— What we do —
The basics
My goal is to help small businesses and other organizations who need, quite simply, a sharp Web presence without the complexity can haunt such projects. I will design the site, add the content you provide, help you purchase the domain name and server space, launch the site and in the end transfer all the files and editing control to you.
When I'm done, your business or organization will have a site that:
- Is custom designed from scratch just for you
- Features photos, logos and colors from your organization
- Conveys the information that you want in the simplest way possible
- Conforms to Web standards and practices (XHMTL, CSS and 508)
- Is accessible to all people, regardless of browser, computer, Internet speed or disability
- Is easy to update
What you need
Most small businesses and organizations don't need the very in-depth type projects that some Web companies provide, nor do they really need sites that are run off of a database or set up with features you'll never use.
The alternative for companies who don't want to shell out lots of dollars for a new site is to still pay a significant amount of money to invest in programs or Web site "templates" that serve at a very basic level to simply get you online, regardless of how unique your site is.
If your company is bigger than a lemonade stand, yet isn't ready to jump into the much larger world of e-commerce and online cataloging, you are probably looking for a site that:
- Tells people who you are and what you offer
- Looks clean and well-designed
- Is simple and flexible enough to fit your foreseeable needs
What we offer
7 Leaf Design tries to fit into the middle: providing at a reasonable price a quite uncommonly elegant solution.
The method that I use is in line with what are called "Web standards." That is, the pages I design are based on the most simple and semantically sensible XHTML coding possible, then coupled with powerful style sheets that tell that information how to display itself. In this way, the content of your site is completely separate from the design of your site.
The content of your site is what you are communicating. At the core of all things, a Web page is usually nothing more than an ordering of headlines, text, photos, links and lists. It is, in short, a grouping of information presented in a way that makes sense.
The design of your site is how you are communicating it. Besides the photos put into the text itself to help explain the content, all the design of your site -- images, logos, buttons, background colors and special effects -- are stored in a separate syle sheet. That style sheet can then be changed independent of your site; this gives you the ability to, say, go into your style sheet and specify that every headline on your whole site will now be red instead of black. One simple change and all the work is done.
Think then, of a style sheet like a prism for your content. Design that is done this way not only makes your pages load faster on computers, but it "degrades gracefully" in outdated browsers and is perfectly understandable to a blind person using a screen reader to listen to the content of your page. Want to print a page? With a special "print" style sheet set up, there is no need for an alternate "print friendly" version of the page: the print style sheet reconfigures the content of your page for any printer you send it to -- and it's all done in the blink of an eye and without getting in your way.
A demonstration of what we do
There is, most likely, no better way to explain how this method works than with a demonstration. I designed one set of pages for this website, that is, I wrote out the code for the six or seven basic pages you see and that's it. I then made the design you see now in a style sheet; then I made two completely different style sheets with two completely different themes. Lastly, I made one style sheet blank, so that you can see that page without any formatting.
The links below, also located at the bottom of each page, will load the new design into the page without changing so much as one line of the underlying code. Click on them to see the difference:
If you're interested, continue on reading what we can do for you by looking at some of the projects that I've worked on before, or read about the process that we can begin to help you get your site off the ground -- or revamped.