Boundary Products Web Design

Designing and building a website is so easy these days, BUT…

it is extremely easy to get it wrong in these SIX areas:

[1] Accessibility – This is now a legal requirement for websites.

But many websites are failing accessibility standards – even those designed by top professional web design companies.
Or, if you go the DIY route, using a web authoring programme, you are virtually guaranteed to make an inaccessible website. Read more on accessibility

[2] Building a future-proof website with validated code.

A website that has undergone validation, and passes, is one that conforms to worldwide, W3C, coding standards. Unbelievably, many websites fail this test.
Historically web browsers have been extremely tolerant of badly written code, but things are changing. Already many mobile devices, screen readers, etc will not operate with unvalidated code and search engines give preference to validated code. Read more on validation

[3] Optimisation for fast loading in browsers and SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) for good ranking within search engines.

Many web authoring programmes bloat the amount of code making websites very ‘heavy’. Google is now giving preference to faster sites.
Read more on optimisation

[4] If you don’t have strong security measures on your website you WILL get hacked!

Just go to a forum on any website publishing platform and type in the word ‘hacked’ and you will find numerous calls for help from desperate people:

• All my sites are hacked. Please help me…..
• …our players stating that they are being redirected to what appears to be a chinese website when they try to access our poker blog.
• My WP site for our parish was just hacked….
• I got the site back up and running. Then yesterday the same hack took over again. What it does is replace the index.php with it’s own vulgar file….
• …my blog was hacked by some one from algeria…

The grief and pressure that this causes is unmeasurable, you MUST have good security in place.

Read more on website security

[5] Websites now need to be mobile friendly, or need to have a specialist mobile website.

Mobile devices outnumber computers approximately 20 to 1 worldwide but most conventional websites fail miserably on mobile devices. Read more on mobile friendly

[6] Content Management Systems are now very popular and allow novices to make updates to websites, BUT ….

the majority produce coding errors and poor accessibility. Read more on Content Management Systems

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Accessibility continued….Legally you must have a website that does not discriminate against disabilities and many websites fail this test.
You can do a quick test to see which sites fail by trying an independent on-line tool, see our test accessibility page.
We aim to design and build professional websites that do not discriminate against disabilities.
Go to the Accessibility section.
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Future-proof continued….
If you want your website to perform well in Google, Yahoo, etc then the code has to be correct and has to be validated to W3C standards.
Marcus Gomez of Microsoft Business Centre wrote:

“…major search engines have recently become quite fussy about the way websites are formatted and presented. They typically favour web pages that are designed in accordance to the latest W3C standards…”

Many professional web designers do not build sites that pass the validation test. Our websites are fully compliant.
You can use the on-line W3C Validator to test any web page. At the bottom of each of our pages there is a direct link ‘test validation’ which goes to the W3C site and automatically tests the page that you were on.
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Website security continued….
You probably think of hackers as being someone sat at a desk. Well, they could be, but more often it’s an army of internet robots that go from one website to another and systematically try out ALL known issues and weaknesses.
They do not get tired or fed up, they just keep trying!

• With our websites you will get a SSL secure connection to your administration area
• The administration area has two types of secure password protection
• The file that holds things like sensitive database connection passwords, is moved away from the browser level, etc, etc.

We can’t tell you anymore, that would be a breach of security!
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Mobile friendly websites continued….
The number of mobiles with an internet connection is rising dramatically. You can do a quick test to see which sites fail by trying an on-line tool, see our Test Mobile Friendly page.
We can check your existing site, just fill in the simple request form
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Content Management Systems continued….
Content Management Systems are brilliant for non-technical people to make changes on a website, BUT 99% of them produce many errors in the code and make the pages inaccessible to those with disabilities. The good news is our CMS isn’t like that – ours is super easy to use AND it produces error free code AND complies with accessibility standards.
See more information on our CMS.
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