Web development is broken down into two areas: front-end development and back-end development. Front-end developers are a blend of a designer and a back-end developer. They are accountable for turning designs into a web site, user interface and JavaScript widgets. Back-end developers normally have no artistic aptitude. Back-end developers are responsible for programming into about all the functions of a web site that it’s users will experience but never see - XML parsers, elaborate product databases, eCommerce integrations etc.

Front-end Development

The initial stage of front-end development is to turn a design or set of designs into HTML and CSS. The majority of web developers will simply use a WYSIWYG editor like Dreamweaver to put your site into HTML. This is little more difficult than using Microsoft Word and results in an unprofessional end product. Web sites that have been constructed in a WYSIWYG editor will suffer from all of the following:

1. Messy and bulky code, which is difficult to update and maintain
2. Pages will not be geared for search engine optimisation
3. Updates to the site will cause degradation to already low quality HTML
4. HTML will be inflexible and suffer from accessibility issues, reducing your target audience
5. Contain numerous coding errors, which can cause cross-browser incompatibility and confuse search engines, again reducing your target audience
6. Only makes use of a fraction of HTML and CSS

At Arkis Data Ltd every single page is hand-coded using scalable, semantic, keyword-rich HTML. This means:

1. Our code is clean & minimal, resulting in pages that are easy to manage and update
2. HTML is constructed in a way to best inform search engines what that page is about
3. HTML is scaleable, meaning any content can be changed to fit any requirements and the size of the site can be increased infinitely without HTML and CSS is provided free of errors and compatible with major web browsers
4. Web site will be compatible with all screen resolutions

Back-end Development

Once a project has been through front-end development it is handed over to a back-end developer. This is the stage where all the ‘behind the scenes’ work goes on - the front-end of the site is connected to programming functions and databases that will make the web site actually work. We have knowledge of and can support development using the following:

Markup Languages

• HTML & XHTML
• XML
• XUL

Stylesheet Languages

• CSS

Programming Languages

• C
• C++
• Java
• JavaScript
• PHP 4 & PHP 5
• Perl
• Visual Basic

Query Languages

• MS Access
• MS Jet
• MySQL
• PostgreSQL

Miscellaneous

• ADO
• AJAX
• JSON
• mod_rewrite

Protocols

• DNS
• FTP
• IMAP
• MIME
• POP3
• SMTP

If it is not possible for us to meet your requirements with one of the above languages we will definitely be able to using a combination of them.

Our approach to programming is modular and object-orientated. All of our programming is created with extensibility in mind. Most of our programming is built on frameworks, which allows us to do more, to a higher standard in less time. We have our own content management framework, which allows us to build any form on content management on strong foundations. We do not create anything that uses systems or pre-built packages; quite simply because they are inflexible, difficult to maintain and we would not insult our client’s confidence in us by giving them something we have just downloaded for free.