We believe that successful web site development is built around a good understanding of the requirements by the developer, and good communication between developer and the client throughout the project lifecycle.

Our development process follows this philosophy and includes:

• Initial Specification - the scope, requirements and deliverables for the project are clearly defined and agreed with the client in a detailed functional specification and project plan
• Design - visual designs for key web pages are created and approved by the client prior to web site development
• Development - prototype web sites are used to demonstrate functionality and show web site progress throughout the development phase
• Testing - all development work is unit tested by the developer and then independently system tested against the functional specification
• UAT - finally a user acceptance testing (UAT) phase is undertaken by the client to verify that the web site conforms to the agreed development specification and design layouts
• Status Updates - we aim to communicate with clients on a weekly basis to feed back progress of the project against the project plan and discuss any issues around the web site development

We use the latest Microsoft technologies to make our web sites faster, more powerful and more resilient than our competitors, including the use of:

• Universal Mark-up Language (UML) techniques to design the program code, ensuring the quality and scalability of the web site
• . NET 2 development platform and ASP. NET programming language to stringent internal coding standards
• Javascript, Ajax and Microsoft Master Pages and Enterprise library technologies
• Microsoft SQL Server databases for our web sites for security and reliability
• Cascading Style Sheets ( CSS ) to easily change the site look and feel, with compliance to W3C XHTML 1.0 and CSS specifications (see the www.w3.org web site for more details)
• Best practice techniques to ensure that web sites are completely visible to search engine crawlers

We are a Registered Microsoft partner, enrolled in the Microsoft Independent Software Vendor's program and are committed to using the latest Microsoft technologies to ensure that our clients' web sites perform as efficiently as possible.

We have the experience to also integrating your web sites with 3rd party software if required, including:

Front-end:

• Integration with payment processing web sites for ecommerce applications
• Implementation of address validation software to ensure that web form address information is correct

Back-end:

• Integration with client databases, including Oracle and Microsoft SQL, and company ERP, CRM and financial systems allowing you to:
• ensure that your web site is up to date with the latest product, pricing and if applicable customer information
• display stock levels and warnings on your web site
• feed order information directly into your fulfilment and finance systems
• add web site contact details directly into your contact/ CRM database

We take great care to prevent malicious hacking of our web sites to prevent corruption of the web site presentation or theft of customer data, including:

• HTTP basic authentication to provide a basic level of security
• session management to log users out if no activity is recorded over a set time period
• login forms for administration areas and specified customer areas to authorise access to these areas, secured so that the time required between subsequent failed login attempts increases exponentially
• log records recorded for every login attempt and email form submission
• all email forms secured to they cannot be submitted more than a set number of times or within a set time period of each other in the same session
• payment details and login pages encrypted using trusted SSL 128bit encryption algorithms
• secure TCP /IP connections used to pass payment details to payment processing company