Inforest Communications, Web Design and Development
  
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About Inforest

We Bring Value to Web Development Projects

Based on our experience, we've determined a number of core techniques and technologies which we incorporate into all of our Web projects. These techniques and technologies include 1) a standards based approach to Web design, 2) commitment to search engine optimization and 3) integration of our own, customizable Content Management System.

The benefits of using our skill and technology set include the development of Web sites with inherent performance advantages:

  • Better performance with search engines
  • Extremely easy to update and less cost to maintain
  • Faster to load and accessible by a wider range of browsers

We believe that these strategies represent a collection of “best practices” for Web design and development. Yet, as fundamental as these ideas and techniques are, the majority of Web sites don't employ them. Thus, they collectively represent our competitive advantage and how we bring superior value to our clients.

Our Standards-Based Approach to Web Design

The adoption of modern Web browsers, such as Internet Explorer, Firefox and Mozilla, has opened the door for use to employ latest XHTML and Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) standards in the design of Web pages. These new standards allow for us to provide a separate design and layout specification, the "Cascading Style Sheet," as an overlay for the underlying XHTML code.

While the idea of separating design from the underlying copy and markup may not seem as a big deal, it opens up a number of important opportunities in Web design:

  1. It allows for very simple markup of Web page copy, uncluttered by positioning and text formatting directives. This allows for us to markup the content of a XHTML page in a hierarchal manner, which can be important for non-visual browsers and search engine robots. This serves as a strong foundation for accessibility as well as improving search engine performance.
  2. We can specify more than one style sheet in order to better match the requirements of a particular browser or media. For example we can specify a built-in, "printer friendly" layout when the Web page is printed. This makes it easier to re-purpose site content or to make design changes.
  3. By utilizing layers and style sheets for positioning and layout, XHTML Web pages load and render faster than pages using older HTML standards. This is essential to all sites, but crucial in e-commerce and sites with heavy traffic.

Other advantages of XHTML/CSS standards include ease of maintenance and ensuring consistency of design across pages. While the migration to XHTML from HTML has represented a considerable learning curve for our developers, we have seen that the advantages of a standards-based approach and employ them in all new Web design projects.

Search Engine Optimization

For most sites, referrals from search engines represent the largest source of incoming traffic and are essential for success. We are active in ongoing optimization of sites for search engines, and while specific techniques may change month to month, we make it a policy that all sites we produce are optimized for search engines to our best knowledge at the time of launch.

This is an important added value we provide to our clients, since the costs of retrofitting an existing site for search engine performance can be very high. By taking care to design the site with search engines in mind, we can provide Web sites that serve as strong anchor points for current or future search marketing campaigns.

Content Management System

By integrating content management tools into Web sites, we empower are clients to make more frequent updates to their sites and save money on maintenance costs.

We have developed our own, highly customizable Content Management System (CMS) which provides a common administrative interface for varied forms of Web site content, ranging from product catalogs to press releases. Utilizing capabilities built into modern Web browsers, our CMS tool provides a full-featured WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor with functionality similar to Microsoft Word. In fact, you can cut and paste from Word documents while retaining much of formatting. We have also built in the capability for users to upload original, uncompressed images to a site to be resized and optimized for the Web along with the ability to upload and link to external documents.

We invite you to explore our Web site to learn more about our company, our projects and our services. For further information please feel free to contact us via e-mail or call 1-888-706-1380.