Internal systems, public-facing sites, and scalable web applications, they're all products we custom design and build to meet our client's needs.

In web develpoment, purpose, goals and audience help to define content and functionality. Because we believe that form should follow function, data architecture and systems engineering set the stage for visual design, which is used to enhance usability and accessibility—not distract from them.

Data architecture is the foundation of our web development. The web browser has enabled us to provide access to that data anywhere needed via a free, platform agnostic interface and that's a great thing. Access, however, is less meaningful if the database itself is not secure, fast, and scalable, and designing, building and tuning database systems to meet those requirements is our core strength. We have over 30 years of relational database design experience among our staff, with emphasis on Microsoft's SQL Server Database platform.

Once designed, developed and deployed, business systems need to stay online, accessible, and fast and they need to be maintained, as well. We provide performance monitoring, ongoing index tuning and upgrade maintenance services for every system we build to ensure the system continues to perform optimally for as long as it is in use.

Change can be very hard, especially when it comes to business computer systems that have been in place for many years, even decades. Those systems often have to change, however, as they have become burdensome to update and as their features and benefits no longer offer the competitive edge for the business they did initially, and that edge is needed now more than ever.

We can help move old systems (think mini-computer, ie AS/400) into modern, sustainable architectures (think client/server) in a way that ensures the business is impacted only in positive ways and users are able to transition smoothly from their old interfaces to their new systems. We can also ensure data from the original system is brought into the new so that data is just as accessible and relevant as new data captured going forward.

Building a great system, small or large, starts with clarity of purpose, goals and expectations. In our experience, more minds make for better thinking. “I need another pair of eyes” is a phrase you hear every day at our place. The more minds the better, we've found, and we excel at facilitating disparate minds in group settings when it's necessary to set project purpose, prioritize project goals and to build consensus around both.

The key to building great systems and web applications is to begin with a solid infrastructure. Through research, discovery, and strategic planning, we begin each project by mapping out the journey ahead. This often includes, but is not limited to, industry analysis, site mapping, information architecting and wireframing, and formal documentation of user flows and site functionality.

There is a fair amount of complexity in the field of technology and considering either small or large projects can be a little easier if you have someone with a fair degree of experience in the field. In the end, you have to make your own decisions, but we can help provide guidance based on what we've learned over the years working with a wide variety of hardware and software systems.

While we like building things, we also like helping others to understand the things that can make our field seem so complex, so they can make better, more confident decisions.

We have built systems from the ground up, even starting at the level of computer hardware, networking devices, operating systems as well as application platforms. We have worked extensively, at this point, with virtualization including virtualized databases. If any of those areas are areas where you might have questions, we may be able to help guide you.