Our Websites
We at Freedom Software take great pride in creating a website to your specific wants and needs. We specialize in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to get your company noticed and well known.
Our services include (click on each for more information):
- Website design and Website development
- WordPress Websites
- HTML coding
- CSS coding
- JavaScript coding
- jQuery coding
- PHP coding
- SEO
- POPIA and GDPR
- And so much more…
For any questions or to get a free quote please fill in the form below.
Website design and Website development
WordPress Websites
WordPress is a free content management system that allows you to build an entire website, whether it is a basic one pager, or an entire e-commerce website. It is mainly build with PHP code.
Plugins are used to add more features and functionality to your website. These plugins are also free most of the time, but usually only include basic features. If you want more advanced features from these plugins, it might cost a bit.
Security is also catered for. If you have a professional maintaining your WordPress website, then it can be very cost effective, safe and secure. The security of your website is also handled by plugins, but it is important to use the right plugin and to configure it correctly.
Even though WordPress can manage all your content and it is usually just a few clicks to build a website, WordPress also offers manual manipulation of the HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP code that it is build on.
The main advantages of WordPress is that you can easily and quickly build almost any website or online system that will cater to your needs. It is also much cheaper than building a website from nothing.
Some of the disadvantages in our opinion is that because it is so easy to build a WordPress website, many beginners try to do it themselves and end up with a website that might look ok, but it suffers from slow speeds, weak security, instability or bugs, and ultimately can cost you more money and time to fix the website rather than to have someone build it for you from the get go.
(Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress)
HTML Coding for Websites
Also known as HyperText Markup Language, but we will stick with HTML. Almost every single website that exist, regardless of who, where, how or when it was created, uses HTML code in order to function. Other types of code can be added later on to expand the functionality or abilities of the website. HTML code basically handles the semantic layout of a website. It does not add any styling such as color, font size or font family, spacing, or anything that makes your website look great. With HTML only, the website will look like a white notepad with some black boring text such as this image snippet:
To give you an idea of what HTML code looks like, the below is a snippet of some HTML code:
<DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Hello World!</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>My HTML code.</h1>
<p>Check out this HTML code</p>
</body>
</html>
For more information you can check this website that explains everything: https://www.w3schools.com/html/
(HTML code written by Freedom Software)
CSS Coding for Websites
Also known as Cascading Style Sheets, but once again, let us just stick with CSS. CSS coding works hand-in-hand with HTML code. The primary focus of CSS is to style the website to make it look great and to make it user friendly. It uses what they call selectors to select specific groups or single elements that you wish to style, move, or color. This block (and every other element on this website) uses CSS to make them look as great as they do.
It does not include animations, such as blocks moving around, or creating interactive pages.
CSS can be added inline or as a separate file. The inline code can be added inside the HTML code and should be used in rare circumstances, and is usually found between two quotes preceded by the word style: style=”{CSS code}”. When you use this method you do not need to use selectors.
Using it in a separate CSS file, keeps it separate and allows you to reuse some of the code. It is also easy to maintain or change.
CSS code in a file would look something like this:
.elementor-pagination-position-outside .swiper-container {
max-height:250px;
}@media (min-width: 960px)
{ .builder-item--logo .site-logo img {
max-width:850px !important;
}}.page-id-17 .hfg_header .header-main-inner {
height:90vh !important;
}.hfg_header .header-main-inner {
height:300px !important;
}
For more information on CSS you can look at this website: https://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp
(CSS code written by Freedom Software)
JavaScript Coding for Websites
JavaScript is where things become interesting. It is used to make the website interactive, such as animations and clickable events and buttons. JavaScript can also change the HTML and CSS code. This means you can dynamically change the look and feel of your website and also the content.
Some of the most advanced features are usually handled by JavaScript, although there are alternatives such as Typescript, JavaScript is a very popular and commonly used language. Just like CSS, JavaScript uses selectors to affect a group or single elements on the webpage.
A quick example of some JavaScript code embedded in HTML code would be the following (the red text is the JavaScript code:
<body>
<h1 id="test">Hello World!</h1>
<script>
document.getElementById("test").innerHTML = "This changes the text in the h1 tag of the HTML code above.";
</script>
</body>
For more information on JavaScript you can look at: https://www.w3schools.com/js/
(HTML and JavanScript code written by Freedom Software)
jQuery Coding for Websites
jQuery is a library/extension of JavaScript. It simplifies certain features of JavaScript and adds some extra features. Just like JavaScript, it is used for the more advanced features such as animations and interactive pages.
A quick sample of the code:
<script>
$(document).ready(function(){
$("img").mouseenter(function(){
alert("Displays this text when the mouse enters the area of an image!");
});
});
</script>
For more information on jQuery you can look at: https://www.w3schools.com/jquERy/
(jQuery written by Freedom Software)
PHP Coding for Websites
PHP code, or Hypertext Preprocessor, is a general purpose language that offers a very wide variety of features and abilities. As mentioned before, WordPress uses PHP as its foundation. PHP is run on the server where the website is located and extremely powerful.
This very website is build using WordPress, this means it uses all the languages mentioned up to this point, including some custom code to give it that extra something special.
A sample of PHP code would look like this (this code snippet is from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP):
<?php
echo "<h2>This PHP code creates a heading</h2>";
?>
For more information on PHP you can have a look at: https://www.w3schools.com/php/
(The PHP code was written by Freedom Software)
SEO for Websites
Also known as Search Engine Optimization, SEO refers to promoting your website on Search Engines to ensure that your website appears at the top of search results on platforms such as Google Search. This will ensure that your website will be seen first, giving you more traffic and possible leads.
This is a much more complicated process than it sounds like. There is a big number of things that need to be in place and that needs to be updated regularly. Some examples are the wording of each page, the speed of loading webpages, user friendliness, links to your website on other websites, website responsiveness, proper use of code such as JavaScript and CSS, and these are just to name a few.
SEO is vitally important to any business or person who needs to have a lot of website traffic to promote their business, service, or product. Many business fall and rise purely based on how well their website performs and proper SEO gives your website a massive boost.
POPIA and GDPR for Websites
POPIA (Protection Of Personal Information Act) and GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) has become a sore point for many organizations who work with, store or access any form of personal information of any person or business (the latter being protected mostly only by POPIA). These regulate how, why, when, where and who is allowed to have access, use, store and process any personal information. Failing to do so properly can end up in massive fines or even jail time.
Anything from a simple contact form on your website to receiving an email from someone gives you access to their information and you are bound by POPIA and GDPR. Not many people are aware that most websites use something called cookies. It is a small file that gathers personal information from the website visitor that is needed by the website to function properly. This information also falls under POPIA and GDPR.
There are quite a few steps and procedures that need to be taken in order to comply with POPIA and GDPR and that is where we come in. For more information you can Contact Us or visit https://popia.co.za/ for POPIA and https://gdpr-info.eu/ for GDPR.
