This stage covers the design concept of the site as well as the navigation of it (which page will link to which page, etc.). The architecture is critical (as the whole site is based on it) and we are excellent at it.

Artistic renditions (or mock-ups) of the site are provided to you very fast -- usually within 2 working days. After the initial artistic concept is agreed upon we work to finalize it so the project can move to the next phase.

Once the artwork of the site is finalized it gets "cut up". It ends up becoming smaller pieces of artwork as well as code. These items and coding are then used to create the individual web pages for your site.

This is the "Checkout" portion of an e-commerce site and would be integrated with your current merchant provider if you have one. We can set this up with standard merchant service systems or web-based services such as PayPal or NETeller. We can even help you set up your own merchant account with a reputable financial service.

Adding this feature allows you to update your product pages without paying a design firm to do it for you. You'll be able to add, edit or delete products, pricing or other product detail.

We'll design this administrative page to have easy to fill in fields where you input information about each product. The details you enter will be displayed in their proper place on each product page when viewed by customers. This is completely customized to fit your product line.

Addition of new products is a breeze with this module. Simply click "Add Product" and fill in the appropriate information on the Add Product page. Click the "Submit" button to enter it into the catalog and onto your web site.

This allows users to put items they'd like to buy in a virtual cart so they don't have to go through an ordering process each time they choose to buy a product. It enables multiple items to be purchased at one time.

If you're considering having a new e-commerce web site built for you, this module is indispensible. Integrating this function during the construction of a new site is the most economical route.

We can also retro-fit an existing site with a shopping cart. If you already have a site with an online catalog of some sort the addition of a shopping cart will encourage additional purchases from your customers.

Web sites can use this module whether they are dynamic or not. This means that even the most simple web site can have a custom shopping cart added. If your site is older or "static" we simply configure the shopping cart to appear as a pop-up cart. Any time a user wants to view their cart they click a button and it appears.

Boy, that's a mouthful isn't it? This allows your users to create a user profile and log in when they go to the site. It "remembers" whatever information you'd like it to remember, such as credit card data, their user profile and order history - which is all changeable by them. This is a major feature for returning customers as it allows them to move through the checkout process very fast.

This allows you or employees to view details of orders, mark them as "Received", "In Progress", "Delivered", etc., give a "Customer Satisfaction Level" or any other information you'd like, with time stamps or other tracking information so you can see how things are being handled. This is a very customized set of features and is set up to best suit your needs. Many clients prefer the cleanest of layouts, showing a list of orders made, when and by whom.

This module is actually 2 individual pieces of programming. And while they are separate coding products they work in concert so both are included here;

• Order Tracking (being able to see the details of the order) and

• User Management (being able to contribute to the details in some way for administrative purposes).

This is a changeable board whereby users can add/edit and/or delete posts for other users to see. We commonly set this up so only those with the required username/password can edit or delete posts.

This can be used as an announcement page, show items for sale, display happenings in a community or business setting, etc.

Would you like a continuous stream of up-to-the-minute data streaming on your site? You can have it.

We use official reporting agencies and integrate the items you want on your site. You have the ultimate say-so in what gets displayed and we tailor it to your needs (Business News, Financial Data, World Events, Stock Tickers, etc.) Some of these services may have monthly/yearly fees payable to the reporting source.

Banner ads are common to today's internet. And while we don't like seeing them pop-up when unsolicited, surveys show a different attitude when they are on a web site a user is intentionally visiting. These are usually from paid advertisers and are closely associated with the product/service the user is looking for. For instance, if your web site sold cellular phones you could have banner ads for service providers as well as accessory dealers - things you don't provide.

The banner ads can be different sizes (such as small, medium & large). Via an admin Page the length of time they are shown can be changed. These speeds could be: Fixed (doesn't change), Seldom (maybe every 20 seconds the ad changes) & Rapid (perhaps 7 seconds and the ad changes). It all depends on how it best suits your business and how many advertisers you would allow on your site.

A very flexible module. We can set this up in various configurations but in its most basic form is a place where an admin (or qualified user) can upload images and these images can be viewed by users.

The images can be displayed in various categories or simply one. The images can have descriptions or not. And typically the images are displayed as small thumbnails and expand when clicked on. The gallery can have other options as well - like the large image appearing on the page or in a pop-up, the ability of the image to be saved as wallpaper on the user's computer, the ability of the image to be printed directly, etc.

Want a visitor to be able to add a link to your site without you having to do it manually? This is the answer. One way to amass traffic to your site is the exchange of links. People visiting sites that have a link to your site may visit you and ultimately purchase the product/service you promote.

However, the more popular your site becomes the more link exchange requests you'll receive. The answer to this is the links module. A user to your site visits a page and inputs their link information (Site Name, Description, upload of banner, URL, etc.) and submits it. Depending on how you set the administrative controls it either automatically displays on your links page or you have the option of reviewing it (to ensure it is suitable content for your site) and accepting/rejecting it via a special Administrative Page.

This is a very popular item on today's web site. A forum is basically a place where members of your site can post questions, comments and information for the other users to view, add to or comment on. There's usually more than one category and often subcategories for members to use. Depending on the content of your site this can be a valuable resource to have people repeatedly at your site.

This can be used in concert with other modules. A popular combination is the Forum and Banner Ad Rotation modules. This way you offer the free service of a forum to your users but also expose them to fitting advertisements by paid advertising clients. It's a win-win situation.

The classified module is absolutely wonderful. Mind you it's totally customizable to your business and how it would best serve you but here's a scenario showing how it might be implemented.

It often starts out with text explaining how to use the service ("Pick a category from the drop-down menu and click 'Go'") and the cost/benefits of placing an online classified ad.

Immediately below this can be listed every item in the classified section (with 10 or 20 per page displayed). At the top of the list would be headings above each column of data (Category, Make, Model, Year, Mileage, Price, etc.) and each of these would be hyperlinked and if clicked will resort the list accordingly.

If a category is chosen from the drop-down list and "Go" is clicked the page would refresh with all items from that category.

Once an item is clicked on the user might see the following (depending on your specific requirements) on a new page:

• Picture (can be clicked to view full sized imaged)

• Make, Model, Year, Mileage, Price

• Description (with a limit to how many characters they may type)

• Contact Info (phone, email, pager, etc.)

There is an administrative page where any item can be added, edited, archived or deleted and the user can also do these things.

This is a major feature to add to your site. It enables customers to stay on your site for extended periods of time and be exposed to advertising (see Banner Ad Rotation above). It can invite them to return often and can be integrated with the Opt-in Email System (below) to automatically notify people when particular stock is added.

The classified ads module is not just for outside users to your site. It isn't just for users to buy and sell to each other. This module is what we used if creating a site for auto, motorcycle, boat sales, etc. This is the way to display your stock very easily and give live information that can be changed easily at a moments notice. You can't do that with print advertising…

Allows you (or users) to submit articles and have them display for users to view. This is a completely customized module based on your business. Let's give an example of how this might work though. Let's say you would be having several categories of articles.

At the top of your "Articles" page there could be titles of each category of articles offered. It would offer a simple search function (basically a drop-down menu with various sub-categories of articles that can be pulled out of the database) or a complex search function (where users type key words and results are pulled based on their search criteria).

It would then list the articles available in the category of the page they chose. The list of articles might be simple text links with the title of the article in bold and 100-200 characters of content from the article after it so users can see if it's applicable.

If a new category is chosen from the Search Function the page would refresh with the new articles listed and the category's name for the page title.

Adding articles can be set up so administrators only can add them via a special administrative page or where users to the site can submit them, choosing categories, etc. for final approval from an administrator before displaying on the site. This allows total control as to the content of your Articles page.

This uses weather.com for an information source and can be set up in a variety of ways. It can be set up so the weather of the location you're promoting from (say a condominium complex is southern Florida) is displayed automatically, or it can be set up where the user must input their zip code or city name. It can also be used in concert with the above "User Management/Login/Authentication/Web Based Admin Page for User Management" module so when the user logs on it automatically tells him the weather for his stored location.

This is an absolutely wonderfully module. While it is configured to best suit your needs the basic idea is having control over the users requesting information from you.

Users sign up for a newsletter or updates (depends on what you're offering) and their email address is stored in a database. This database can be created to store different categories of users (those who have purchased from you, those that are simply inquiries, etc.).

By going to an administrative page you can select parts of each list or the whole list and send them emails. You can elect to send them html newsletters (that look like web pages when they receive them - graphics and whatnot) or text only. This preference would be defined by the user when he signs up.

Hypertext Markup Language. This is the set of markup symbols or codes inserted in a file intended for display on the World Wide Web. The markup tells the Web browser how to display a Web page for the user. Each individual markup code is referred to as an element or tag.

HTML is a formal recommendation by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and is generally adhered to by the major browsers (Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Netscape's Navigator) which also provide some additional non-standard codes. The current version of HTML is HTML 4.01.

However, both Internet Explorer and Netscape implement some features differently and provide non-standard extensions. This makes building web sites very challenging, even for the professional. As a side-note, the Opera browser is the most compliant (not to mention fastest) at implementing the standard HTML language.

Dynamic HTML. A combination of new Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) tags and options that allow the creation of Web pages that are more animated and more responsive to user interaction than previous versions of HTML. Simple examples of dynamic HTML pages would include (1) the expanding drop-down menu used on this site (2) allowing a user to "drag and drop" an image to another place on a Web page.

Extensible Hypertext Markup Language. For readers unacquainted with the terms, HTML is the set of codes known as "markup language" that a writer puts into a document to make it displayable on the World Wide Web. XHTML is a structured set of rules for how one might define any kind of data to be shared on the Web.

It's called an "extensible" markup language because anyone can invent a particular set of markup for a particular purpose and as long as everyone uses it (the writer and an application program at the receiver's end), it can be adapted and used for many purposes - including, as it happens, describing the appearance of a Web page. That being the case, it seemed desirable to rename HTML in terms of XML. The result is XHTML, a particular application of XML for "expressing" Web pages.

Extensible Markup Language. This is a flexible way to create common information formats and share both the format and the data on the World Wide Web, and elsewhere.

For example, computer makers might agree on a standard or common way to describe the information about a computer product (processor speed, memory size, or whatever) and then describe the product information format with XML. Such a standard way of describing data would enable a user to send a program to each computer maker's Web site, gather data, and then make a valid comparison. XML can be used by any individual or group of individuals or companies that wants to share information in a consistent way. XML, a formal recommendation from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), is similar to the language of today's Web pages, the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). Both XML and HTML contain markup symbols to describe the contents of a page or file.

HTML, however, describes the content of a Web page (mainly text and graphic images) only in terms of how it is to be displayed and interacted with. For example, the letter "p" placed within markup tags starts a new paragraph.

XML describes the content in terms of what data is being described. For example, the word "faxnum" placed within markup tags could indicate that the data that followed was a fax number. This means that an XML file can be processed purely as data by a program or it can be stored with similar data on another computer or, like an HTML file, that it can be displayed. For example, depending on how the application in the receiving computer wanted to handle the fax number, it could be stored, displayed, or dialed.

XML is "extensible" because, unlike HTML, the markup symbols are unlimited and self-defining. It is expected that HTML and XML will be used together in many Web applications. XML markup, for example, may appear within an HTML page.

This was named after the Indonesian island and is considered a "source of programming fluid".

Java is a simple, object-oriented, distributed, interpreted, robust, secure, architecture-neutral, portable, multithreaded, dynamic, buzzword-compliant, general-purpose programming language developed by Sun Microsystems around 1995. Java supports programming for the Internet in the form of platform-independent Java "applets".

Cascading Style Sheets. An extension to HTML to allow styles, e.g. color, font, size to be specified for certain elements of a hypertext document. Style information can be included in-line in the HTML file or in a separate CSS file (which can then be easily shared by multiple HTML files). Multiple levels of CSS can be used to allow selective overriding of styles.

A file format for delivering interactive vector graphics and animation on the World-Wide Web, developed by Macromedia.

It is visually stunning and very effective in producing aesthetic web projects. The use of Flash varies widely from individual graphic pieces (such as the header at the top of this page) to entire sites built with this technology.

Presentations and complex animations can be done in Flash that are a fraction of the size of full video production and much less costly to produce.

Active Server Page. A scripting environment for Microsoft® Internet Information Server in which you can combine HTML, scripts and reusable ActiveX server components to create dynamic web pages.

Hypertext Preprocessor. It originally meant "Personal Home Page" and was created in 1994 by Rasmus Lerdorf to track visitors to his online resume. PHP later became to mean "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor." This means that the PHP code actually handles data before it becomes HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). PHP is really the next level of Web applications since it allows you to send and receive data. PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML.

PHP can be used to tell your browser to get and receive information from a database. Some common examples of this are hit counters, search engines, job database information, journals, generic e-mail forms, guest books, and much more. E-commerce sites have really been able to use this technology by allowing on-line sales to be much easier because of PHP.

It doesn't actually hold the information though. That would actually done with a server side database program like SQL (which is talked about elsewhere on this site). The PHP coding actually tells the server to use the database to do a certain task, like a search, and then the code deciphers what the server tells it and exports it as HTML so your browser can display the information, which is why it is call a hypertext preprocessor.

Practical Extraction and Report Language. A high-level programming language, started by Larry Wall in 1987 and developed as an open source project. It has an eclectic heritage, deriving from the ubiquitous {C} programming language and to a lesser extent from at least a dozen other tools and languages. Originally developed for Unix, it is now available for many platforms.

Perl's elaborate support for regular expression matching and substitution has made it the language of choice for tasks involving string manipulation, whether for text or binary data. It is particularly popular for writing CGI scripts.

The language's highly flexible syntax and concise regular expression operators, make densely written Perl code indecipherable to the uninitiated. The syntax is, however, really quite simple and powerful. And once the basics have been mastered, a joy to write.

Visual Basic. A popular event-driven visual programming system from Microsoft corporation for Microsoft Windows. VB is good for developing Windows interfaces, it invokes fragments of BASIC code when the user performs certain operations on graphical objects on-screen.

It is widely used for in-house application program development and for prototyping. It can also be used to create ActiveX and COM components

Cold Fusion Markup Language. A tag based markup language used to create Cold Fusion applications by embedding Cold Fusion commands in HTML files.

Cold Fusion is Allaire Corporation's commercial database application development tool that allows databases to have a World-Wide Web interface, so a database can be queried and updated using a web browser.

The Cold Fusion Server application runs on the web server and has access to a database. Cold Fusion files on the web server are HTML pages with additional Cold Fusion commands to query or update the database, written in CFML. When the page is requested by the user, the web server passes the page to the Cold Fusion application, which executes the CFML commands, places the results of the CFML commands in the HTML file, and returns the page to the web server. The page returned to the web server is now an ordinary HTML file, and it is sent to the user.

Examples of Cold Fusion applications include order entry, event registration, catalogue search, directories, calendars, and interactive training. Cold Fusion applications are robust because all database interactions are encapsulated in a single industrial-strength CGI script. The formatting and presentation can be modified and revised at any time (as opposed to having to edit and recompile source code).

Structured Query Language. An industry-standard language for creating, updating and, querying relational database management systems.

SQL was developed by IBM in the 1970's. It is the de facto standard and is often embedded in general purpose programming languages.

The first SQL standard, in 1986, provided basic language constructs for defining and manipulating tables of data; a revision in 1989 added language extensions for referential integrity and generalized integrity constraints. Another revision in 1992 provided facilities for schema manipulation and data administration, as well as substantial enhancements for data definition and data manipulation. Revisions continue to this day.

Oracle Corporation was founded in 1977 in Redwood, California. They introduced the first Relational Database Management System based on the IBM System/R model and the first database management system utilizing IBM's Structured Query Language (SQL) technology.

Today, the Oracle DBMS (Database Management System - a software system that facilitates the creation and maintenance and use of an electronic database) is supported on over 80 different operating environments, ranging from IBM mainframes, DEC VAX minicomputers, UNIX-based minicomputers, Windows NT and several proprietary hardware-operating system platforms and is clearly the world's largest RDBMS (Relational Database Management System) vendor.

C# (pronounced C-sharp) is a new Java-like language from Microsoft. Microsoft says that C# is a language with the power of C++ and simplicity of Visual Basic. C# is supposed to be the best language for Microsoft's .NET programming.

.NET (pronounced "dot net" is Microsoft's strategy for developing and delivering next generation software products and web services. In .NET, Microsoft's focus is web based application instead of the desktop because they think the future is the web.

Three key elements of .NET are:

1. Microsoft .NET platform: Includes .NET infrastructure and tools to build and operate a new generation of services, .NET user experience to enable rich clients, .NET building block services and .NET device software to enable a new generation of smart Internet devices.

2. Microsoft .NET products and services: Includes Microsoft Windows.NET (with a core integrated set of building block services), MSN.NET, personal subscription services, Microsoft Office.NET, Microsoft Visual Studio.NET, and Microsoft bCentral™ for .NET.

3. Third-party .NET services: A vast range of partners and developers will have the opportunity to produce corporate and vertical services built on the .NET platform.

This is the most popular operating system for handheld devices (handheld PCs to specialized industrial controllers and consumer electronic devices).

One thing we use it for is custom programming for PDA's. Imagine a worker being able to go through a warehouse inputting information into a handheld device - this data instantly updating your inventory tracking software. These types of application are right up our alley.

This is a version of the Microsoft Windows operating system that is being used in a variety of embedded products, from handheld PCs to specialized industrial controllers and consumer electronic devices.

One thing we use it for is custom programming for PDA's. Imagine having your entire product line able to be displayed on a PDA while your salesmen visit clients. Instant quotations are possible and no more out-of-date rate cards.