About MargilDesign
David Margil has been designing and developing websites since 1996 A.D. It was during that fateful year that Dave left his successful Lotus Notes consulting practice to become a founding member of the now legendary computer games company Genetic Anomalies, Inc. Among his many other roles, he served as GA’s Art Director and Webmaster, responsible for the creation of the company’s original site and its version two redesign. He also was the mastermind behind the site for the company’s first product, the groundbreaking game known as Chron X. As Vice President of Product Development, Dave oversaw the creation of GA’s Internet games, including WWE®: With Authority! and Star Trek ConQuest Online. In 1999, GA was acquired by THQ Inc., and Dave remained with the company until 2002.
In 2003 Dave founded MargilDesign to focus on creating standards-based, accessible websites. What are web standards? Simply put, standards are a set of technologies (XHTML, Cascading Style Sheets, and the Document Object Model) specified by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Web sites designed using those technologies can be both stylish and consistent across all modern web browsers. Standards compliant web sites also “degrade gracefully” for effective viewing in older, non-compliant browsers.
Accessibility is the other piece of the puzzle. When creating a 21st century website it is no longer acceptable to consider only how it will appear in the latest graphical web browser to people with perfect vision. More and more, you have to expect that visitors to your site will be those with a disability (e.g., impaired vision or mobility), or perhaps without a sophisticated, high-resolution graphical browser (e.g., those browsing on phones, PDAs, or text-only browsers.) The definition of a perfectly “accessible” website is hard to nail down, and as others have noted, accessibility is a sliding scale. All MargilDesign sites strive to reach at least the minimum guidelines for accessibility.