A Myriad of Skills:
A Tool For Any Job...
Whether you own a small business, or an international Fortune 500 corporation, having developers with a myriad of skills is important to making sure that all aspects of your website play well together. Though we specialize in PHP and MySQL, we are also highly versed in JavaScript (including AJAX Web 2.0 uses,) and multi-browser compatible CSS and HTML, and are quite capable in Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator.PHP:
PHP is an open source server side language that has been around for 27 years. If you don't think an open source language is for you, consider the fact that websites like Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Digg, Facebook, and popular web applications such as Blogger, WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, osCommerce, and Magento all use PHP. And because PHP is free, you can find inexpensive PHP capable hosts all over the world. Here are a few select samples of our PHP work.The Zend Framework - Security, speed, and flexibility...
Zend Powered Communitas CMS + Magento eCommerce After a year of development with a small team of programmers, the final website offered a rich user experience that is more than just commerce. Mutually built on top of the Zend Framework, Communitas is tied to Magento via an extended Magento API like no other platform on the market. This website is built to seamlessly span multiple servers. It has a large and flexible cache, supporting many additional commerce features not readily available in Magento, including a unique blend of blog and product content. Available in multiple currencies and languages, with visitors spanning the globe, this website was our most challenging project to date. Contact us to learn more »Popular Applications - Facebook, Magento, WordPress & more...
Coors Light Football – Facebook Application. This fast passed project was a great example of the power of Facebook when combined with a sleek user interface powered by jQuery and AJAX. Extensive use of the Facebook Graph API allowed us to build a secure game that ties in with the user's Facebook friends. Using the Facebook JS API (and even integrating it with Flash when needed,) gave us the power to drive wall posts and invitations, helping spread the word. To top it all off, integrating Google Analytics helped the client see exactly how this Facebook Application is helping their brand. Check it out »Customized WordPress More than just a blogging tool, WordPress can be a powerful and popular CMS. When we were asked to work on a new website for a local publishing company, the client already had their heart set on WordPress. With the creation of custom administrative tools via a WordPress Plugin, we were able to give this client the ability to control not only blog posts, but many pages with complex and varied content. Contact us to learn more »
Coors Light: Pass The Pint – Facebook Application. Pass The Pint is a great example of what can be achieved with a quick implementation of Facebook code. This Coors Light application uses straight forward FBML to get a list of friends and send posts to their walls. Combined with AJAX for tracking, this is a simple yet powerful application. Check it out »
Custom Applications - Anything Is Possible...
InkBusters – Custom, Unique, Powerful. From the word "go", the in-house web application we created for InkBusters has been a prime example of the power of PHP, MySQL, and AJAX programming. More than a simple website, this web application is more like a desktop application, handling the company's inventory, sales, and customer records. With the ability to search tens of thousands of printer and cartridge combinations in moments, and track individual customer purchasing records this web application is the corner stone of the InkBusters business model.PHP File Security and Multi-Language Support. When we built a website for an international clothing manufacturer, we built it to use custom PHP integrated into the site's template to handle the reading and downloading of press releases in 6 different languages. The website also utilized Apache's HTACCESS and some clever PHP programming to secure all file downloads to authorized visitors only. Contact us to learn more »
A Little Something For Everyone. Almost every one of our websites utilizes PHP in at least some small manner. Whether using PHP to display dates, discreetly include files, or power contact forms, most websites can benefit from a bit of PHP. No task is too small to overlook.
MySQL:
A Database For The Masses...
Most websites and open source applications that utilize PHP also use MySQL, the 27 year old open source database language now owned by Sun Microsystems. MySQL is supported by nearly all hosting companies, and when combined with tools like MySQL Query Browser or PHP MyAdmin, it can be very easy to use. For those of you who don't mind a little techno-babble, know that we often utilize foreign keys, sub-selects, and joins, plus good old fashioned planning to make our databases as flexible and fast as possible.CSS / HTML:
Light, Flexible, Compliant, & Browser Compatible...
Whether you're creating a basic HTML email to send out to your clients, or if you're looking to render a complicated website template, we've got you covered. CSS can cause major headaches when dealing with multiple versions of today's browsers, but our years of experience have taught us how to overcome these common hurdles. In addition to support for Internet Explorer (7 & 8), Firefox (2 & 3), Safari (2 & 3) and Chrome, our CSS is hack free, and standards compliant whenever possible.JavaScript / AJAX:
Once used for nothing but pop-ups, and things that blink and move entirely too much, JavaScript has gotten a bad rap, but AJAX and the Web 2.0 movement have changed everything. We use JavaScript and AJAX to enhance your visitor's experience rather than hinder it. Take a well developed website, sprinkle on some properly thought out JavaScript and you can get a website with all of the hallmarks of a desktop application without the draw backs of Flash.Prototype, Scriptaculous, Custom - It's All here...
InkBusters – AJAX just does it better. The in-house web application we developed for the crew over at InkBusters does a lot of things well, and one is its use of AJAX. We developed the InkBusters user interface to be asynchronous, allowing the large amounts of data that users need to work with to move in and out of the page piece by piece as it's needed. No waiting for the page to refresh. No scrolling over and over again. Just easy to use.Perrone Leather – Swatch Configuration. Perrone Leather had a very unique request: to allow their users to be able to color, layer, and rotate different patterns for use in leather and fabrics, and the ability to see these changes live. This not only presented a difficult challenge in the way of image generation, (which we tackled using the GD Library in PHP) but it also required a complex system of tabs, buttons, and sliders to all work in concert, much like Adobe Photoshop®. It was an interesting challenge, and yielded great results.
Other Skills:
Search Engine Optimization...
SEO is a complex and highly detail oriented development process that strives to make your website correctly reflect the product or information that your website is about, which in turn may increase your position in search rankings under various terms. SEO is not a simple matter of changing “meta tags” or sneaking content in where it doesn’t belong, and developers claiming this should be avoided. We perform SEO using many different techniques including:- Using clean HTML with as little inline CSS as possible. This makes it very easy for search engines to find the stuff that matters.
- Offering search engines (not to mention screen readers for the blind) as much text as possible when images are used. Because computers cannot easily read text inside images, a poorly rendered design can severely hurt search rankings and accessibility.
- Using the full capabilities of HTML to provide search engines with alternate language and table of contents pages where applicable. (Ask about this when developing a multilingual website.)
- Asking clients to carefully think through the search terms that they would like to address, and asking that they provide content that addresses those terms.
- Using tools such as Google Analytics to analyze what search terms are most successful.
