Style
I have been criticized over the years as creating “Simplistic retro 90’s web sites”. I am guilty and proud of it. My sites are what one may call simplistic as I find simplicity to be beautiful. I do not care for the overly crowded Graphic heavy web design now considered modern. Web sites are about information. So I place information as priority 1 and a simplistic design allows easy understanding and access to that information. The look of the site does not define the site, the content does and graphics should simply support the content.
Philosophy
Standards - I stand by the standards set forth by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Standards are there to help designers create sites that will look almost the same in all browsers. For this reason I design all web sites per standards rather than simply design sites that work in Internet Explorer (which is well known for it’s poor standards support, but is the mostly used browser at this time). LSW sites will meet W3C standards and hope one day IE will actually support standards. Your web sites will continue to work while many IE specific sites are then broken.
Cascading Style Sheets - I always use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to move all site formatting into a external file leaving only content and structural elements in the HTML pages. By doing this, the page sizes are much smaller and the pages load faster. Also this allows changes to the site to be made by changing only one file. In fact the look of the entire site can be changed by this file without ever touching the structure or content making re-designing much easier. Also using CSS makes the background code of the page much cleaner and simpler, allowing for higher ranking in search engines.
Accessibility - I am dedicated to the idea that web sites should be available to everyone. Many designers and site owners never stop to consider how customers with disabilities experience their sites. The result is that unintentionally they have placed barriers up that keep millions of possible customers from using their services. The motto of LSW is “Everyone has the right to surf!”. Sites must created to the highest possible accessibility standards to ensure that your customers can use your site regardless of illnesses, disabilities, habits or preferences. Your site should be developed to be as flexible as possible to allow the user to be able to change the site in whatever way needed for them. Happy customers are more likely to return and tell others about your services. You can find more about accessibility under Accessibility in the main Menu.
Customers - Although you are a web developer’s customer, in the end we are not designing for you, we should be designing for your customers. It is our job to make your customers happy so they continue to use your services. That is our goal. As a customer you will naturally get what you wish, but everything we do should be targeted to make your customer happy. Just as your site represents you, so our work represents you as well.
History
I grew up in the Ohio Valley in the early 70’s in a small city named Barnesville. Here my father, a freelance Artist and Art Professor at Ohio University, opened a small studio in a back alley and called it “Lamson’s Studio on the Alley”. When I started LSW-Web Design in 2000, it was clear that in honor of my father it’s name would be “Lamson’s Studio on the Web”. LSW-Web Design and I have become known as LSW in many web design forums.
I was educated as a Internet-Producer by the e-cademy, IT- & Multimedia-Trainings GmbH in Potsdam Germany and as a Web Programmer at indisoft GmbH in Berlin Germany. I did freelance work and began specializing in accessible web design. I created the accessible web portal for the Youth Services Division of the District of Neukölln in Berlin and am a member of the Guild of Accessible Web Designers (GAWDS.org).
I left Germany in 2006, worked as Webmaster for the Juneau Empire and now reside in Juneau Alaska where I worked as a Analyst/Programmer for the Department of Health and Social Services, Business Applications, State of Alaska and as a team member for Alaska’s first state “Web Accessibility Training”.