About Shiny Octopus Web Design
Shiny Octopus is the merging of freelance web designer Cathy White's web design site and VegDesign - a web design service marketed towards vegetarian and vegan companies. Together as Shiny Octopus we bring our professional web design service to everybody. Our learning process is ongoing and we adhere to the latest guidelines in web design.
Web standards
Web standards are a big issue today. Table-less designs, semantic mark-up, usability and accessibility are all phrases you may or may not have heard of. Shiny Octopus designs sites using valid CSS and XHTML with minimal - if any - Javascript to ensure your site is fast-loading and compatible with as many browsers as possible to get your widest viewing audience.
CSS v tables
Tables are a thing of the past. Today's designers have left behind the old-style sites full of clunky code and nested tables. Sites using tables for design, instead of a table's proper use - tabular data - can choke browsers and be rendered useless for visitors using screen readers or a handheld device. Using CSS to separate content from presentation means that only one file needs to be downloaded from the server instead of huge amounts of code embedded into each page, meaning that your website will be faster to download, take up less space on the server, use less bandwidth and be more search engine friendly.
