Technologies we use
This page is really to give you a bit of an insight to the technologies that we use behind the scenes in order to get the job done. There are many different technical tools and techniques available for creating and running a web page but here we list the ones we've chosen and explain our reasons for choosing them.
- HTML
- "HyperText Markup Language". You've all probably heard of HTML as it's been around for donkeys years, so to speak. HTML is the language that your web browser on your computer understands and converts into fancy fonts and graphical images. Every web designer has to deal with HTML, there's just no getting around it.
- PHP
- "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor". Yes, it's a recursive achronym. PHP allows us to make our websites a little more dynamic by making our web server able to decide what website content it needs to send based on some decision making logic we have programmed into it. There are a handful of other tools that perform this task but we use PHP because it's widely supported and free. It also runs on web servers with the Linux operating system which is also widely supported and free. Both of these reasons help us keep our costs competitive.
- JavaScript
- JavaScript is a language that instructs our browsers to do some kind of work on our web pages without the need to connect to the internet. The advantage of this is that we can use it to make our pages look very dynamic without suffering from slow loading over an internet connection and with some ingenuety can really make a website stand out.
- XHTML
- "Extensible HyperText Markup Language". This is the latest incarnation of the legacy HTML standard. In essence it performs the same job as HTML but there is a strong emphasis on separating the content of a web page and its styling. The advantage of this is aparent when the time comes to update our sites as we can update the content without the risk of ruining the styling, or visa-versa.
- CSS
- "Cascading Style Sheets". With the latest XHTML veering towards a content only language, CSS is the place where all our styling information goes. Sounds simple enough but there are a good few tricks that can be done with CSS that can make our websites look really smart that would have been very difficult to achieve with plain old HTML.