About Us

captured sparks is a small web design studio run by Robin Fisher. We specialise in designing and building websites and we applications for charities and small businesses.

The Name

When designing, we hope to capture those sparks of inspiration, brilliance or sheer silliness. It's that simple.

Background

captured sparks was established in early 2008 by Robin Fisher. Robin has been working in and around computers since the days of the BBC Basic. He remembers leaving the phone off the hook to dial in to bulletin boards and spending hours creating boot disks in DOS.

Standards?

The W3C releases specifications that determine how HTML, CSS, and other languages should be interpreted by browsers. We endeavour to ensure that all our designs are structured in compliance with the XHMTL 1.0 Strict standards and styled in accordance with the CSS standards. There may be occasions, however, where this is not possible. On this site, for example, code samples are interpreted by software that adds code in a non-standard way. The benefit though is that the code displays more clearly.

In summary, we strive to achieve compliance but won't allow full compliance to get in the way of ensuring your message gets across in a clear fashion.

Our Designs

Our intention is to design and build websites that meet the standards laid down by the W3C and work across all browsers with minimal variation. We also design our websites to be accessible to people with disabilities and those browsing on non-standard devices.

This Site

The site runs on a custom-made CMS coded in Ruby on Rails. The CMS enables the easy posting of entries to the blog and management of our portfolio. All pages are hand-coded in TextMate. Hosting is by Slicehost.

Accessibility

Standards is inextricably linked with accessibility. By building a standards based website, you are more likely to automatically generate a site that is more easily accessible to those people with disabilities.