We’ve known Dr. Emily Cooper at Seattle Performance Medicine for years. And most of that time we’ve been nagging her to rebuild her web site… Well, we finally pulled it off!

This one was a collaboration with Heather at Bad Feather. Heather worked with Emily to develop SPM’s new branding and logo, and design the graphics for the site. We then built the new spmedicine.com. The site is clean and elegant, establishes SPM’s new visual identity, and finally gives an accurate representation of SPM’s work! And with this modernization, the site has moved forward in leaps and bounds in terms of search engine optimization, accessibility, and ease-of-maintenance.

We don’t like to brag, so we’ll let Emily speak for us. We were pretty flattered when she said “This is the best thing I have done for my business!”. Check out the new online presence for Seattle Performance Medicine at spmedicine.com.

Remember Arnold Schwarzenegger the body builder? Photographer-turned-documentary film making legend and founder of White Mountain Films George Butler introduced Arnie to the world with his 1976 film, Pumping Iron.

Butler has produced a great body of film and photography work since, and the old WMF website was not doing it justice. We took their existing branding and created a minimal layout to showcase their portfolio, film stills and photos. Under the hood, we gave the code an audit and overhaul for accessibility, search engine optimization, and ease-of-maintenance.

Keep an eye on whitemountainfilms.com for films on subjects as diverse as the ancient and thought-to-be-extinct Ivory Billed Woodpecker, and the ancient and soon-to-be retired football coach Bobby Bowden.

Standardista and web development community leader Molly Holzschlag pointed me to the “very awesome iJustine”, who posted this hilarious rap by m0serious about standards-based web design. User interface tips, semantics, accessibility — it’s all there! Perfect for nerds and gangsters alike… Molly and iJustine’s posts are complete with transcript, so educate yourself

A friend of mine works for a public advocacy law firm that often represents disabled folks who are denied access to services in the physical world. He said he realized recently that his firm’s web site itself is not accessible to many of these same people! So what does “accessibility” mean on the Internet? It’s an issue we discuss with our clients often, so I thought I’d give our take on it here.

My friend was not too worried about his site’s lack of accessibility, saying essentially that the Internet was inherently limiting and it would be a fool’s errand to try to make his site available for everyone. But therein lies the rub… “Accessibility” in web development does not mean “how can I make my photography web site politically correct for blind users”! Rather, accessibility (combined with other concepts like writing semantic and valid code) is a set of best practices that will make your web site available to as wide an audience as possible.

Yes, these best practices will allow blind and visually-impaired folks to interact with your site as best possible. They’ll also help people like me who want to maximize the browser and jack up the font size late at night when their eyes are droopy, or actually print one of your web pages. And don’t forget these other goodies… they’ll increase your site’s search engine optimization, ensure that your site works optimally on the steady stream of new user agents (browsers, mobile phones, etc), and make your site easier to maintain!

In short, writing accessible code is simply good web development. It’s a symbol of the “new professionalism” that we are excited to provide for our clients.