Technology is simply an inexpensive and quick way to develop more business: it’s not fundamentally interesting in itself.
If you are practising Luddite, by accident or design, please feel free to ignore this page. You don’t have to know anything about how it all works to have an excellent website, however you do have to put some effort into content to keep your website attractive. The basic building blocks of our work are the following technologies and services. These are the backbone of Web 2.0 and we’ll explain briefly. They are all Open Source (i.e. no licence fees) and the most popular (you can easily find people to work on them if you wish)
Cascading Style sheets (CSS) are designed to enable the separation of document content from document presentation, (e.g. colours, fonts, and layout). This separation improves content accessibility and provides flexibility and control in the specification of presentation. In practice it’s the key to making your site reliably consistent, easy to maintain and great looking.
PHP is a scripting language that is especially suited for web development. It enables us to make dynamic pages that respond to user input and we can use it to do all kinds of fancy things. Over 20 million sites are written in this language, including Facebook and Wikipedia. It is entirely free and owned by no one.
MySQL is a relational database management system which has more than 11 million installations. It is provided by Sun Microsystems on a free to use basis and is easily the most popular and sophisticated database on the internet. Famous users include Google and YouTube. Together with the web server technologies this grouping is often called LAMP (Linux (the operating system), Apache (the server technology), MySQL and PHP) .You might be amused to know that for the equivalent Microsoft systems (which are proprietary), the acronym is is WIMP.
Other: We use other technologies in our sites too: Flash for video and audio (like on YouTube) and for fancy graphics, Javascript (for fancy in-page things) and AJAX (an advanced form of PHP) for site administration.
Blogs, Twitters, Social Networks, eCommerce, RSS, Geotargetting, Streetview and many more...All of these technologies are simple to integrate with our sites. As fast as they are invented we can incorporate them either as links or via what are called APIs. We’ll stop here as we can feel eyes glazing over…
Hosting and Domains: This is a commoditised market: it’s very inexpensive and there some truly excellent third parties. We normally recommend you use someone like GoDaddy (the worlds largest) or Zen (regularly the Which Best Buy in the UK). We build the sites: they host them. Typically the hosting and domain cost is less than £70 a year, which you pay directly.
