About Simple Station

The Company

Simple Station Inc. was founded by Stuart Bowness in 2005 and designs simple, usable, and attractive web sites. We are based in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. We mainly work with small and medium sized companies, non-profit organizations, and creative individuals.

The Vision

• Small and Friendly

  Goodbye pretentious business meetings. Hello little coffee shop, and friendly conversation. Our first meeting will always be a relaxed one. Throughout the process - from concept to design - we strive to work with you to create a web site that you will feel excited about.

• Simple and Creative

  The Internet is full of web sites with flash animation and illegible type. Here at Simple Station we create unique web sites tailored to each client’s individual style. While we focus on good legible typography, we ultimately strive to create edgy and usable web sites. Our creativity is not a bully on the playground. We work with you to blend your creativity with ours. Our primary objective is to inform the readers about you. Good design should complement your information, not make it more difficult to read or find.

• Web Standards

  Simple Station produces web sites built on a foundation of valid, structured code, based upon web standards. Many web design companies ignore these standards in order to save time during the development process. At Simple Station, however, we are committed to ensuring that our web sites adhere to these standards. All our sites are highly accessible to screen readers, pda’s and cell phones, and take into account guidelines for disabled and visually impaired users.

• Open Source Technology

  We often use open source technology as a means of reducing costs for our clients. Open Source web technology is freely available, and is developed by many collaborating individuals worldwide. This saves us time in developing technology solutions for our clients, and allows us to participate in a global movement of programmers, businessmen, and designers. This does not take away from the quality of our web sites. Instead this practice augments our creative design work with exceptional technology.

• Technologies We Use

  • XHTML / CSS / YUI Framework
  • PHP and the Zend Framework
  • MYSQL
  • RSS (Really Simple Syndication)
  • Javascript and Ajax
  • Flash
  • One more thing... we’re Mac geeks!

The People

The Station Master

Stuart Bowness BSc is a web designer living in Victoria BC. He is the founder of Simple Station, a small, friendly web design company.

Stuart has a Bachelors in Computer Information Systems and 5 years of experience in developing, implementing, and maintaining small business networks, and 7 years of experience in user interface design. One of his firm beliefs is that the development of clean, simplistic, and easy to use websites is paramount in the modern business world.

All the free time Stuart gets is spent outside of the IT industry and preferably in the great wide outdoors. He is an avid sailor, surfer, hiker, climber, and road-biker

The Engineering Crew

Nathan Wright, works as a PHP/Javascript programmer here at Simple Station and heads up all our major programming initiatives. Over the past year he has become very active in the Zend Framework Open Source Community and loves all things object oriented. In his spare time he loves rock climbing and hard rock, preferably together.

Anthony Theocharis is in his 3rd year of Computer Science at UVic and works at Simple Station as a programmer specializing in Javascript.

The Train Crew (Part-Time)

Heather Bowness B.A. has a degree in Greek and Roman Studies and is our lead copy editor and creative writer for Simple Station. It’s her job to make your content stand out from the rest.

Graeme Sheeley holds a Bachelors in Computer Science and helps handle administration and maintenance projects here at Simple Station Inc. Many of our clients love how detail focused Graeme is. In his off time, Graeme loves to make a two wheeled machine (his bicycle) move as fast up hill as down. Occasionally he has ridden over 200km in a day.