Splendid Spider offers inexpensive, high quality website designs for your business or personal use.
Splendid Spider specializes in designing small websites. Some examples of the type of sites we can make for you are Galleries, Online Catalogs, Brochure Sites and Personal/Creative Sites.
Separate or multiple pages can be done on each of your subjects, such as a company profile, product information, a map to your location, product manuals and bios of your management team.
We specialize in small designs for a number of reasons, and the first is to keep the price down.
A small design won't require a lot of special features on from your web host, which not only makes it easy to install, but makes it easy to move should you decide to change providers.
Making small, low-featured sites allow us to make sites that work well on most browsers and computers at a minimum of cost. Some sites have a design that only looks good at one resolution, or with only one version of browser.
Our keep it simple philosophy means that we don't do e-commerce, flash graphics, shopping carts or credit card processing. There are a lot of companies that provide those services, and charge accordingly higher rates. We want to specialize in sites that just need to get their names out there, that want a quick, low cost solution to having their business on the web. If you didn't know what these the items were that we don't do, then you are the type of customer that can use Splendid Spider instead of one of the more complicated design services.
Splendid Spider can either do a complete design for you on our own, or we can work with you on content, layout or both. You can provide us with graphics and concepts, or we can do them for you.
How we communicate depends upon your needs. Most of the time, email communications and maybe a couple of phone calls will be all that is needed to design your site. If you have concepts that you want to discuss, or have very specific designs in mind, we'll expect to be having a lot more interaction. Splendid Spider is based in Thousand Oaks, California. We can meet with you in person if you are in the area and prefer to work that way.
The following information can become somewhat technical. The "executive summary" is that we design to the standards that most current web browsers use, and don't worry about adding a lot of complexity to support browsers that are out of date and that are used by fewer than 0.5% of the viewers. For most designs, we also don't use any "scripting", which means no drop-down menus as an example.
Splendid Spider's websites are designed to support current standards. That means that we don't spend a lot of extra time on work-arounds to support IE Version 5 or earlier browsers. (Microsoft's site doesn't either at this point.) It will cost a little extra if you want IE6 supported. Adding support for those obsolete products requires a lot of extra work and testing. In many cases it requires adding work-arounds that violate current standards.
Microsoft's Internet Explorer version 5 replaced version 4 in March 1999; Netscape 4 was replaced in November 2000 (from Browser History). According to a 2006 study, fewer than 0.5% of browsers are version 4 or earlier. In 2009 it no longer included version 4 in its statistics and version 5 browsers were in the 1% usage area. Often the older browsers are still in use on illegal copies of Windows, which cannot be upgraded, and in corporations that refuse to update, which foolishly exposes them to malware and other evils.
Websites are still visible in these older browsers, but they may not appear as nicely formatted as they do in more current versions. As of 2008, most design companies focused only on standards compliant browsers such as Firefox and on IE version 6 and up. IE6 support was frequently abandoned in 2010.
JavaScript can make a website much more interesting and interactive. It can make images move and allows user interaction. But some users consider it a security risk, so they disable it. Most major sites require JavaScript to be enabled, so this isn't the problem it used to be.
A site that is designed to use scripts may not look so nice if the JavaScript is disabled. The work-around is to detect if scripting is enabled, and have an alternate page if it isn't. This essentially means that every page need two designs, doubling the workload.
If you want it, we can do it. But it will cost a little more. Generally we design for "graceful degradation". That means that the content will still appear but functionality or some of the visual appearance may be diminished if users disable features.
