Development

Project development melds creative, production and technical talent. On the creative side, graphic and information designers analyze requirements, audience and objectives to produce strategically focused design concept alternatives that meet the site objectives. The focus is on the user, resulting in interface concepts that are not only visually appealing but also functional and usable. Our team has extensive expertise in layout and design, in web based graphic development, in branding and in usability. We develop a logical, extensible, modular design that is both sufficiently standardized to allow the benefits of consistency to be achieved, but flexible enough to accommodate future change.

Once interface concepts have been approved, our production team moves into action, using advanced development technologies to create page templates that are easily replicated and maintained. Frontier employs Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to ensure consistency throughout the site. Similar to styles in MS Word, CSS allows the appearance of all headings and body text to be updated from a single location on the site. In addition, we use Server Side Includes (SSI) to incorporate consistent elements such as navigation, page headers and footers into each page of the site. Again, this simplifies changes to navigation and other consistent information elements and makes the addition of new pages or site sections a matter of changing a single file. Templates are cross browser and cross platform tested to ensure compatibility with major PC and Mac browsers.

On the technical side, our team undertakes the task of technical planning and documentation, building the site on paper before moving ahead with actual implementation. We work closely with our clients through the planning process and beyond to ensure that the tools we develop are not only technically compatible, but that these tools also fit with our client's structure and processes. Once the system has been designed to the satisfaction of both the development and client teams, our developers begin creating databases and coding and scripting the site and application. The actual functionality of the system is incorporated into the page templates created during production and the application begins to come together in a way that is representative of the final product.