Welford Media has impressed us almost beyond words with the web design skills, customer service and overall experience with our business needs. At ASL Law we deal with aspects of Law which are not common in our district and we wanted our website to represent that, we didn’t want a website that looked like a standard solicitors of accountants website (very corporate). Our new website needed to be fresh looking, light and simple to use with easy to navigate; while still being optimised for particular key words. I am very happy to say that Welford Media where able to match our needs completely.

ASL Law are a solicitors firm based in Harrogate, specialising in most aspects of business law, immigration law and property law. We really wanted to concentrate on our online visibility through search engines such as Google for particular keywords as with our old website we couldn’t be found at all. We understood that it would take time to increase our website ranking results however within a few days of our new website launch we could be found on the first page of Google. We are currently undergoing further search engine optimisation with Welford Media and have complete faith that they will achieve our objectives.

We found Welford Media to be highly responsive to our website wants and had the capabilities to understand our business needs completely.

We are more than happy to recommend anyone and will defiantly be suggesting there service to our clients.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web published a website in August 1991, making him the first ever web designer.

HTML

Early on, websites were written in basic HTML, a markup language giving websites basic structure (headings and paragraphs), and the ability to link using hypertext. This was new and different to existing forms of communication - users could easily open other pages. As webpages became more complex, so did the HTML, introducing new tags to control the way a webpage looked, for fonts, styles, size, colours and so on.

W3C

New features such as tables were also invented to allow data to be displayed in a tabular form, table also became an invisible way to structure a web page. This allowed users to position text and pictures and distances between them. As HTML grow and changed the standards became blurred especially with different browsers supporting different HTML tags, hence the formation of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The W3C have introduced a standard to which webpages can conform to, for web pages using HTML 2.0 (current most popular version is XHTML 1.1).

CSS

Another momentous event for web design was the invention of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), these style sheet literally kept all the styles for the website in one place. This not only tidied up the HTML code but also meant that changing the colours and to a certain extent the style of a website was relatively easy. This was because it only required the CSS to be modified, instead of every single HTML page. CSS can also control the layout of a webpage and can replace tables ( which are increasingly seen as outdates), however it is still far for perfect with different browsers interpretation of “commands” varying widely (which is why it is so important to test website over a number of browsers). CSS is rapidly becoming the standard way to control the layout of webpages, however in many cases it is still much more practical to use tables, especially when producing dynamic database driven websites.

DYNAMIC WEBPAGES

Dynamic webpages generally use a database to extract the webpage content from. Dynamic webpages are normally programmed using CGI, PHP, ASP.NET, ASP.NET 2.0, ASP, JSP, and ColdFusion, however the style and layout of the webpage is still in HTML. Almost all large website will be database driven, this allows the person controlling the website to managed it much more easily.

MACROMEDIA FLASH

Macromedia Flash allows much more interactively and animation than standard HTML, this allows designers to offer and produce new interactivity features to users. Flash, however, has many problems; requiring a proprietary plugin to be seen, accessibility issues and it does not integrate with most web browser UI features like the "Back" and “Forward” buttons.

THE FUTURE

The web is constantly evolving at an ever increasing rate, with buzz words like Web 2.0, AJAX, .NET 2.0 and DHTML it can seem like a confusing place. With technologies all progressing in many direction it is becoming harder to standardise and predict the future however there is no doubt that the next generation of website will be focused on the user experience and interactively. Its the most exciting time for the internet since it’s birth 15 years ago and in 15 years time I believe that the majority of website will look nothing like they do today.