about
By taking lots and lots of small steps and occassionally climbing on the shoulders of internet giants
In the good old days creating a website was little more than stringing a few 'static' pages together using a very simple markup language called HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language).
Nowadays, however, creating an attractive website is much, much more demanding - both technically and visually.
For example, HTML has now been extended and to use the jargon 'reformulated'. It is now called XHTML (Extensible HTML) and is much less forgiving.
Web designers need to learn and master new technologies on an almost daily basis.
For example, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) ,a great tool for creating the look and feel of a website, radically changed the way web designers worked.
Javascript, a programming language that works inside your internet browser, is now used to create lots of really cool effects - from sliding control panels to drop-down menus. More importantly, perhaps, Javascript can be used to help enure that any form fields are completed properly before submission, or even help to pre-populate form fields based on information entered a few moments before. Another new technology called Ajax (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) allows clever web developers to go one step further and create web pages that look and feel very much like a desktop application.
And then there is the server-side code that runs your website or web application. We develop websites and web applications using PHP (Preprocessor Hypertext), a 'dynamic' programming language, which is ideal for this purpose.
From a technical perspective, the PHP code we create is object-oriented, well documented, under version control and unit-tested continuously. What this all means in English is that we create code that is technically robust and very easy to extend.
