Web build

Designed in-house, built in-house

We think having everything under one roof makes for a higher quality of work, call us control freaks if you like, we don’t mind. Whitespace started life as a finished artwork studio for advertising agencies, we don’t do production work for anyone else now but that same sense of pride in the quality of final production is still core to our culture.

Built for all, built to last

With modern web standards, browsers and technologies there are no excuses for websites which aren't built for all. Our site for NHS Health Scotland and its win in 2007 of a DADI award ‘Most Compliant/Accessible Website’ attests to the high priority we place on this issue. Even on projects where accessibility is not a priority, we take pride in aiming for the highest levels of accessibility (meeting AAA with WCAG 2.0 for the majority of pages). Using properly structured XHTML our sites can be understood by those using assistive browsers such as text only and screen readers. This not only ensures you meet your legal responsibilities, it makes your site easy to administer, future proof for the next generation of browsers (think mobiles, tablets like the iPad, games consoles and TVs) and excellent for search engines.

Managing your site

As covered on our Content generation services page ‘Content is King’. A site which is out of date or unchanging is useless. We offer a range of Content Management Systems (CMS) to meet your organisation’s needs. Our in-house CMS, called Sprocket, is a good option for most projects, whilst we offer Drupal (a widely-used open source CMS) where a proprietary CMS is not appropriate and Umbraco for projects where a commercial or .NET system is required. We also deliver templates for larger commercial CMS systems where often our client’s in-house developers or CMS partner will manage the integration.

Bespoke development

Over the last 13 years we’ve developed bespoke functionality, ranging from simple forms to complex integration with our clients’ internal systems. You can be confident in our development standards as our applications have passed ethical hacking and security and load testing by third party specialists and our client’s own IT teams within the financial services sector.

Geek acronyms a go-go

So far, for your sanity we’ve only include two geek acronyms, WCAG 2.0 and XHTML. Now it’s time to ensure that anyone with a geek checklist gets what they came for . . . our front end developers use: XHTML Strict but have an eye looking forward to HTML 5; JavaScript including Prototype and Scriptaculous libraries; CSS (obviously); Flash with Action Script 3 and plenty of XML/back end integration including with Facebook’s Connect API and web cams.

Our back end developers use PHP 5 where possible but also know .NET (mainly C#), ASP Classic (we actually used this a couple of months ago on request), Java, ColdFusion (not sure when we last used it though), Perl, Python and some other obscure stuff we won’t bore you any longer with. In terms of databases we mainly use PostgreSQL (the most powerful open source DBMS) as well as MySQL (the most popular open source DBMS), SQL Server and plenty of databases you just wouldn’t use for a web project any more (like Access).

Our favourite webserver is Apache, our love for this piece of open source software and its beautifully powerful .htaccess files will never leave us. But as pragmatists we know it isn’t for everyone, so we also use Microsoft’s IIS.

Questions?

To discuss your online requirements, call Iain on 0131 625 5500.