Welcome to Copper Creative, standards compliant web design and development

Who cares about Standards Compliant Websites?

Well, we do actually!

Copper Creative is a web design and development company based in the Northwest of the UK that has been developing accesssible, standards compliant websites for clients for as long as standards compliance has been viable with an almost evangelical zeal. Coming from both a design and a technical background and bringing together a wide range of disciplines xhtml, css, php, asp, mysql, seo, etc to provide the most elegant solution for their customers.

What are 'Web Standards'

Back in 1998 the world wide web consortuim (W3C) laid down a set of rules as to how web sites should be coded and how web browsers should display those sites. Copper Creative design web sites that are not only visually attractive, but sites that load quickly and are accessible to everyone connected to the internet, no matter what sort of browser they use.

guild of accessible web designers logoI am also a proud member of the Guild of Accessible Web Designers (GAWDS), and if you follow the link you can read all about what we stand for, which is "Promoting a vision of the future that assumes accessible web design to be, relevant, obtainable, and not at odds with successful business practice or good visual and usable design."

Why should I have an accessible site?

Since 1st October 1999 under section III of the Disability Discrimination Act, service providers have had to make “reasonable adjustments” for disabled people, such as providing extra help or making changes to the way they provide their services. In 2002, the Code of Practice for part III of the Act was published and specifically mentions that web accessibility is now a legal requirement.

Besides the legal requirements for you to make your website accessible, an accessible website can also help you make and save money through:

(i) Compatibility with new browsing technology – with an increased use of PDAs and mobile phones to surf the web, making your site accessible to these technologies is opening your company up to potential new clients.

(ii) Appearing higher in search engine rankings - Search engines cannot usually understand non-text content, such as images, audio and video. By providing alternative content to each of these forms of content, search engines will have a better understanding of the purpose of the website and potentially move your site up the rankings.

(iii) Increased reach of your site – an inaccessible site would not be able to cater for a large percentage of web users:

Web standards make good financial sense

Add to that sites that are easily updated, can be completely redesigned by altering one file and are future proof (remember, all future browsers have to comform to the same rules your site was written to) and you start to get the idea that standards compliance is important to everyone.

...and where's all the rest of the site??

OK, I know there isn't a lot here (well one page actually :-) but I'm waaay too busy doing cutting edge, CSS driven websites for other people and not able to do anything on this site.

I guess it's like a hairdresser having a bad hairdo...

some of the sites I'm working on are:

www.inspiredimagesltd.com - this site posed some interesting challenges, how to produce a feature rich, accessible site to showcase great photography. The site uses standards compliant and accessible javascript to achieve the stunning effects for the gallery. The site is also able to be easily updated with new images, it's simply a matter of dropping them into a folder via ftp...

www.clickforkitchens.com - it's always great to use technology to make things better, click4kitchens does just that, by eliminating the overheads of expensive showrooms, they can save £1000's off the price of a high quality kitchen. The sites not bad either :-)

www.cater-sure.co.uk - a fully automated catering insurance site, enter your details, pay your money, print off your documents and your insured!

www.laptc.org - the Lancashire Association of Parish and Town Councils, this is an informative site to help educate and train Town & Parish Councillors.

www.allcare-uk.com - A northwest training and nursing agency with a huge portfolio of training courses for all industries .

www.becoolbaby.co.uk - A fantastic company providing UV protective baby's clothing and accessories

www.cfultd.com - A company selling refurbished PC's online, they have a full ecommerce store

www.revealsolutionsltd.co.uk - A site to help you reclaim unfair bank charges

www.maligaya.co.uk - An ecommerce site sellng all manner of novelty and interesting items

www.bnipreston.co.uk - a group of local businesspeople that I work closely with, if you would like more business why not get in touch to see if we can help you:

www.bnionline.co.uk - this is the regional BNI site for Lancashire and South Pennines, I was involved with coding this site to AA rating accessibility and all the backend database coding, this new look for BNI has been rolled out to the regions of Manchester, Liverpool, Tyneside, London, Birmingham and even the national site for Brasil (www.bnibrasil.com)

The businesses in our BNI Chapter are : (please note I haven't designed these peoples websites, I just work closely with them :-) if you would like more information or would be interested in their services, please contact me.

Please find the following list of current members and their business category.