Website Development Services
Gradpass Systems offers a variety of website development services and website functionality. These are the tasks, services and functions that we might need to provide to get your site up live, to optimize rankings, and to keep it running.
Because we know that you probably don't work with this every day, we've made up a short list of some of these services and a brief explanation of each term. Regardless of which website developer you might be thinking of, you should use this as a guide and make sure that your developer has experience in all of these areas.
- Hosting - The maintenance of your website on the world wide web. This usually includes placing your site on a internet server and maintaining the site on that server as support programs and browsers change.
- Domain Acquisition - Purchasing a domain name for you from a provider (you can easily do this yourself also).
- Graphic Design - The process of creating visual styles including images, fonts, placements and positioning, colours and video. Graphic Design is critical to making your site unique, appealing and memorable. Your Design must make a great first impression.
- E-commerce - Selling goods or services online. E-commerce comes in many forms including shopping carts, subscriptions, or the selling of individual items. The best e-commerce systems will include an inventory management component, minimal manual intervention, and the ability to run promotions.
- SEO - (Search Engine Optimization) The set of actions or modifications required to improve the ranking of your website in various search engines (Google, Yahoo..) vis-a-vis your competitors. This is a highly complex activity and is often subcontracted for larger clients. Our SEO checklist contains over 60 items.
- Membership Functionality - The ability to allow visitors to "join" your site by logging in. This can be a great way to legitimally gather e-mail addresses and stay directly in touch with your customers. It can allow you to service your members with important information or promotions. All membership systems must include several levels of security to be managed properly.
- E-learning - In broad terms, a training system that uses the internet to present lesson materials. In its simplest form, e-learning allows for text, audio, video or image infomration to be disseminated to a group of learners. As it becomes more complex, these systems can include learner progress tracking, seminar and webinar presentation, quizzes, timed testing, automatic grading and of course a robust content management system for instructors to update materials.
- Shopping Cart - A type of e-commerce where buyers can purchase multiple items at one time. This service is offered by most major payment services.
- Registration - Similar to membership but usually referring to the act of enrolling for a single service such as a seminar or an e-learning course.
- CMS - (Content Management System) A broad reference to any mechanism or strategy that enables website owners (non programmers) to update their website content without the intervention of a programmer or the webmaster.
- Interacitivity - Website attributes that engage a site visitor through active use of a website. This can include the way the site is navigated using appealing buttons or techniques or by using surveys or quizzes. Used properly, interactivity can dramatically improve the click through rate for a site.
- Dynamic website capablity - Dymanic sites are those that use a database to populate a specific page with different information. A good example is amazon.com or kijiji.com where different information is displayed depending on parameters chosen.
- Flash - A video file format developed by Adobe specifically for use on the internet. Some sites are produced entirely as flash video.
- API Inclusions - (Application Programming Interfaces) Segments of programming code that enable links to third party utilities like Paypal, Google Maps, e-commerce, Facebook, Twitter and many more. API's can be as simple as pasting code into a script or can be very complex to implement depending on the desired function.
- Browser Compatibility - Ensures that your site has the same look among various browsers. There are a multitude of browsers used by visitors to your site each with many versions. These include Internet Explorer, Safari, Chrome, and Firefox to name just a few. You have invested a lot of time in designing your site. It is important that your site look the same in all browsers and versions.
- Inventory Management - Generally used in conjuction with e-commerce and are typically less robust in internet applications than in IT installations. These systems usually are updated directly by the seller and the e-commerce system itself. Most inventory systems are used to inform buyers that items might be backordered.
- Forms - these are a particular programming element that allows visitors to your site to input data. A typical form can be seen on many contact pages that send email from the visitor to the site owner.
- Statistical Monitoring - Many of the functions within your company can be tracked and monitored by your properly coded website. Typical applications could be registration counts, percentage of tests passed, members in a specific geographical area....etc.
- Performance Monitoring - This relates to the performance of your website. Google Analytics is often used for this but other tools are also available such as Webalizer, AWStats and many others.
- and more!