The design of Systegral.com

In the beginning ...

In line with how many web sites are designed, we employed an application program to create and manage this web site. Systegral.com appeared on the web in 2003. The original design made use of CSS for text presentation, however, the structure of the html code (as per the application program) used tables for presentation positioning.

We were never really happy doing it this way, but we had to start somewhere. So from early on, it was our goal to redesign the site to web standards and get away from using table based layouts.

Web Standards

Web standards are anything but new. In fact the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has been around since 1994.

The missing piece of the puzzle was that virtually no browsers were supporting the standards initially, but rather using their own propietary commands. Hence the mess of not being able to view some sites on certain browsers, or having to use a particular browser, or as a designer, having to write duplicate code and employ browser sniffing.

To all of our benefit, many highly respected individuals worked tirelessly to clean up this mess. Most browsers have now managed to implement web standards fairly well. Some still have a few quirks, but generally they are all getting the idea that they should display the web page as designed (to the standards) and not display their own interpretation of the page. Isn't that a novel concept!

Modern markup code employs XHTML code for structural layout (containing the web page content), and then uses CSS for the presentation. To keep this blog simple, there are many other standards available which I will not list here.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) develops interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) to lead the Web to its full potential. The W3C is a forum for information, commerce, communication, and collective understanding.

Some of the key points in deploying modern markup are; you increase your audience reach; commitment to social responsibility; improved performance of web services; and reduced maintenance.

Founded in 1998, the Web Standards Project (WaSP) is a grassroots coalition fighting for standards that ensure simple, affordable access to web technologies for all.

Web Content Accessibility

For more detailed information on the benefits, please see the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

This web site is designed and authored to accessibility guidelines as published by the W3C. Following these guidelines will make content accessible to a wider range of people with disabilities, including blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, learning disabilities, cognitive limitations, limited movement, speech disabilities, photosensitivity and combinations of these. Following these guidelines will also often make your Web content more usable to users in general.

These standards are designed to allow web content to be accessible to people with disabilities. By following these standards, the web content will also be more available to all users, regardless of the user agent which they are using.

In our understanding of the standard, this site conforms to:

W3C's "Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0", available at http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20, level Double–A.

It is our goal to continue to work on improving this site and bring our conformance up to the next level.

If you are encountering problems with this site, please e–mail us with the details so that we may correct the issue. Thank you.

Systegral.com today...

This web site has been redesigned by hand–coding to web standards (really not that difficult... and fun too). It thereby now employs XHTML 1.1 for the structural layout, and CSS 2.1 for all of the presentation. This has resulted in page size reductions typically in the order of 50%. Such savings translate into significant storage savings, bandwidth savings, and pages will load quicker in your browser.

The intent in the design of this site is that it will display (as it was designed) in all browsers, on all platforms, and to make our web content accessible to people with disabilities or other limitations that may affect their browsing experience.

With the advent of alternate user agents (e.g. desktop browser, voice browser, mobile phone, iPhone, pda, etc...), the goal is that the site remains readable, and accessible on these devices. We do recognize that on some old browsers it is possible that the site may break (not display correctly). We encourage those people to upgrade their browsers so that they may experience this site (and all web sites) as they were designed.

Flash. What can we say? It has been around a long time, is widely used, and in our opinion, has had its day. With the advancement of other technologies and techniques we can do much better. Flash is now very slow, can lock up a session, and simply not provide the intended experience. As such, we have chosen to remove the flash that we used previously, and also will not use it in the future. We'll do what makes sense in the ever evolving web, in order to give you, the viewer, the best experience possible.

The future? We will keep track of how standards develop and ensure we keep pace. At the moment we're watching the progress on HTML5 and CSS 3 so that we know when is the right time to update the code. We believe this will be an exciting time as the web transforms with the new capabilities.

In preparation for the transition to HTML5 and CSS3 the site has had a well deserved review in the shop. Improvements to the semantics of the layout have been done in order to take the site design up a notch, and to simplify the implementation of site updates.

Mobile

This has become an increasingly important part of the web experience. This section will reflect that market segment specifically.

The fundamental improvements being made to systegral.com overall has laid the foundation for a further refinement in design that will feed a more appropriate design to small screen devices (which typically are mobile devices with their smaller screens and potentially slower bandwidth connections). One must tread carefully in this space however as mobile devices have a wide range of browsers with various inherent capabilities. They also vary in their support or activation of Javascript, so the site must fail gracefully when it is not active (this really applies to non–mobile user agents too).

This will be a solution for mobile success that is to be built over time.

Your Experience

Comments about this web site should be sent to our web designer via e–mail.

Helper Applications

Links to 3rd party web sites for getting free software required for fully featured use of this web site.

Javascript is used in portions of this site. The design attempts to provide basic information where javascipt is not operationally available on your user agent.

Used for documentation available for download.