One of the key selling points of my website development service is that sites I develop conform to web standards, and I keep banging on about this. So why does this matter so much?

The web has been selling products and services for enough time now for it no longer to be considered a nascent industry. We take it as perfectly natural that a site is promoting something, with some form of sale often being a site’s principle aim. In recent years, attention has been increasingly focussed upon the language used in websites, and upon how this language can be honed to increase the chances of a sale.

King Gillette apparently started it all in 1895 when he gave away his new disposable-blade razors. These razors were useless in themselves, but the disposable blades sold in their billions – and a trend towards ‘freeconomics’ was born.

In a separate blog article I cited free website hosting (and development) as an example of the ‘freeconomics’ trend in business, a race to the bottom that removes quality both from the service that is provided and from the website that is produced.

Technical support. Five syllables and a yawning maw of potential frustration!

Here are the two extremes of the technical support spectrum:

Many websites are built using ‘templates’. These are often off-the-shelf files that the developer can modify or can be part-and-parcel of some of the web development tools that site developers use.

Templates can simplify and speed up the design and development process and in that sense they serve a purpose.

+1 for Inno Setup!

Building an installation for a software application is sometimes approached as if it were an afterthought. It shouldn’t be. It’s the first thing about your application that your users see and as such it has to be top-class, meaning robust, flexible, field-tested to destruction and attractive in appearance.

Without special software, finding files on your computer can be a tedious affair. As hard disk capacities get astronomically bigger and as the torrent of files coming off digital cameras adds to this, the challenge of retrieving a specific file (or set of files) gets more daunting.

Are there any software packages that I’d recommend to the general computer user (for Windows PCs)? Yes!

Our corner of the Gers is wonderfully hilly and we’re lucky to have a steeply-sloped 2 hectare (5 acre) field behind the house which is just too steep for a tractor. It’s ideal for sheep and inside the 800 metres of fencing that we've surrounded the field with we keep Soay (pronounced 'sow' - 'ay') sheep.