Each website must have a unique domain name (e.g. salemdesign.com) and this name must be registered in order for it to be found by web browser over the Internet.

There is a master register (essentially an index) which contains the name, who owns that name, and the numerical IP address of the server (a computer) on which it resides. Copies of this master register are kept on hundreds of other servers (called domain name servers or DNS) around the world. It can take up to 72 hours for a new registration (or changes in an existing one) to propagate to all the DNS servers. In general, your local DNS servers are maintained by your ISP (Internet Service Provider). For example, we connect to the internet using Verizon DSL, so all our machines (and browsers) look to the Verizon DNS servers to find a target website.

• You need a clear idea of what you or your organization are trying to accomplish. If you are a non-profit (e.g. an art association or a little league) then you may want the website to publicize your organization and/or communicate (events, schedules, announcements) with your members. If you run a small business you may want to publicize your products or services more widely. If you are an individual artist, you may want to use the website as an online portfolio of your art… Or you may want to publicize your work to the whole world.
• You need good, interesting, useful, appealing content. The website is ultimately about you and your organization, products, services, art, whatever and you have to give us good descriptive text, drawings, photographs that we can use to get that across to the people that will visit the site.
• You need to get your website listed elsewhere on the web, e.g. local business directories or art associations. This helps with getting your website found by people surfing the web. We will help get the site indexed by the search engines but these sort of incoming links help your rankings with the search engines.
• You need to read and respond to your email. People do not expect an instantaneous response to an email but they do expect one within 12 to 24 hours.

You need to have a good business model to start with. A website is not a magic bullet. The most successful websites we have built were for customers who had already established that there was a market for their products or services. The website then substantially increased their business.

Make sure we get things right the first time. We need a single person in your organization to be our point of contact. Carefully proof read all information that you want us to include in the web site. Ensure that everyone who needs to review the design or content has done so before you ask us to start work. It is much more efficient if you provide all written content for the web site as electronic files (e.g. Microsoft Word, ASCII text, or Excel spreadsheets).

We test newly developed websites using the latest version of Microsoft Internet Explorer (currently 6.x) for Windows, Mozilla Firefox 1.x for Windows and Macintosh OS X, and Apple Safari for Macintosh OS X. We no longer test against Internet Explorer for Macintosh OS X since Microsoft is no longer developing IE for the Mac. We also validate our XHTML and CSS code using the W3C organization validation tools.

This does mean that newly developed sites may not work well with older browser versions. But almost all of the major browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Netscape, Safari) can be upgraded to the latest version for free. In fact, if you are properly keeping up with your Windows XP or Windows 2000 OS updates, you are automatically being updated to the latest and greatest Internet Explorer.

Basically it means we use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and XHTML as the underlying technology for all our new website development work.

The World Wide Web and the Internet are always undergoing technological change but, in particular, the web is currently undergoing a major transition from an older web technology (loosely called “tables and frames”) to a new technology generally known as Cascading Style Sheets. This change is being driven by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C.org) which is the web standards organization based at MIT and we are following their recommendations. The new technology provides additional capabilities and makes it easier to design and maintain websites. The downside is that websites developed using the new technology may “break” when viewed using older browsers (e.g. any version of Netscape, Internet Explorer, etc. more than 3 years old). However, it is possible to install or upgrade to the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari for free.

XHTML is, in simple terms, the latest version of HTML. The last version of HTML was version 4.01. The W3C organization decided to call the next version of HTML “XHTML 1.0″ rather than “HTML 5.0.” The X prefix is to reflect the fact that this latest version is compatible with another standard called XML which governs the automatic exchange of information between organizations. The new XHTML standard is also a bit stricter in its syntax which should, in the long run, make it more likely that website written using XHTML will “look” the same in different browsers.