We are as careful with our coding as we are with our design. Some web designers are very talented visually, but when it comes to coding they lack the necessary skills. At Merkados™ we don't automate the coding of your site. We code line by line, character by character all by hand. Sure it would be easier to let a computer write the code, just like many web design agencies out there do. In our case, we do things differently. By coding your website by hand, we ensure mainly two things:
Coding with W3C Standards. We code your website pages with W3C compliant XHTML and CSS. Does it make a difference to have valid HTML and CSS? We think so. When the browsers have no problem rendering your site, first you gain speed serving the website to your clients, but second, you allow search crawlers to do a better job indexing your site. Many designers are still coding with tables and not with cascading style sheets. In today's Internet, it is of extreme importance to separate markup, content and styles.
The new kid in town is "Responsive Design". Everybody talks about it. So what is it? Responsive design is the development of a website that "responds" to the display capabilities of your browser. If your browser is in a mobile phone, then the website will display the content of the site with a format suitable for smaller screens. If your browser is a desktop screen with a large display, then it will use as much real estate as possible. Responsive design is based on the philosophy that in order to administer content only once, you must not create a separate mobile version of your site. In Responsive design, the content remains the same, what changes is the way you display that content.
So the question is why would you not want that? Responsive design is great for some sites. Remember that most mobile browsers were designed to display regular websites properly. In other words, the browsers were designed to display the websites, therefore designing the websites to match the browser is sometimes not a good idea. Most importantly, sometimes your mobile audience is different and/or at a different state in their client life cycle. Therefore it needs completely separate content. Responsive design only changes the display of the content, not the content itself.
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The thing that struck me most about Alex was his design sensibilities. He was able to really listen and hone in the look and feel of what we were after. He was flexible enough to abandon early design ideas and produce a dramatically different final product that was right on target. No ego, no pressure. Just listening to the client, applying deep creativity and a commitment to excellence, and getting it right! Great experience and I highly recommend him!
Tony Delmedico
