We can provide the best in both front-end design and back-end
programming for small businesses as well as multi-tiered
enterprise systems. Our emphasis is on clean, professional
designs that are efficient and easy to use. Our staff
has training and experience in the following areas:
Our clients want designs that uniquely reflect their own
businesses and perspectives. We are here to create sites
for people who want more than just a template or copy of a site
that everyone else has.
We are experienced in making detailed and complex editing to
photos and other images and can create logos and color schemes
that are customized to your business. We also can create
streaming sound and animation for your site.
Very few companies do hand-coded HTML anymore -- they use
WYSIWYG HTML generators instead. (WYSIWYG = "What You
See Is What You Get") Examples of such programs are
FrontPage, Dreamweaver, etc. This may be useful for
certain cases like rapid prototyping or fast intranets, but
we have found problems with that method as a general
solution. First, many programs create HTML that
works only on one browser, like
Internet Explorer. The same code fails on others.
Another issue is efficiency. Hand-coded HTML will almost
always download faster because it is smaller. The HTML
these automatic programs produce will
rarely be as minimal as hand-coded HTML because they
must necessarily use a general algorithm to solve specific
problems. Sometimes the code they produce is just wrong, and
fixing the unformatted, mangled HTML that is spewed out by
these WYSIWYG generators is a real nightmare. It is nearly
impossible to maintain that sort of code manually or to add
embedded server-side scripting like PHP or JSP. Yes,
it takes longer to hand-code HTML, but we are just old-fashioned
enough to care to do it.
[If you'd like to see how nicely formatted our HTML is, just
right-click on a page of ours and select "View Source".]
We can help you create professional content by writing
and editing the text for your web site.
We are experienced editors with
training in advanced grammar, literature, marketing psychology,
foreign languages and the elements of style and word choice.
We take the time to carefully interview our clients in order
to accurately and effectively represent them online.
Amazingly, it seems most web developers do not spend time doing
usability research to discover the best ways to design web sites
that are easy to use. Some sites have text that is too small
to read or is overlayed on complex graphics that interfere with
legibility. Some sites are attractive but impossible to
navigate in order to find simple things like contact information or
order forms. Other sites are full of fancy graphics or animation
that take forever to download but fail to give even
basic information about the company and what it offers.
NewlightSoftware.com designs web sites with usability issues in
mind.
If you have ever noticed web pages that look good on one
computer and one browser and terrible or at least really different
on another, you have experienced multi-client and multi-platform
compatibility issues. NewlightSoftware.com tests its sites
on as many platforms as possible. We work hard to avoid
compatibility problems, but certain things like differing
screen resolutions on large and small monitors can
create an inconsistent appearance. We are able
to write programs that detect differing screen resolutions,
client versions and platforms, and reformat your web site dynamically
to look the same on all of them. If you are interested in
this level of consistency, ask for an estimate that
includes this option.
If you need restricted access to your site or secure data transmission,
we can provide it. We offer support for both the http and https
protocols. We also can assist you with the acquisition of
an SSL certificate from an Internet Certification Authority (CA) if
needed.
Usability research has shown that if your web page takes more than 10
seconds to download you will lose customers. The longer the page
takes to load, the more customers you lose. We emphasize fast
downloads in our design methodology. If the web site is to
be viewed by the general population, the calculation for page size
must be made with the typical analog modem user in mind.
Some companies require ready access to their business or customer
data from anywhere in the world. We can build custom databases
and applications that are available for secure online access.
We can provide database design, administration and backups and
customized user interfaces to your data, as well as customized report
generation.
We will create the META-tag content and description and submit
your site to all major search engines. If you need help
with additional online advertising, we can also assist with that.
Some companies have a need for more complex, distributed applications.
These systems are not necessarily web-based but may have web components
included. We emphasize the use of Java enterprise technologies
because of Java's inherent portability as well as its capabilities such
as multithreading, object serialization, security management, RMI,
JDBC, EJB, JMS, and so forth. Our software engineers can
build n-tiered systems for clients who need them from the design
phase through testing and final deployment phases.
We provide web pages of usage statistics on your site that
includes number of hits, where visitors came from, etc.
This information is presented in a graphical and
tabular format for ease of interpretation.
These data are accessible by login and password so only
the owner of the data can see them.
