Welcome to the home of BogeyWebDesign.com — a Lowell, MA based W3C compliant CSS & XHTML web design company. This is a currently setup as a portfolio site. If you do wish to have me design your website, please contact me. One thing to notice about this site is that all the 'style' links on the right use the same html file — index.html. I simply used a style sheet switcher found on A List Apart to switch style sheets. I take no credit for this open source gift from creator Paul Sowden. You do need JavaScript to be enabled for this to work. It simply switches on click and sets a cookie with your preferred (last selected) style. This will load the next time you visit my site. Note: this site is best viewed in Mozilla Firefox, however should work in most browsers. I try to keep my designs as fluid as possible and, with my newer styles, strive to have them retain most — if not all of their structure — for 2 increases in text size.
Introduction
Internet users have many options when it comes to their web browser. In the past, the solution to this problem was to generate multiple versions of the same site and determine the browser beforehand in order to serve up the correct iteration. This was both expensive and time consuming. The past few years have seen the rise of CSS & XHTML based designs — giving companies, groups and organizations an easier option. By designing their sites using these tools, they are able to generate sites that are cleaner, use less markup, are easier to update and are semantically correct. A beneficial side effect to this is the fact that their site's search engine optimization (SEO) improves greatly because search engine spiders are better able to read their site.
What are some further benefits to utilizing a standards compliant website?
- Your pages will be smaller because all of the aesthetic markup will be removed. This results in faster load times to your clients — meaning happier clients for you. It also means less bandwidth and space is used on your hosting service — meaning lower cost for your monthly hosting.
- Future updates will be significantly easier. Your markup will be cleaner and not based upon table based designs so that you can easily find and edit your content.
- You have the ability to serve up multiple styles for your site. Not only can you make your site more accessibly by making it easier for text readers, audio browsers and handheld/mobile devices — but you can also allow your users to choose the style they prefer, my site being an example of this. Finally, you can serve up different variations with small changes to the markup — a good example being ESPN.com who by adding a small tag to the body can vary between a normal story header to a full above the fold design. You can offer more options to your users and more flexibility to yourself with minimal work.
About the Designer
I am a graduate of UMass-Lowell with a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science who has been programming since 1998 in one way, shape or form. My original love of programming started with HTML and then proceeded on through — in some level or another — C, C++, Javascript, Lexx, Yacc, CSS, and XHTML.
Why BogeyWebDesign.com? Bogey was the first of my ferrets to pass away. He was also the youngest. Bringing ferrets into my home is something that I will always remember, as well as something that added value to my life. I learned almost as much from them as they did from me. When I tried to think of a name for my design company I centered my process on the things that meant the most to me. Though it took time to realize what the answer was, in the end it was worth it.
My Site
In the navigation you will find a list of links. The first is one of the first sites I did. I never got to complete this work and it does not display right all the time in Mozilla. The most interesting page is the Samples page where I used some code from CSS Play to make two interesting galleries. The CSS dropdowns (that also work in Internet Explorer) used in the MySpace layouts were also found there — though I have since seen similar works elsewhere.
You will then notice a few different styles for my site, a link to my blog, two examples of "hacks" I did for MySpace profiles (including my own — one is saved on this site since the user has since changed their profile, it looked the same except the ads were included there), a site mock I did for my cousin's site (very basic, rough idea) and finally a few templates I devised for various things.
All my CSS and templates - including the MySpace — are open source and free to use for any means. If you do decide to use them, a link or reference in your code to my site would be appreciated. I will in turn link to your work, giving higher ranking to those that take my ideas and expand on them. If you have a basic site or MySpace you wish to adapt and will give me credit, I am interested in either adapting my ideas to your needs or building something new and interesting from scratch. No sites over 5 pages and no for-profit businesses please.
Bogey