• contact@westwebtechnology.com
• 0845 303 8696

• • Q... How will a website improve my business?
  • Q... Why choose West Web Technology?
  • Q... How can I sell on the web?
  • Q... What do I have to do?
• • Q... Why have a website?
  • Q... What is a free consultation?
  • Q... Do you expect me to know everything already?
  • Q... Do I need to have a logo?
• • Q... What is SEO?
  • Q... Which type of website should I have?
  • Q... Do I have to look after the website myself?
  • Q... Do I need to have pictures / text?
• • Q... How do I get on Google?
  • Q... What if my needs are only small?
  • Q... What if my website isn't getting any visitors?
  • Q... How much will it cost?
• • Q... How can West Web Technology help me?
  • Q... What if my needs are very big?
  • Q... How long will it take?
  • Q... What if my website stops working?

Making a website work for everyone

In our living rooms at home, most of us have a television with a remote control. Remote controls are useful and really save us time and effort when using our TVs. But, perhaps you have a DVD player, a video player, satellite box and a stereo system as well, all with separate remote controls? Soon you find you have several remote controls that only work with one device and so it becomes much more frustrating having to find the right control each time and sometimes you can't even use your device if you don't have the correct controller. In many ways, it would be better and easier to have one remote control that you could use for every device in your living room.

The same principles can apply with the web. Many people are unaware of the number of different ways visitors will try to access your website. You want to make sure that their "remote control" i.e. web browser, works with your website.

If you are using a PC which you have bought from your local computer shop ready to "plug and play", then you are most likely using a browser called Internet Explorer to view the internet. You may recognise its logo:

Internet Explorer is most commonly used because it comes with PCs and people don't realise there are other options available, such as Firefox, Opera and Chrome. Over recent years these competitors of Internet Explorer have started to take more and more of the market and recent findings show IE has moved down to a 67.55% share. Competitors such as Firefox (21.53%) and Safari (8.29%) are steadily growing. In many ways this is a good thing and there are large communities using alternative browsers every day.

In the early days of the internet, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) developed international standards for writing websites because the main vision of the internet, was that information would be available for everyone, no matter how they were accessing it.

For some years Internet Explorer dominated the market so completely that the software developers who made the browser didn't feel it was necessary to stick to the standards set out by W3C. Since Internet Explorer's market share has been decreasing, the problem of compatibility between browser and website has come to the fore-front.

These newer browsers have been developed to follow web standards as best they can, but unfortunately Internet Explorer is still a long way behind on being "standard compliant". This means many websites only work on IE and web agencies are failing to create websites which can be viewed correctly by other browser users.

What does this mean?

At present 32.45% of internet users do not use Internet Explorer - almost 1 in 3, and you may not have the time or knowledge required to test your website in the ever-growing list of alternative browsers.

West Web Technology appreciates these problems and always works to create a website that will be accessible to as many people as possible. This means we code your website so it looks the same for everyone. We want your website to be the success story you want and will always do our best to make it happen.

Find out about the websites we offer

Stats from Market Share Net Applications for January 2009. http://marketshare.hitslink.com