A website is very much like an iceberg in that what you see is only a (small) part of the whole, and it’s the part you don’t see that can really hurt you.

A Professional Web Designer spends hundreds of hours to learn

With all the modern technologies, anyone can throw up a website, but that is like saying anyone can paint. Just because you can put paint on a canvas, doesn’t mean you will create a great painting. Creating a great painting (or a great website) will mean hundreds of hours of time and learning.  And that doesn’t address whether you…

Accessibility. What does that mean in terms of a website and why do you care?  Accessibility means that visually or physically challenged individuals can access the content on your website.  Do you know the visually impaired (yes even totally blind) can surf the web? You may not have thought about it, but it’s pretty cool when if you do.  But visual challenges are not limited to blindness.  As people age it becomes harder to read small text font and text with less contrast. Accessibility is not limited to visual challenges. Some individuals have trouble with mouse control, so the placement…

Security is a huge deal these days. If Amazon and Google can be hacked, anyone can. Hackers can always get at you. But there is no reason to make it easy for them.

Quite often, clients will ask me why we put a contact form on a website rather than an email address. I also often get asked if a Captcha code is necessary. This post answers those questions.
Why no email addresses or links on the site?
There are two main reasons you don’t want your email address openly visible on your website: First is SPAM.

In HTML, your email looks like this…

While many clients are aware that security is very important for their site, few understand the importance of web hosting security. The web host is a company that provides server space for your website to live.
Your website is only as secure as the place it lives.
I still today have clients who need to be educated on why they don’t want their website on their own servers. Simple answer: are you spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to protect your servers from the latest cyber attacks and malicious code and  back them up in different locations? Also, do you…

The most important rule in web design is the Martian Rule:

Can a Martian tell in 4 seconds

Who you are
What you do
Where you are?

And in less than 8 seconds

What makes you the answer to their problem or need?

Martian Rule Content
First, the name of your company should be absolutely clear, and preferably in a way the visitor will remember. No point in selling them on a product if they don’t remember your name.

Second, it is wrong to think that visitors to your site know what you do. They may have stumbled on your site accidentally and may,…

The different ways browsers present a website has been an issue since there was more than one browser. All browsers have the job of interpreting the web page code and displaying it to the user, but no two browsers display all code the same way. What that means is that a website may look fine to one person and not to another, depending on what browser, and what version of the browser, each is using. For example, if I create a website in Internet Explorer , it probably will not look exactly the same in Chrome or Mozilla Firefox or…