Forward compatible, cross-platform, & standards compliant, web design & management for small businesses & organizations
“
Simplified web design
& content management!”
We design, produce, build, & maintain
affordable, effective, elegant,
standards compliant,
cross-platform accessible,
forward compatible, user friendly,
&
findable websites
for small businesses,
professionals, and organizations
of all kinds.
Hand coding in valid (X)HTML & CSS
means your site will work tomorrow,
and
next year, too!
The goal is faster loading pages,
with less cost to maintain and update."
Ask us about site design/revision!
» Web design,
maintenance, & hosting
for small businesses, professionals,
& organizations!
» Update, & revise existing sites
or produce a whole new site!
» Hand coded XHTML & CSS!
» Objective = less cost, improved findability, better results!
"Our clients are successful business
& professional people
who wish to achieve objectives.
Our objective is to help them do it..."
- James Parsons
Don't let your web site project end up being "...like setting up the deck chairs on the Titanic"
A brief, frank message:
"A credible standards compliant, cross-platform, accessible (see
W3C-Business Benefits of Accessible Web Design
), & usable web presence can be a vital marketing, commerce, public relations, and brand building asset (any and all the above) for any small business, professional practice, or organization reaching out to a customer/client base for their bread and butter.
For those venturing onto the Web without understanding the building blocks, the difference between semantical structure & presentation, it can quickly begin to resemble something like a snake & alligator infested swamp full of quicksand.
The snakes, alligators, & quicksand are conflicting ideas; standards; & outmoded, archaic techniques. Some of these go back to the Jurassic Period of the Internet (the mid-90s), but they still linger as a kind of conceptual congestion. For example, you can't wriggle into a 'top 10' profile on the search engines using meta-tag voodoo and frequent re-submissions. This is one of those notions that keeps rearing it's venomous head. It's not true. In fact, improper use of meta-tags is actually "spamming" and can result in your site being excluded from many of the primary indexes/search engines.
So don't kid yourself; If you don't know XHTML 1.0 from HTML 3.2 or CSS from DOM or understand the differences & issues separating accessibility & semantical structure from presentation and these things all "sound like Greek" to you, you need somebody like us.
A site that actually "works" is not something you can buy in a box off the shelf at Office Depot. For the past 10 years we've been learning the ins-and-outs of effective, successful web design; what works and what doesn't. Our mission is to guide our clients through the snakes & alligators and around the quicksand to solid ground and do it quickly and for a reasonable cost. This is what we do and it works!" --James Parsons
» rough costs?
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"The purpose of web standards is to write once, publish everywhere. Not write once, shoehorn in a bunch of hacks and tricks, and then publish." --Jeff Zeldman,
The Web Standards Project: What are web standards and why should I use them?
"When you make a building you make a blueprint, when you make a toaster you first diagram its workings. I think we agree your website is more complex than your toaster. Yet the website is being thrown up in a few weeks and who is making the blueprint? That kid from art school? The engineer who speaks Perl, C++ and Java and yet can't communicate with the guy in the next cube? You spend thousands of dollars on servers so the website won't crash, but what good are all those servers if no one can find the information they need?" --
IAI | Elevator Pitches
Wired 10.01: Turn of the Century
: There's nothing new about battling for standards. In the 19th century, William Sellers championed standardized machine screw production and in the process helped usher in the Industrial Revolution. Today, the Information Revolution is still in it's infancy. After the dot-com bust of the late 90s, the growing web standards movement presents the clearest and best path for the future of website design and production.
![[On Thursdays, we let cows come to town... Mooooooooooo!]](Images/thursday_cows_200x195.gif "On Thursdays, we let cows come to town... Mooooooooooo!")
Web designers since January, 1998!
Parsonsnet.com, (also known as BatWorks™ Creative Group), is a small web design, hosting, & management agency located in the smaller town of Tripoli nestled into the
rolling countryside
of northeast Iowa. We first went online with a small personal site in 1996...
(back in the <blink></blink> days).
In November 1997, we launched our first small client project.
In January, 1998, we hung out our shingle as "Parsonsnet.com" and since then, we've designed, launched, maintained, and hosted sites (some of which we've even donated) for over 150 different small to medium-sized businesses, organizations, professionals, and community groups throughout Iowa, North America, & the world. In May, 2002, we were able to acquire the batworks.com domain and since then we've also been known as "BatWorks™ Creative Group" reflecting our objective of endeavoring to provide same day or overnight client service whenever possible.
Of course, business being what it is, not every client we've ever served is still with us. Some have quit while others have moved on (and, a couple of those have moved back). In five years time, one or two have simply gone out of business or into different businesses. Nevertheless, we have retained over 90% of our client base with less than a 10% churn rate (
industrypeak
for
turnover
). Slightly over nine out of ten clients who have retained us since January 1998, are still with us. Our objective has always been to provide simple, smart, thrifty, & scalable web design, revision, management, &
hosting solutions that work
.
Building, revising, and updating client sites in hand coded XHTML & CSS, we steer clear of proprietary publishing & coding solutions/technologies in favor of logical semantical structure & valid cross-platform compatible html and seek to focus more on customer/user oriented design. The objective is to produce forward compatible sites (that won't break in the next browser version). When indicated, we adapt and design Content Management Systems that deliver improved usability, accessibility, and findability for less than the cost of many
WYSIWYG
template driven, proprietary HTML based solutions. If you think we might be able to help you attain your objectives,
we'd like to hear from you
.
Besides our core group of site design/maintenance & hosting clients, we provide scalable Linux hosting solutions (with occasional assistance with html/design issues, writing, editing, graphic design,
etc.
) for site owners who, otherwise, produce their own content. So, if you just need hosting,
we still want to hear from you
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Toggle for further info
]
With small to medium sized business, manufacturer, and professional sites
comprising the majority of our portfolio, our projects range in size from small business micro-sites to dynamic enterprise applications with hundreds of pages. You can
see a few of these, here
.
Micro-sites?:
While we design, maintain, and host a growing group of medium-sized & larger sites, we welcome RFPs (Requests For Proposals) for what we call
micro-sites
(see
The 333 Micro-site Solution
). Think of this as a scalable, growable, starter solution for smaller businesses, professionals, or organizations seeking an effective web presence on a small budget. This is NOT a template option; we design, host, & maintain an effective, unique, simple, useful, & appealing website based on your business, using your content. [
contact us
]
As we seek to provide affordable & scalable web design solutions, we're focusing more on what's come to be known as
web standards
. We talk about this a lot but it's becoming a key strategy for maximizing ROI for smaller sites without big budgets. Eschewing proprietary html and platform specific design we can deliver sites with greater "forward compatibility." The objective is to assure that your information will be be
more findable and accessible
to your clients, customers, and visitors across a wider array of devices and platforms; today, tomorrow, and a year from now. The
Browser Wars
are over, Web Standards won, and it's incumbent on both site owners and devlopers to recognize the fact. If designers, developers, and site owners had paid attention to this back in 1998/99, who knows, maybe the
dot-com boom
wouldn't have busted so bad. [See
99.9% of Websites Are Obsolete
by Jeffrey Zeldman]. Zeldman writes:
"... An equal opportunity disease afflicts nearly every site now on the Web, from the humblest personal homepages to the multi-million-dollar sites of corporate giants. Cunning and insidious, the disease goes largely unrecognized because it is based on industry norms. Though their owners and managers may not know it yet, 99.9% of all websites are obsolete."
Beyond the issues of forward compatibility & accessibility over a widening array of alternative Web access devices, there's no way more effective for a small business owner, professional, or organization on a limited budget to maximize their web profile and
findability
than to simply follow web standards guidelines. Unless your budget allows buying prime-time commercials on the major networks, print ads in local or regional newspapers or national periodicals or the resources to mount a radio
blitzkrieg
you're probably hoping potential customers or clients will find your site in one of the web indexes like
Google
. The standards based approach separates informational content from presentation which helps web indexes (search engines) do a more effective job of categorizing content. Ultimately, this makes you much more "findable" for your potential customers and clients.
"The World Wide Web Consortium (
W3C
), along with other groups and standards bodies, has established technologies for creating and interpreting web-based content. These technologies, which we call 'web standards,' are carefully designed to deliver the greatest benefits to the greatest number of web users while ensuring the long-term viability of any document published on the Web.
Designing and building with these standards also simplifies and lowers the cost of production as well as delivering sites that are accessible to more people and more types of Internet devices. Sites built around web standards will continue to function correctly as traditional desktop browsers evolve and as new Internet devices come to market." -- See
The Web Standards Project: Mission
»
Parsonsnet.com/BatWorks™ web design, development, & revision:
As we update our little corner of the Web to XHTML & CSS, different sections of this site look different. Part of the reason is we re-do different sections and we just don't necessarily feel like we need to go back and re-do everything the same. It also helps give you, the reader, a sense of different ways we think about design, without ever leaving the site.
»
For more on our take on the "how & why" through which web standards can improve the results on your website investment
, see
about us
.
»
If your current web design/maintenance solution doesn't seem to be making you "findable" in the various indexes/search engines
, contemplating the examples & offer we put forth on the
"Overview"
may be in order.
»
Zipweb.net - solid Linux based hosting for small businesses & professionals
: We run our own Linux/Apache web server. Our small business, professional, and organization "design, development and maintenance" clients' sites are generally hosted on this system. If you just need website hosting, you can get that, too. It's a scalable no-nonsense system with industrial style resources, fat pipes, and better security at a fraction of the cost. You get the usual bells & whistles: FTP, Qmail, SSH, your own cgi-bin, MySQL, PHP, Perl, SSI, secure server option. Got a problem or need help?
or give us a call on the direct line (
646.494.7932
). There are no "customer service flacks", here. There's no, "I'll have to put in a work order for this..." with a 48 hour lead time before anything can even begin to happen. No annoying background music. If we can't take your call for some reason, leave your name and number and we'll return it at the first opportunity. The person you talk to can & will answer your question or fix your problem. Immediately. Unless it's something totally out of our realm or it can't be done. In which case he/she will be able to explain why. We're here weekdays; nights; weekends, too. We live, breathe, and eat this stuff.
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