Approach

Our Capabilities

We design and develop websites and management information systems (MIS) for firms, organizations, and individuals. Given our expertise, which you can read about here, here, and here, we can help you realize the power of the web and create a valuable marketing and business tool for your firm. It’s grown-up web design™.

Our systems are easy-to-use, completely searchable, and for larger organizations, totally integrable with other large-scale databases, e.g., billing systems, etc.

Our Approach

Our approach is simple: we offer Grownup Web Design™ and development to other grownups.

We follow the Golden Rule, and treat clients as we would want to be treated ourselves. (We use the same web applications for our corporate sites.)

We’re not a young, art school grad–with no sense of the real world–looking to design pretty-but-slow sites while we await our chance to design the next killer game at Nintendo (or wherever), but we do think our graphical designs have a certain flair and elegance to them.

And, we’re also not coders trying to adapt 1990′s technology to our clients’ demands for an easy-to-maintain web site. We’re like you: we were looking for an easy-to-manage, yet effective, web publishing platform. That’s what we found, and that’s what we offer our clients, too.

We view web sites like any other business tool–as something to help maximize profits or value.

Hardware and Hosting:

We advise clients to outsource web site hosting and e-mail services.

There is no reason to operate one’s own expensive hardware servers when very reliable and very inexpensive alternatives exist. Most hosting providers lease equipment in state-of-the-art server farms and guarantee at least 99.9% up-time, and it is very nearly 100%. (For truly mission-critical web apps, redundant systems are available, but are substantially more expensive.)

For those interested in maintenance agreements and ongoing guidance and advice, we offer hosting on our server (on a server farm) at reasonable prices.

Server Technology and Software

We utilize open-source software and server applications that supported by some of the largest and most respected firms and organizations in the world.

Open-source means free or very nearly so.

Not only are those applications free, but they are also very cheap. Upgrades are free, easy-to-perform, and they seem to be thoroughly and extensively tested prior to their release. There is no catch. Instead, small-and-medium-sized firms can enjoy many of the benefits of near-state-of-the-are information technology.

It is a beautiful and long-sought phenomenon that has resulted from a combination of the advanced state (and affordability) of hardware technology and a convergence of incentives among software developers, consultants, and others.

It is a great time to be alive and engaged in commerce, especially e-commerce.

Large companies offer free versions of software to inhibit competitors or to reduce dependencies on erstwhile suppliers, and small developers give aways plugins (addons with specific functionalities) in hopes of receiving donations or consulting engagements. We take and use the best from both segments, and offer those systems and routines to our clients as part of an integrated package.

Our Platform

For informational (non-transactional) sites, we use the most popular content management platform in the world, and we had use it for small stores, too.

We then integrate additional plugins that we found and use at our own sites. These add-ons help organize the site, track visitors, assist with search-engine optimization, or perform a variety of other essential tasks that improve ease-of-use, visitor experience, or security.

They provide functions that firms want (or will want when they know about them) but have neither the time or inclination to find, evaluate, or install on their own.

Our clients have no interest in learning how to code in html or on CSS pages or any of the other multitude of programming languages. We don’t either, especially when free–or nearly free–off-the-shelf packages work so well.

Moreover, our clients have no desire to become dependent upon a web designer or webmaster, especially for simple content and structure changes. That’s something that they should be able to accomplish themselves, especially for content and announcements that should be updated (or removed) frequently. Have you ever visited a site where out-of-date sales campaigns or expired offers show?

That won’t happen when we empower you and your employees to manage the site’s content. (Of course, we’re happy to manage content, too.) We build CMS-enabled web sites. CMS stands for Content Management System. Modern sites have three components:

Design template or theme or skin or look and appearance,
Infrastructure (server technology and web applications) that permits the easy delivery of content and the management of the site,
Content or material to publish: text, graphics, photos, videos, audio, etc.

We design the look of a site–to your detailed specifications or our artistic impulses if you’re unsure–which is kind of like being an architect.

We develop the infrastructure that gives the functionality, security, and ease-of-use that you seek, which is kind of like being the builder.

We also help develop and/or edit the content that will appear on the site, which is kind of like being the interior designer.

You can rearrange the furniture on your own, so-to-speak, or we can maintain it.

In the old day of static of html pages, these three functions could not be easily or cheaply separated, especially the design and the content, but that’s the beauty of technological innovation and the web platform that we use.

Now, just like a house, once the site is built, neither the architect nor the builder is needed (unless major renovations or expansions are desired). (We do offer maintenance arrangements for clients who want an expert standing by.)

What that means: if you can use a word-processing program or write an e-mail, you (or a subordinate) can manage the content of your site. That includes adding or editing words and pages as well as changing the menu structure and adding or deleting pages (from view or permanently) and attaching files for others to download.

We empower you to publish to the web. It’s so easy that we offer the same web-based platform for internal record-keeping–because the entire site is a database–and qualitative management information systems. (Look for more information on that topic, soon, or just ask us for examples.)

In the back office of your site, you can track visitors and learn how they arrived at the web page, including which search terms were used to locate it. In addition, you can visit the search-engine pages that your guest saw and see where you rank. You can also see visitor counts and the pages within your site that they visited.

Strangers who find your site from a search engine almost never arrive by the front door; so descriptive content and keywords throughout the site matters a great deal–as does a clean look and easy navigation. This is very important and worth restating: strangers who visit your site will rarely arrive at the home page. Of course there’s more features and functionality, like easy-to-administer web calendars, but if you’re interested in our services, you probably want to know more about our process.

Our Process

The design and development process usually consists of the following steps:

Establish hosting account and domain name.
Develop infrastructure (simultaneous or nearly so with (3) and (4)).
Design graphics, and provide photography services, if desired.
Enter & edit content and forms–usually jointly with organization’s owners, managers, or employees.
In multi-user sites, set user roles and permissions.
If required, transfer e-mail accounts to new host.
Go live.
Guarantee work.
Provide maintenance contract if desired for server-related issues and software upgrades, and/or provide content on an ongoing basis.