Starweavers' "keep it simple" theory applies to web site design - we want your customers to find your
web site easily and, once there, we want them to be able to quickly find the information they need. If your
customers have to wait a long time for pages to load, they may go elsewhere. Likewise, if they need to have
the latest and greatest browser to view your pages, they may be unable to get the information they need. To that
end, we try to make site navigation simple, have images and copy load quickly, and make your web pages available
to the widest user base.
You have probably noticed that our web site does not use many images,
other than those used for navigation. The truth of the matter is that this web site does not require the use of
images and including them would only slow the user down, for no useful purpose. We do use images on our clients'
web sites where they are informative, or as requested by the client. Please go to our clients page to check this out.
This same philosophy holds true for fancy programming and display techniques.
Starweavers' web pages contain simple javascripting which controls the "onMouseOver" effect for the navigation
buttons, but the decision to include this simple script was a measured one, we believe it aids in the navigation
of our site. Not all browsers will "see" the effect, although the navigation buttons will still be functional.
The use of this script also slows down the initial loading of these pages (it loads the navigation images before
they are actually needed), which is another argument against the use of such effects. If your pages have
a good use for such effects and techniques (and good use can mean "because I want it"), we are fully able to supply them.
A note on browser compatibility - they are several browsers used to view
web content, with the vast majority of users browsing with either Microsoft's Internet
Explorer (tm) or
Netscape's Communicator (tm). Even these two browsers are being used in several versions. Additionally, the
hardware and operating systems used for web surfing is diverse, from PC's to Macintosh, to WebTV and Linux. With
such a wide variety of software and hardware, it is not possible to design web sites which will make everyone happy.
Once again, to make the web sites we design available to as many people
as possible, we try to keep the sites simple so that they can be viewed on most software/hardware platforms. And
while we support the effort to establish
web-wide standards, we find that we must limit our design variations.
We do not have the hours available to create a different version of a web site for every possible combination of
hardware and software, nor do we find our clients willing to pay for such exhaustive work. To that end, we tend
to design for the user who is using a PC with one of the latest couple of versions of either Internet Explorer or Communicator. If a client's
web site is expected to have an audience primarily using some other platform, will will design to that platform.
