Getting in touch
As a small partnership, we take pride in developing direct relationships with our clients. Email us with the description of your project. Shortly, a partner will let you know if Cidamon is available and will negotiate an appropriate pricing method. Our colleagues at Forty Media will give you one of the most accurate summaries on what to look for in web design talent.
Please review our portfolio for a list of projects completed to date.
About us
Cidamon is Pennsylvania–based web design and development partnership founded in January of 2006. Cidamon’s mission is to author aesthetically sound, standards–compliant, platform–independent, and accessible web sites, web applications, and web systems using primarily open–source tools. Cidamon’s philosophy is strongly guided by current best practices in web development such as focus on separation of content from the behavior and style, focus on clean and semantic XHTML markup, and use of unobtrusive scripting through progressive enhancement. This practice in turn provides our clients with websites which are accessible, optimized for search engines from the core, work on variety of platforms, and are not likely to break in future versions of web browsers.
Even if accessibility for visually impaired or otherwise disabled is not a business imperative, optimizing the website for such audience is a good idea because doing so, in effect, ensures that the content is already search engine optimized. The added benefit of efforts to improve accessibility is that the website becomes easier to use for people who use screen readers, textual browsers, cell phones, PDAs or other hand–held devices to access the web. Accessibility also opens up possibilities for content aggregation. Last but not least, accessibility on the web is important because Governments of Countries such as U.S., U.K., Australia and others are actively passing legislation which specifies the minimum standards of accessibility on websites for disabled, not unlike the building codes do. All governmental institutions in the U.S. for example are required by law to maintain ADA section 508 compliant websites.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is significant because as Richard Wurman has effectively pointed out, the knowledge today does not lie in possessing information but rather in possessing means of accessing it. Mostly thanks to Google, businesses in today’s information–overloaded environment understand the value of “findability”. However, a massive demand has unfortunately opened a space for dubious practices where many firms consciously build poorly marked–up websites expecting to charge separately for SEO, which in that case consists of series of compensations on a weak base.
Cidamon holds platform–independence and future–proofing to be self–evident objectives. Specifically, users using Opera, Safari, Firefox, and many other browsers to access the web should not be restricted in their web experience only because the website had been authored with the majority’s browser in mind (or vice versa). Cidamon strives to support different browsers to the extent of Yahoo’s A–grade browser support.