Bespoke Software
Most website designers rely on a basic skill set and a content management system to create websites for their clients but what happens if the client wants something more, something which their trusty management system is incapable of achieving? They may suggest an alternative which offers only a partial solution or they may even tell you that what you want to achieve, is impossible.
We are profficient in a wide range of software so when a client asks for a solution to a unique problem, all we have to do is choose which of our many software skills we need to call on. All of our development is carried out 'in house' which means we are in full control of both quality and deadlines.
Don't be fooled by software designers who create solutions by joining together other people's libraries in the hope of the end result meeting your requirements.
HTML is the backbone of the internet, it is the code which tells your computer what to display on your screen. Creating HTML pages using a content
management system is all very well, but when the code stops working properly, and it will, a designer with no knowledge of HTML will be
clueless about how to fix it.
HTML tells your computer what to display and CSS tells your computer how to display the content. CSS is complex and a firm grasp of how it works is essential if you
are going to avoid having issues with content not appearing as it should.
Many people will never have heard of Perl but it is the program which keeps many large websites running. Perl is a very powerful server side language and we
use it on all of our websites to provide background functionality to make websites far more than static.
Most people will have heard of PHP but many will not know what it does. PHP and Perl are both server side languages and we use both for a wide variety of tasks.
They are each more suited to particular tasks and we use whichever one is appropriate.
Tesseract is a software title that most people have never heard of. It is used to convert graphic documents to searchable text. It is complicated software to use but it is invaluable for creating searchable archives of newspapers and social documents.
Photoshop is one of the programs we couldn't manage without as it is our go to solution for all our graphics and picture editing work. We have been using Photoshop in its
various guises for over 30 years and it has proved time and time again to be the best photo editing program out there.
When a website requires data to be processed it is usually processed in a server side database and MySQL is the most commonly used one. It interfaces easily with both
Perl and PHP and is a reliable solution for most website database requirements.
Foxpro was the first language I learnt for PC and over the years I have written all kinds of programs with it.
jQuery sounds like it should be a controller for databases but it is actually one of a number variants of Javascript, which we are also proficient in. Used
mainly for client side tasks, Javascript ind it variants are powerful tools for extending the functionality of web browsers. Most content management systems make use of Javascript for certain functions but they wrap it up in bloated code which cannot be easily modified to suit specific requirements.
