Our Web design philosophy

Also known as: Why have we decided to produce such primitive web pages?

The answer is simple, really. Graphics can add a lot to the communication of ideas. More often then not, however - at least in web pages - they are just "eye candy" - unnecessary material for you to download.

This site was designed with the intention of providing you (our prospective customers and clients) with as much information as possible about our operations. When the information you are really seeking can be much more easily (and quickly) provided through the use of plain, ordinary text, we have elected to use text. We have prettied it up using simple colour and layout tricks using the wonders of CSS2, but we have not significantly increased the bandwidth in doing so.

• Text material is universally compatible with ALL versions of ALL browsers.
• It is quick enough to be usable even for those people running on the end of slow modem links to the net (not everyone has broadband!).
• It is cheaper for us to produce because we don't spend money on paying graphic designers. We pass those savings on to you.

Where we do use graphics, we have attempted to keep the number to a minimum, and to re-use them across multiple pages, so they can (after the initial load) be loaded out of your browsers cache, for a minimum of time and bandwidth consumption.

While it was our goal to have cache-enabled pages (speeding up your access to our pages and reducing the bandwidth requirements on the internet backbones), our change to a content-management system has meant that our pages are now dynamically generated. This does mean we can provide a better service through our website, which is why we did it, but we have had to sacrifice cache-ability in order to do so. Unfortunately, the content management system also carries with it some javascript and other stuff. Definitely less than ideal, but overall still not bad.

If you have any suggestions on how we can improve our web pages within this philosophy, we welcome them. Suggestions should be sent to info(at)mail.watersprite.com.au.