Obsidian Cliff is a San Francisco-based freelance web design company specializing in creating beautiful, functional, and accessible websites. Our web solutions are tailored individually for every client with services ranging from creating small personal or business sites to developing large scale websites and database-driven web applications.
Like Bob Dylan says, "The times, they are a changing." Nowhere is that more true than in the world of web design. What began as basic text web pages with an occasional image thrown in for good measure, has evolved over the past fifteen years into a realm of stunning beauty, unparalleled interactivity and near-endless possibilities. New technologies have emerged that make things possible that were once nothing more than fairy tales whispered from one designer to another over coffee. However, just as the possibilities have increased, so too have the skills needed to realize those possibilities.
Technology
Obsidian Cliff has all the skills necessary to create your webpage, whether it be a simple family site, a small business identity or an entire web-based application:
XHTML
All websites created by Obsidian Cliff are written in semantically-correct XHTML. Pages are checked and validated against the standards of the W3C to ensure that they meet the published guidelines for markup language.CSS
All of our websites make extensive use of Cascading Stylesheets to ensure that the look and feel of the site remains consistent across various pages. Obsidian Cliff also uses CSS for page layout, making for fast, table-less designs that are capable of things not possible without CSS.PHP
Server-side scripting is what is bringing web interactivity into the new millenium. Among other things, server-side scripting enables user input, database interaction and many other amazing features of modern web design. Among all server-side scripting languagees, PHP is the most predominant and still the fastest growing. Obsidian Cliff takes advantage of these facts, using PHP bolster the creativity, functionality and interactivity of all of our websites.Database interaction
Paired closely with PHP are MySQL databases. These databases give you the opportunity to require logins, create blogs, store user-submitted information and build completely database driven sites where the content changes dynamically. MySQL is the database of choice for most PHP coders, and Obsidian Cliff is no exception.
Accessibility
Although it is becoming an increasingly important aspect of web design, ask many designers about accessibility and they'll have no idea what you're talking about. Accessibility is the degree to which a website is usable by all audiences, including those with some sort of disabiility (such as people with little or no vision). Creating accessible websites not only allows those people to 'view' your website, it also brings along with it a host of other benefits, such as:
- Semantically correct HTML coding does away with extraneous pieces of information, making the page load faster.
- Proper use of HTML increases the likelihood that your site will be found by top search engines such as Google™