Website Philosophy

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.

Small Website Design

We specialize in small designs for a number of reasons, and the first is to keep the price down.

Emphasize the Basics

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.

Other Information

While this site is being put together, some of the information has been stored here to make it available. It may eventually be moved to the About page, or possibly another page to describe the decisions that need to be made while planning a website.

Every business should have a website, even if it's just a single page. Why? People keep spending more time using computers to find products and businesses. It's probably Google they turn to first, instead of the phone book. It's only when they don't find what they want on the web that they use the yellow pages.

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.

We can give you an internet presence in a search-friendly way whether it be a brief one-page information sheet or a multi-page website. 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.

Making small, low-featured sites allow us to make sites that work well on most browsers and computers. Some sites have a design that only looks good at one resolution, or with only one version of browser.

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What We Can Provide

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.

The Process Options

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.

Keeping Prices Low

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.

Browser Support

Splendid Spider websites are designed to support current standards. That means that we don't add a lot of extra work-arounds to support Version 4 or earlier browsers. Support for those requires a lot of extra work and testing, and in many cases requires that the site violate current standards. IE5 replaced version 4 in March 1999; Netscape 4 was replaced in November 2000 (from Browser History). According to recent studies, fewer than 0.5% of browsers are version 4 or earlier. Your websites content is still visible in these browsers, but it may not appear as nicely formatted as it does in more current versions.

Scripting

Scripting can make a website much more interesting and interactive by moving images and allowing user interaction. But it can also be considered a security risk, so some users disable it.

A site that is designed to use scripts may not look so nice if the scripting 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.