Design Basics

In the same manner that Tapir Design values every client, the owner of a website should value every visitor to the website.

A website should serve its purpose unobtrusively; as beautiful as a given website may look, it serves little purpose if people wishing to access it are unable to do so because of reasons beyond their control. If a website cannot be viewed by sections of its target audience, its purpose and impact are diminished.

The vast majority of Internet users have a reasonably modern computer running a recent version of Windows and use Internet Explorer to view websites. Indeed, it is likely that you are part of this demographic. However, having said this:

• Not everybody can afford (or wishes to purchase) a brand new computer;
• 5-10% of all Internet users do not use Windows; and
• 10-15% of all Internet users do not use Internet Explorer.

For certain categories of websites, these figures may even be higher.

In other words, a website should be platform-agnostic. It should make no difference what type of computer or web browser the viewer uses.

A business that turns away every tenth customer on the basis of an arbitrary characteristic that the other ninety percent of people do not share is turning away ten percent of its prospective customers. Why should a website be any different (even if it is not a commercial website)?

Furthermore, some websites use software such as Flash for all content. Again, as nice as such sites may look, if an individual does not have Flash installed on their computer, that person is more likely to leave the website for user-friendlier destinations, rather than downloading the missing software (assuming that the person knows how to do this, or is even allowed to do this on the computer that s/he is using).

Tapir Design is aware of such issues and ensures that almost all visitors to your website will be able to access and view all of it (there is always an exception to every rule...). To this end, Tapir Design undertakes the following measures to ensure that websites it creates are accessible to (almost) everybody that wishes to view them:

• Uses standards-compliant, handcrafted coding;
• Does not require users to have proprietary software that is not standard on all computers that are used to access the Internet; and
• Tests its websites using at least four different web browsers running on at least two different operating systems to ensure that they not only function correctly, but look the same on each combination.