Howard Gibson Web Design

I want to design web pages. I want to design your web page!

What can I do for you?

I will design a simple webpage, with one or two levels of navigation, and no JavaScript or CGI scripting. This is complex enough for small organizations and most small businesses. It is simple enough that an organization volunteer, or small business owner can maintain the website themselves, and have absolute and immediate control over the content. The website will be search engine friendly, with critical search elements placed where search engines, and human users expect to find them.

A website consisting of a landing page, and a couple of content pages can be maintained by a reasonably intelligent person using a text editor like Microsoft Notepad. The HTML language is simple, probably simpler than many of the fancy, graphical HTML editors out there. There is no need to spend big bucks on fancy software.

You can have a more complex website with multiple pages and several levels of navigation. You will need some kind of scripting language, probably on your local computer, to update system wide menus and information tables. I have written a simple Perl script that searches through your HTML files, and replaces tagged sections with the contents of a menu file. Perl is installed on Linux and on Macs. If you are on Microsoft Windows, you need to install it. You don't need to learn Perl.

Please contact me. We can meet. I will bring my laptop and and we can go through my samples of navigation techniques, and web site formatting.

Web Pages I Have Designed

High Park Hiking Club: I designed this web site, I wrote most of the text, and I maintain it. Note the two dimensional navigation. I update menus by running a script on my home computer, that reads a menu file, and searches through all the HTML files searching for a tag.
Toronto Pub Quiz League: I designed this in consultation with the league organizer. This contains fewer pages than the HPHC site, and does not require automated tools to update menus and footer tables.

Note how both of these web pages pass Google's Mobile Friendly Test

Articles

Web Pages: Some thoughts on web page design.
Amaya: Amaya is W3C's web page editor, designed as a graphic tool for generating code that conforms to the XHTML standard. I installed it and tried it out. This is no longer supported by W3C, however, my article shows the problems with using a GUI editor, especially if you do not understand the HMTL language.
Wix: I am playing with Wix.com. Can I build a website with it? Can I make the basic stuff on the website work, like the <title> and the top of page heading?
MathML: MathML is a markup language for presenting equations. This would be really cool if only it were better supported by browsers.
Semantic Web: Let's play with HTML 5. There are all sorts of new tags to support the Semantic Web. Don't take this too seriously. I am messing around. I am not sure these HTML 5 objects work for me.

HTML

These pages are validated HTML. You can click on the HTML 5 button at the bottom left corner of the page, and check. You will have to copy and paste the URL. The old validators captured this information. I have valided my Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) to CSS 3. Strict compliance with the HTML standards is not absolutely necessary to ensure a readable, Google friendly webpage, but it is a good substitute for a lab full of computers with every configuration and mis-configuration of operating system and browser that might be used to read your site.

Valid HTML shows that you care.