Our Process

Strategic Consulting

We begin every project with the same questions: What are your business goals? Are you experiencing a specific problem that needs to be solved? Or do you need help figuring out what’s going wrong? This open dialogue is crucial in bridging the gap between your goals and the right solution. After a complete analysis, we’ll assess your needs, systems and budget and make a strategic recommendation that takes into account your entire business situation.

UI Design

Designing the user interface for your web product is a core component of our services. We investigate the unique features that your target audience requires. We create a user interface that is elegant, easy to use and intuitive. And we carefully consider the product’s relationship to your other online properties. Our design will meet or exceed your brand’s standards.

System Architecture

We work with you to understand your requirements and then create a conceptual map of your web product. Based on this high-level strategy, we then work through every facet of the functional design. The end product is an extremely detailed blueprint of your web product, outlining every component and mapping out exactly how the components and technologies interact with one another.

Programming and Development

Once we design the interface and select the technology, our development team builds the application that drives the web product. As the framework for the entire information solution, this customized application holds the content, receives and processes user requests and delivers the intended search results. We also deliver the applications that enable you to maintain your product going forward.

A successful web product can only be built on a strong technological foundation. Our long-term experience allows us to select and customize a wide range of tools and technologies to optimize your website. Our custom capabilities include:

• Programming with .NET 2.0, C#, ASP.NET, AJAX, JavaScript
• Development under Windows Server and IIS
• DTD, XML, CSS development
• Database programming with SQL, MySQL, Oracle, ODBC and others
• Design with Macromedia Flash, Front Page and Microsoft Visual Studio

Data Integration

Whenever possible, we’ll integrate directly with your existing databases and XML repositories. Leveraging your infrastructure minimizes disruptions to your current business processes, reduces workload, and prevents your having to maintain an additional database.

We have in-depth experience integrating with:

Ongoing Support

We can continue to manage the web site after it launches. We can act as your permanent, or temporary, webmaster, taking on responsibility for site updates. We can also work with you to refresh the information contained in the content collection if you expect that new materials will need to be added to it on an ongoing basis.

Data Architecture

A sustainable and successful web product also requires a logical schema for organizing, storing and processing your data. To deliver the data architecture for your solution, we do a complete analysis of the data entities, technologies and business functions, and then we specify the relationships between them. In doing so, we consider how you want to display the data, your search and navigation requirements, and how best to control the flow of data in the system.

Database design

• XML design
• XML schema
• Metadata repository design

Data Transformation

We work with you to make sure that all of your information is in the correct format. We can convert legacy electronic information or paper documents to XML or HTML in order to make them fully searchable and accessible and to allow the data to be repurposed into multiple products. We can also include PDF content and image files in their native formats.

Testing and Delivery

The final product is a fully-searchable and navigable web-based content collection for users to access. The web site goes through an extensive QA process before it is delivered, in order to assure that it is completely user-ready prior to launch.