MorganAlley is a website design and applications studio situated near Central London. We craft lovely websites for our customers, we make it easy to manage them and we make them useful.

Our goals are that all website we create are designed from the start to be attractive to viewers, search engines and those who require proper accessibility to use the sites easily. It's not an easy task but we have a lot of experience doing this.

We don't believe websites that meet accessibility standards have to be astoundingly ugly; in fact there's no reason they should be. We don't believe websites require unreadable text or dodgy tricks to rank well in search engines. We know they can be aesthetically attractive, express trustworthiness and work well technically. And we know how to make them so that their owners don't require a degree in technology to manage the site themselves. We're happy to do this for customers but we feel it's money for old rope and we'll tell you so.

After I graduated, I worked on a hotel site for a certain large three letter US news company. Now, back in those days, a website was just seen as an extension to brochure advertising. And for the majority, nothing has really changed in the intervening decade.

One of the first things I've noticed is that when working for a Blue Chip, there is a very strong disincentive against doing things the Right Way. This is because the clients will ask for what they think they want. This is usually not what they really want, and is pretty much always miles away from what they need.

And what companies generally start off thinking they want is something identical to their offline stuff.

For small companies with no web development budget, this is understandable. They paid for the development of the brochure, and placing it on the web on a cheap host will expand the scope of that investment for almost nothing. And heck, if they registered the domain name, they have to do something with it...

Should a login system be case insensitive?

Short answer: Yes. But numbers/symbols should be required.

Long answer: One of the most common mistakes made when logging in is to have the caps lock key pressed. In studies, significant proportions of support calls are simple case-sensitivity issues with usernames or passwords.

Some login systems address this issue by detecting when the username and password are all uppercase, and displaying a message "you entered your username and password in all capitals."

While the programmers of such systems are trying to be friendly and helpful, this has a tendency to instead to intensely annoy users: ask why, if someone went to all the trouble to write a system that would notice that they made that mistake and display the message, it could not simply deal with the problem itself, and log them in. Why does the system go out of its way to make them feel stupid, rather than simply using a little intelligence itself?

Scott McNealy, boss of mega-corporation Sun Microsystems and onetime nemesis of Bill Gates and Microsoft is well-renowned for having said "You have no privacy! Get over it!" This seemed not to bother him or his company very much until recently when he made an amazing about face on the issue.

So what brought on this sudden epiphany? It seems his own personal data, including his social security number, etc. were lost by a contractor of a firm with which he does business as a private individual. It's amazing the clarity one can achieve when foisted into the metaphorical other person's shoes. All of the sudden privacy is highly important. Hmmmm....

I must admit I panicked a bit when I read about this at The Reg as much of our code uses PHP or is linked to PHP apps in some way. Steeling myself for a long night's firewall tuning and fending off skiddiots, I was pleased to see that rather than "Mare-D" it should really be called "Linux Worms for Dummies" (and maybe released as a book!) as it relies on register_globals to be turned on.

Now Dewi has posted at length on why this is A Bad Thing (and I'll find it and link to it) but this is something no webmaster, and certainly no one who runs multiple sites, should ever have switched on. There's a lame line of reasoning that states for backward-compatibility with legacy applications (by lazy coders?) it could be maintained, but we don't do this under any circumstance and won't do either.

We've been meaning to launch the ole corporate blogs for ages. So many things to do, places to go, code to write... Excuses, excuses I know but at long last here we are! The first blog on the MorganAlley site.

The test site said: "OK, so it's a test site. But this is good as I can be even more acerbic than usual! Anyway, we can load up our content, test designs, learn this system, etc. without inflicting it on the wide world till we're ready. Nice!" until tonight. We're live and linked now so no more playing around. The acerbity will stay along with a bit of irony, sarcasm, humour and other examples of journalistic prose, and some will actually be intended! We will praise when it's due (even Microsoft!) and will be quick to point out the "less than optimal" we feel you should know about.