Web Site Design and Maintenance
I design and build
- Web sites of up to 50 or so pages that require intermittent updates — like the Bridge House Books site, and
- Web sites based on a content management system (CMS) that you can maintain yourself, like the Golden Green Press site.
Read about the redesign of the Northern California Publishers & Authors and Golden Green Press Web sites.
Accessibility and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
The sites I build are
- Tested in multiple browsers: currently Internet Explorer 6 and 7 (Windows), Opera 9 (Windows), Firefox 2 (Windows and Macintosh), Safari (Macintosh), and Camino (Macintosh).
- Validated to comply with standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
- Designed to be usable at any connection speed.
- Designed with cascading style sheets (CSS)
- to make site maintenance easier, faster, and less expensive,
- to be accessible to screen readers and other alternatives to standard browsers, and
- to be more search engine friendly.
- Optimized for search engines by including
- page-specific title tags (the titles shown at the top of the browser window when you visit a page),
- heading tags that clearly identify the main topic of each page and any subtopics,
- page-specific description meta tags, which are used by some search engines when your page shows up in a search,
- keywords meta tags, if desired (the major search engines index the actual text on your page, so key words are not required),
- a robots.txt file, which tells search engines which pages or files should not be indexed and directs search engines to your search engine sitemap, and
- a sitemap.xml file, which lists only the pages you want indexed. This sitemap is separate from the sitemap you may have linked in your site’s menu.
- Submitted to the top three search engines — currently Google, Yahoo!, and Live Search (formerly MSN).
Content Management Systems
If your site will have more than a dozen pages or your information requires frequent updating, I recommend using a content management system (CMS). I can build a site that you can update yourself, if you want to. All you need do is log in and type! See a demo site.