Intro to Ackadia and a word on web design and hosting
Oh, hey! Welcome! Come on in!
Still working on the place, so it’s a bit of a mess, but it’s coming along.
If you are expecting some flashy, image-filled virtual shopfront, complete with shiny counters, technology to bedazzle you and a pathway to “ask for a quote”, sorry (not sorry) to disappoint. Ackadia is as real as it gets.
Read on. (Unless you want to leap straight to prices, features and options!)
What we offer:
All-inclusive and affordable web design packages, including development, support and hosting, all with a focus on real users.
That means secure websites that load cleanly and quickly, work well on all devices, and take into account usability, accessibility and SEO.
I also prefer a more natural, if verbose, armchair sales pitch. I’ll try not to blind you with technical terms. Nor will I hide the real cost.
What we don’t offer:
Comforting lies!
You may be led to believe web design is all about the look. Big, bold images, sliders showing off your recent posts, and flash gimmicks to grab people’s attention.
Nice as all that is, what people really want, and equally important if you want Google to send you visitors, is fast loading, fast answers and out again.
“How much to clip my dog’s nails?”
“How do I get past the second boss in this game?”
Most of the time now and increasingly, people use a mobile to surf the web. They don’t want heavyweight graphics, sideways sliders, or buttons they can’t press. And they want it secure.
For example:
We recently had some work done on our house. They did a fantastic job.
Today, I had a look at their website.
It’s not a bad site at first glance; fairly typical, in fact. It loads reasonably fast, though there’s too much going on for my liking, and I find it distracting. Subjective, so fair enough.
But you look closer, and a few cracks appear:
Script errors that slow the site down, missing tags affecting accessibility and SEO, control issues (accessibility and usability), contrast issues (accessibility), and perhaps worst of all, at least 4 security issues allowing XSS attacks
Not good, eh!
The site appears to be been prepared by Yellow Pages (Yell), which offers “a bespoke, high-quality ecommerce website“.
Three things to note here:
Firstly, they use WordPress for their site*, but not to build their customers.
*(To clarify, the business subdomain uses WordPress, the main Yell.com does not)
Secondly, the Yell site scores poorly under tests, while their WordPress-based area business.yell.com showed terrible performance and security issues.
Lastly, appallingly for such a big company, the same XSS vulnerabilities occur. They are using a 12-year-old version of jQuery (v1.10.2), with known vulnerabilities. For customers, again with the same vulnerabilities, they are using jQuery@2.2.4, itself 6 years old.
I have increasingly realised that many companies offering websites either don’t understand or don’t fully care about accessibility or changing expectations. Or security! 
The proof is in the pudding
I think that even Harley Quinn would like this puddin’!
Impressive as that may be, that’s within an hour of recreating the site. I can do better. The desktop performance is 100%, loading in 0.7s. Ackadia.com, a much bigger site, still has a better score than Google.com in their own tests.
Similarly, another site I help, a local breast cancer charity (Pool of Life), has a performance of 97 and loads in 2s on mobile.
I can’t offer a glass building or corporate coffee, but I can make the site you need!
~ Ack 
The bouncer on the door feature image is by Dmitry Abramov, from Pixabay