About
About: me
I’m Matthew Babbs. I run intangiblestyle, a one‐person web development studio located in Carmarthenshire in west Wales. I build websites and web applications for people who like designs that are simple, usable and accessible, running on clean, easily‐maintained code.
Most of my work is with small businesses and organisations.
I’m a web developer. That means I like to handle the whole process of developing a website, from design concepts through markup and styling to back‐end code. I keep my code as clean and simple as my designs.
Of course, I don’t always carry out all the development myself. Sometimes I work as part of a team, marking up existing designs or doing the backend programming. I also do a range of website‐related things for sites I’ve worked on.
My services are available to hire. Drop me a line from the contacts page.
About: philosophy
Simplicity means freedom from distractions. Keeping the message and goal simple makes it easier for users to achieve what they want.
Usability means being easy to learn and efficient to use. People spend less than two minutes on a site before giving up, so it’s essential to find what they want easily.
Accessibility means making sure a website or application is usable for all. Whatever their browser or device, no-one should find their use of a website obstructed.
Web standards are the basis of clean, easy-to-maintain code, and an essential part of accessibility and usability. Standards-based sites are also more reliable across different web browsers, more future-proof, and more findable in search engines.
Small businesses and organisations can benefit hugely from usability and accessibility techniques. Expertise in these areas should be easily available and focused at their level.
About: this site
This site is a place for me to post my views and comments about web design and development, as well as articles and tutorials covering web standards, usability and accessibility. It’s also an online playground, where I experiment with design and code ideas (mostly in the Lab), and portfolio. If you see something you like, post in the comments or drop me a line over at the Contacts page.
Behind the scenes, this site is powered by the reliable and extensible WordPress, a blog engine built in PHP. It serves up standards‐compliant XHTML and CSS, with a sprinkling of JavaScript. (You might even stumble across some SVG.) The result is accessible to just about any browsing device on the internet. Although some advanced features, particularly things in the Lab, may not look their best in older browsers, I can pretty much guarantee you’ll be able to read what I’m saying.
If you want to keep up with my articles, the feed is available in Atom. Recent (or future) web browsers may be able to spot hAtom and Webslices, too.