Technology

HTML and XHTML are the base driving forces behind any website. It is the structure that houses all the technology below in a unified markup for Web Browsers to understand. All browsers are not built equal, however, and withoutboundary tests each site in Firefox, Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8, and Google Chrome to ensure that no matter where your visitors are viewing your site, they see what you want them to see. Safari is tested indirectly through Google Chrome as they run on the same rendering engine (Webkit).

If HTML is the structure, then CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is the paint and the artwork that adorns the frame; it allows us to match the design across all the different pages in a site. Any change is automatically visible on any page that shares a CSS file - no more hand-editing every page to ensure they look the same.

JavaScript is the client-side scripting language that allows us to bring a website to life, whether it be a simple fading image or a complex image gallery JavaScript is what allows the users to interact with a website on a level beyond simple links. The jQuery framework is built in JavaScript to allow developers (that's us!) to "write less, do more". Many other developers have also produced plugins based on jQuery to do amazing things that allows us to concentrate on the more important aspects of your site.

PHP (Hypertext Pre Processor) is the server-side language that transforms a simple site into a piece of software, ready and able to access content dynamically from a database such as MySQL. PHP and MySQL are often used in combination to produce websites capable of things previously available only to fully-fledged pieces of software.

The CakePHP framework works similarly to jQuery and JavaScript, in that entire web applications can be written in a few hundred lines instead of thousands. It makes accessing records in a database a simple one-line piece of code so that we can concentrate on making your website work, rather than making code work. Wildflower is a new CMS still being developed that is built on CakePHP which again provides functionality that lets us get your site up in the best way possible.

Smarty is a PHP-based templating engine that allows for templating without a database or when backend content management is not necessary. The majority of withoutboundary sites are constructed in CakePHP, simply because it offers the most useful ability to adapt.