Website Development

InfoPathways provides professional web site development and hosting services to help you get your image and message out. We have developed web sites for broad use on the Internet, as well as web sites for private use on corporate Intranets. We've designed, developed, and supported web sites that include graphics, photos, video, audio, and documents of various formats, depending on the users' needs.

Internet

Your web site can be hosted for the world to see on the World Wide Web, directly on the Internet. When your web site is intended for the Internet, you should include information that is of interest to all potential customers and/or consumers of your products and services. Let them know what you are about.

Intranet

Your web site requirements may specify a set of information that only needs to be hosted on an internal server, internal to your organization. Many organizations publish their processes, employee manuals, benefits and health plans, among other critical pieces of information to internal web pages. This type of web site makes proprietary information accessible and easy to find for all an organization's employees, but is isolated from the rest of the world.  

What Can You Include?

Whether internal or external, web sites can include text, photos, graphics, video and documents of any type. Many organizations publish selected documents into PDF format for easy access to their users.

Compiled Help Pages

As your mass of online documentation grows, your users need an easier method of finding just what they need. As your mass of online documentation grows, your users need an easier method of finding just what they need. Search engines may help them locate the web sites that contain the information, products or services they need. However, these search engines don't provide refined searchability inside large online documents. Nor do they provide the capability to arrange the information as the chapters and sections of a book. This is where Compiled Help Pages can provide that next level of functionality. When the documentation you intend to include in your web site includes users manuals, organizational policy manuals, benefit manuals, and help-type documentation, compiled help pages may provide a better solution.
Compiled Help Pages can be incorporated into a web site, whether the web site is internal or external. A good example of this is our  Online Help Pages for PIMS, our Project Information Management Solution; click to view the PIMS Help page. These pages provide a chapter-based index, an index of key words and phrases, a glossary of terms, and a search capability The search capability lists all pages that satisfy your search criteria.

Custom Web Development or Off-The-Shelf?

There are many pre-packaged or shrink-wrapped web site development applications and packages on the market today. You can buy web authoring software from a software vendor to build your own web site, and you can purchase space with hosting companies who provide on-line interfaces (tools) to build and manage your own web site.
Most off-the-shelf applications and on-line web design tools provide templates with which you can design your web site. These templates can be a good starting point for your site, and often you can expand these capabilities to customize the look and feel of your web site. However, these templates have limitations.
Many organizations choose to hire an outside professional to develop, build, and post their web site. At InfoPathways, we provide these services. InfoPathways can design and implement a customized application to meet your specific needs.

The Development Process

The development process will vary, depending on what your requirements, goals, and budget dictate. The more complex the design, the deeper the process may become. In general, the process is as follows:

1. Define the purpose and scope of web site.
2. Define the intended audience/user group as well as knowledge level.
3. Define whether the site is to be used internally or externally.
4. Lay out the site map (topics and flow).
5. Identify existing graphics, photos and/or text to be used within web site.
6. Identify new graphics, photos and/or text needed for web site.
7. Design web site.
8. Review web site and identify needed changes and enhancements.
9. Make changes.
10. Re-review.
11. Post (upload) web site to host server (operational server).
12. Test web site on the operational server.
13. Invite customers / users to use web site.

The process above is straight forward, as long as you have a sound idea of what you want to accomplish on your web site. If you need to post data from a database or provide the capability whereas users enter information into the web site (into the database), then the process will become longer and more complex, as the database needs to be designed and the web interface coded to allow for the entry and display of data from your database. The Database Back Ends section provides more information on including a back-end database in your web site design. 

Database Back Ends

Web sites often include forms for collecting information from your users. Sometimes this data is sent back to the organization via email or written to log files. In many cases this information is stored in backend Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS), making the data easier to use for other processes. Web-based stores and purchasing systems, such as Amazon and Dell, use relational databases to collect and store information from users like you.
Here are a few ways in which Relational Databases can be used to support a web:

• To generate web pages (static HTML pages) based on your database's contents.
• To generate static reports that can be posted to your web site as PDF reports.
• With data entry forms that collect and store data in your database, provide a variety of views of your data in meaningful forms following entry.
• To support a web site with both static and dynamic pages, where the dynamic pages are built with data in the relational database. The City of Taneytown website is a great example of a web site with both static and dynamic content. Here are a few more: Community Foundation of Carroll County, Taneytown Chamber of Commerce, Harbor View Contractors, and the Town of New Windsor.

A desktop application connected directly to the web site's database can provide an extremely easy and fast tool to allow you to manage the content of your web site.