitted into the target market of the product – which meant that we could bring ideas/creativity to the table from an end user perspective too.

The new UK website was created following the latest accessibility guidelines and we created all of the graphics/screensavers/desktops in-house. We also used JavaScript and Flash to make the website look more user friendly and animated. For more information on this project, please visit our web design portfolio page.

We are pleased to say that we have just finished creating our latest website - Purple Places!

We were approached by Olives Et Al (the pioneers of “Purple Love”) as they needed a brand new website for their 2007 campaign – so they chose us!

They needed their new website to do a range of different things, including allowing users to register, add their information and upload their photos to their very own photo album. They also wanted to maintain the website themselves, add new content and view member information.

Purple Places now has over 800 registered members including delis, farmers, farm shops and candlestick makers… and have received nationwide press coverage. They are averaging over 1100 visitors a week too! The actual Purple Love Week has not started yet, but their website is showing signs that it is going to be even more successful than the year before!

We have been very busy building websites recently.. and we are very proud of our latest creation - a fully content managed website for Martlet Development Consultants.

Martlet approached us as they wanted a new and professional brochure website with the added functionality of updating the content in house (without the need of asking us every time a change was needed.)

We provided Martlet with a redesigned website following their already established and strong branding guidelines. The website is hosted on Windows 2003 and uses our ASP based content management system to allow them to update their website.

As a freelance writer and editor in Chichester specialising in international development, economics and politics, Jenny’s approach is to communicate complex ideas in a clear and engaging way. With more than ten years experience working in development and economics, Jenny offers a range of services including writing, copy editing, Spanish to English translation and publication project management.

Before turning freelance in 2004 she worked as a university researcher, a policy adviser for a development NGO and as an analyst in the private sector. With an MPhil in Development Studies from the University of Sussex (IDS) and recent editorial training, Jenny Kimmis provides a all round high level of service to all her clients.

Jenny approached Strawberrysoup with simple requirements and a clear understanding of preferred layout and content. With this in mind we were able to fit the website into our affordable StrawberrySite Business Package.

Following the W3C online guidelines the website was built using the latest XHTML and CSS code. For more information on this why not check out the World Wide Web Consortium.