Website Development

Next Big Leap can provide you with all your web development needs.

Whether your website is to be used as a marketing tool or to sell products and services, good web development is crucial. Visitors want a simple, yet visually appealing website, that enables user interaction.

Offering you a tailored approach, we can develop a website all your customers will find exciting and innovative.

Latest trends in website development can often dictate how a website is planned and built. This may be an ok approach, but what happens when after 12 months, that “cool” gimmick starts to look dated? Latest web development technologies have their place, the key is to identify those places and implement them, only if the visitor will benefit in some way.

Thanks to the web development community, you now have the choice of hundreds if not thousands of community driven applications everything from timesheet management to photo sharing. We can tailor our web development to your specific needs and apply a unique website design, whilst being able to make any adjustments to suit your requirements.

Technologies We Use

  • PHP
  • Expression Engine
  • CodeIgniter PHP Framework
  • IPhone / Objective-C
  • CSS/HTML
  • Flash / Actionscript
  • MySQL / MSSQL
  • .Net / C#
  • Ruby on Rails
  • Coldfusion / CFML
  • Javascript / Jquery / Mootools / PrototypeJS
  • XML / JSON / Ajax
  • Visual Basic / REALBasic

Accessibility

Next Big Leap can design and develop websites based on the W3C guidelines.

Under the Disability Discrimination Act your duty to avoid discrimination includes your website. You must take reasonable steps to make sure that your website does not discriminate against disabled visitors.

Making your website more accessible sends out a good message about your business. It also means that more visitors can benefit from the facilities and services on your website.

For certain websites, addressing accessibility can be a legal requirement. This is usually the case for government sites, but can also affect others.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines or WCAG became a W3C recommendation on the 5th of May 1999 (becoming a W3C recommendation is an extremely tough and long process). This is achieved through 14 gudelines with a total of 60 checkpoints. There are varying levels of effort people are willing to put in to making their sites accessible, to take this into account, checkpoints are broken down into 3 different priority levels - priority 1, priority 2 and priority 3. For pages that are produced to conform to any of the above priority levels there are a matching set of conformance levels:

  • Level ‘A’ - All Priority 1 checkpoints are satisfied.
  • Level ‘Double-A’ - All Priority 1 and 2 checkpoints are satisfied.
  • Level ‘Triple-A’ - All Priority 1, 2, and 3 checkpoints are satisfied.

Usability

Usability means ensuring visitors to your website can find what they are looking for in a reasonably quick and efficient manner. The second a user asks a question such as, how do I find….? How can I get to….? Or has to make a guess to find a product, service or information, usability has failed.

Next Big Leap know how important this is, we can improve usability for screen reader users, as well as other visitors by ensuring basic guidelines are followed, such as:

  • using descriptive headings
  • providing information in lists
  • writing short, front loaded paragraphs
  • designing effective navigation